ObamaCare Decision: Ruling a Right-Wing Conspiracy?, Onward to Single-Payer, Eliminate the Tax to Eliminate the Mandate?
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Advocates of President Obama's Affordable Care Act lament that their victory in the Supreme Court decision upholding the law is a sneaky, right-wing conspiracy to restrict government power by reinterpreting the Commerce Clause.
- Or maybe "[t]he largest expansion of the American welfare state since the Great Society" is a "monumental setback for a conservative movement strategy meant to sabotage, by all available means, the presidency of Barack Obama"
- Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sees the ObamaCare ruling as only a first stop on the road to "a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system."
- Justice Scalia's dissent, which repeatedly refers to Justice Ginsburg's consurring opinion as "The Dissent," may have originally been the majority opinion.
- Ilya Shapiro points out that the Supreme Court saved the ACA by, essentially, illegally rewriting the law as a tax measure in a way that pretends to restrain government power, but does no such thing.
- Now that the individual mandate is a "tax," the Senate could, potentially, avoid a bigger battle by lowering the tax on non-compliant Americans to nothing, effectively eliminating the mandate.
- Find the ruling here (PDF).
