Maybe it helps to consider why there are no good outcomes in the health care constitutional battle (or maybe not)

by Ken

Thanks to Ian Welsh for directing attention to Bmaz's Emptywheel post, "Requiem For ACA at SCOTUS & Legitimacy Of Court and Case," making a solid case that there is ample basis, on the parts of both the challengers to the individual mandate and the Supreme Court justices who seemed clearly prepared during the oral arguments to strike it down, for challenging the constitutionality of the use of the Commerce Clause to legitimize the individual mandate.

The arguments against the mandate by the challengers are not wrong or silly simply because made by the “other side”. There IS merit to their concern, even if you ultimately believe the mandate should be upheld. Which has made it distressing, to be kind, to see the efforts of many of my colleagues on the left to demonize and degrade the questions and apparent inclination by the conservative bloc of the Roberts Court during oral arguments.

I'll let you digest the Bmaz post for yourself. I have major reservations but don't feel especially well qualified to press them at this moment. What I'd rather do is take the step back that Ian himself does after directing us to Bmaz, and remember what it is that's at stake with regard to the precarious status of the so-called Affordable Care Act.

Is the individual mandate really the hill progressives want to die on?
2012 APRIL 2

by Ian Welsh

Really?

The individual mandate is lousy policy. It always was. It is especially lousy policy without a large (100 million +) public option. The health care plan is, for all intents and purposes, a 90′s Heritage plan.

This? This is what progressives want to fight for?

BMaz has a good article up on whether the bill is Constitutional. Me, I don’t know if it’s Constitutional. But what I do know is that if I were a conservative Justice, I’d want to just strike down the individual mandate and leave the rest in place, because I would laugh myself sick every night watching Obama have to kill the bill himself, getting rid of guaranteed issue, community ratings, and so on. Because Obama would have to, and would. He made a deal with the health insurance companies. In exchange for some concessions, what they received in exchange was every American being forced to buy their shitty product. And while Obama doesn’t keep promises to left wingers, he does keep promises to people like the CEOs of health insurance companies.

Still, watching “progressives” defending the individual mandate is just another reminder of why I don’t call myself a progressive.

Go and die on a hill, for forcing Americans to buy shitty insurance from evil companies which aren’t properly regulated.

I’ll just sit here on the sidelines laughing myself sick. With progressives like these, who needs right wingers?

I wouldn't go absolutely that far either, but I take the point. Thanks to the splendid new way our political system, er, "works," we're left more and more often with no good outcomes -- but, in exchange, lots and lots of bad ones, so that at least within a certain range we get to pick, or root for, our poison.

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