Of all the ways President Obama’s health care law is poised to alter the U.S. medical system, the extension of new health insurance coverage to some 32 million people has been billed as its most important.
So much for weeks of chatter about how the Supreme Court is the last hermetic institution in Washington. CBS News has its hands on a once-in-a-lifetime scoop: Someone with intimate knowledge of the Supreme Court’s health care deliberations has provided their account of Chief Justice John Roberts‘ decision to reverse course in May, and the intense but ultimately ineffective campaign by conservative justices to change his mind. Supreme Court leaks — especially one originating so close to the bench and coming just a few days after a ruling of such gravity — are virtually unheard of, even if all the circumstances the story describes are not.
Pete Wehner continues his relentless attempts to depict Barack Obama as a despicable human being by vamping on the President for calling the “tax” paid by people who don’t buy health insurance in the Affordable Care Act a “penalty.” Of course, Mitt Romney called this exact same payment a “penalty” in Massachusetts, (Add: and again today) which makes him far more honorable. The precise point is that this a volitional tax, just like the tax on tobacco: if you buy health insurance, you don’t pay a tax, a penalty or a fee. And the moral–and civic–reason why you should buy health insurance is that sooner or later you’re going to get sick, wind up in a hospital emergency room, and the rest of us will have to pay for it if you don’t. I thought Roberts decided the case on the firmest possible grounds–the federal government’s taxing authority, a better bulwark than the commerce clause. The half-crazed rabid Republican effort to use this as evidence that Obama is a high tax President is not only intellectually dishonest, but cynical in the extreme.
From the healthcare ruling to the campaign trail, TIME’s photo editors bring you the best pictures of the past week from the Beltway and beyond.
You don’t have to love classical music to be amazed that Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony while deaf or be a fan of the old New York Giants to marvel at Willie Mays’ catch in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series.
Obama could help himself if he leveled with voters about the law’s weaknesses
Now is the time for the Smart Takes, for pundits to earn their pay, for analysts to analyze the larger significance of the Court’s decision beyond the obvious Obamacare Survives headlines. Here’s my dumb take: Stop overthinking this. The larger significance is: Obamacare Survives. That is a big Biden-word deal for everyone who interacts with the health care system, which is to say, everyone. The speculation about the future of the Roberts Court, the Commerce Clause, and other judicial precedents implied by the opinions are all just that—speculation. That future will be decided by two factors that cannot be determined by studying Thursday’s footnotes.
Barack Obama got to watch his own legacy crumble on live television, standing just outside the Oval Office where a flat screen broadcasts the feeds of four different cable news stations. “Supreme Ct. Kills Individual Mandate,” one quarter of the screen read, and then another network followed with the same grim news. Two years of work, most of his political capital, the chance to insure millions more Americans — it was all slipping away. The President did not speak. He just gazed at the monitor, looking anxious and puzzled, one aide said.
Mitt Romney has long run a campaign obsessively focused on Barack Obama’s economic record. Romney has been so monomaniacal that I recently wondered in this space whether he might actually be putting too much emphasis on the economy for his own good. The Supreme Court’s ruling on health care offers an interesting test of his campaign’s strategy. Although Romney insists that Obamacare is, in fact, an economic issue—“a job killer,” as he called it Thursday—it’s still a diversion from his core message about the unemployment rate and the failure of Obama’s stimulus plan to kick start the economy. Perhaps that’s why Romney’s advisers stop short of saying that health care will be a central issue in November. “In the end, this is a good thing for us,” says one person close to Romney’s campaign, who also concedes that the issue “will fade” over time.
Since its passage (and even before), Republicans have cast President Obama’s health-care reform law as an unconstitutional power grab that trampled Americans’ liberty by requiring them to purchase insurance or pay a penalty. That argument was shredded Thursday by one of their own. Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative icon, authored the majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision that upheld the law’s so-called individual mandate by framing it as a tax. In wake of the decision, Republicans swiftly pivoted to a new argument: that the duty to repeal the law now falls to Congress, making it doubly important that the party gain control of both houses and win the presidency in November. They spun a loss into a rallying cry. You work with what you have.
During the Tea Party summer of 2009, when suburban revolutionaries with funny hats and nasty signs began screaming about Obamacare and tyranny, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel urged the President to settle for a less comprehensive health plan. But Obama said no, he felt lucky. At the end of the summer, after Obama’s approval ratings had sagged and Obamacare’s approval ratings had plunged, Emanuel asked during an Oval Office meeting whether he still felt lucky.
