Everybody in the Pool !!!

From the ‘sink or swim’ mentality that many of us have been carrying around for recent weeks, we can switch mantras to ‘Everybody in the pool.’

While we await extended interpretation of the impact of the Court’s ruling on AFA, we can know that the individual mandate stands, deemed a tax.  As the centerpiece of the legislation, the mandate recognizes a concept necessary and basic to insurance.  In order for insurance to work, coverage must for a broad population–in this case, the healthy, the presumed healthy, the potentially ill, and the presently suffering.

While the ruling is that Congress may not require people to buy insurance in a free market economy, they can tax people (the mandate) just as the government does to provide fire and police protection, bridges and roads, a military. At the human level, there is the broader concept that health insurance is a basic right to which all Americans are entitled.  However, Romney, should he be elected, and Cantor, regardless, of which candidate is elected, will make it their priority to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act. Romney on his first (could it be?) day in office; Cantor as soon as the legislature returns.

Can’t recognize the man wearing the mask? That’s Eric Cantor

Whodathunk it? Defying Expectations.

What odds could you have gotten just hours ago that Chief Justice Roberts would join Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg in a 5-4 decision supporting the individual mandate?  His motivation? Likely less the law than politics.  Likely his personal politics trumping conservative politics.  Roberts is keenly aware that history books will forever link his name with the Bush v. Gore and Citizens United decisions.  That connection will associate him with evil-doing for posterity.  Not even Roberts wants such a legacy. So, he wears a white hat for a day.  I’m wondering how the four guys wearing hats that match their black robes are feeling about Roberts leapfrogging them to cover his tracks as generations look back at his Court’s activism when it is just such an approach to rulings that he and his compadres–Alito, Scalia, and Thomas have condemned as partisan politics that has no place in the courtroom.

On a beautiful, warm, sunny day such as it is–everybody in the pool!!

Congratulations President Obama.  Good work progressives.

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