Justice Roberts: I Am A Coward

I saw mc collum on Van Susteren last night.
some of the logic I heard from McCullom seemed solid.

There is a chance Robert's decision

a. gutted the law because the states wont have the money to agree to provide Obamacare... and now won't have to, and

b. gutted the democrats at the same time by calling a tax, a tax

I have not read the opinion, I will.
So while as an american I am concerned about the eroded liberties, this may have been a very interesting decision.

It will be up to the voters and the states.
Which I think may have been Robert's point.

 

roberts either indirectly did the country a huge favor (lighting a fire under conservative ass to get a super majority in november and repeal) OR he basically bankrupted the country with the swipe of a pen.

I guess we'll find out in a few months. Either way though, he's a clueless ass.

 

A good read:

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Confused Opinion
By RICHARD A. EPSTEIN
Published: June 28, 2012

THE stunner yesterday was that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by the Supreme Court’s four most liberal justices, wrote the majority opinion that upheld the individual mandate in President Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act, which requires Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. In an ironic twist, the chief justice simultaneously accepted the conservative argument that Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce did not include the power to regulate economic inactivity, like a decision not to purchase health care. The court ruled 5 to 4 on that point, with the chief justice joined by the court’s four other conservative justices.

But what Chief Justice Roberts took from Congress with one hand, he gave it with the other: a broad reading of the taxing power. In the majority opinion, he wrote that since paying a penalty for not obtaining insurance could be seen as a tax, and since “the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.” He will no doubt attract praise in some quarters for splitting this baby.

But his decision is wrong. As a matter of constitutional text, legal history and logic, the power to regulate commerce and the power to tax should not be separated. It is not good for the court or the country that the chief justice’s position in such an important case is confused at its core.

Consider first the constitutional text. Chief Justice Roberts refers to Congress’s power to “lay and collect Taxes.” But it’s worth recalling the surrounding language, which notes that Congress has the power to “lay and collect Taxes” only in order “to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

Historically speaking, this clause corrected one of the great weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation (the precursor to the Constitution), which had forced Congress to essentially beg the states for the revenues needed to run its business. By giving Congress independent powers over taxation and other revenue sources, the Constitution ended that dependency. But as a quid pro quo, the Constitution also restricted the use of these revenues to classical public goods — benefits that must be given to all citizens, if given to any — like paying off national debts and paying for the nation’s defense. General welfare, mentioned in parallel with these two phrases, is best read as covering only matters that advance the welfare of the United States as a whole. The redistribution of income, or “transfer payments” among citizens, like those mandated under the Affordable Care Act, doesn’t qualify for taxation in this originalist reading of the Constitution.

Through the early 20th century, the Supreme Court was cognizant of this tight relationship between the power to regulate an activity directly and to the power to tax it. The basic idea relies on a simple economic insight: taxation and regulation are close substitutes, so a limitation on one power matters little if the other power is still available. There is no practical difference between ordering an action, and taxing or fining people who don’t do that same thing. If the Constitution limits direct federal powers, it must also limit Congress’s indirect power of taxation.

In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts didn’t come to grips with the two critical early Supreme Court cases that set out the relationship between the powers of regulation and taxation — a relationship that survived the New Deal revolution in understanding the Commerce Clause. In the Child Labor Tax case of 1922, the Supreme Court refused to uphold a tax equal to 10 percent of the net profits of any firm that shipped goods into interstate commerce if the firm used child labor anywhere in its plants. Chief Justice William Howard Taft noted that the court’s earlier decision in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) forbade Congress to use its commerce power to prohibit outright the shipment of ordinary goods across state lines because they were made in factories that used child labor. A heavy tax, the court argued, could not be used to mount an end run around this constitutional obstacle to its own power.

The same point was reinforced in 1936 in United States v. Butler, which struck down a tax on agricultural commodities because it sought to achieve the then unconstitutional regulatory aim of reducing the total acreage in agricultural production. After the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn, when the Commerce Clause was held to permit such regulation, the tax became just as permissible as direct regulation. Wickard expanded the scope of federal power, but it did nothing to upset the constitutional parity between the taxing and commerce powers.

Chief Justice Roberts has ignored this fundamental principle: If direct regulation is beyond the scope of the Commerce Clause (as he held), then taxation as an indirect route to the same regulation should be off limits as well (as he failed to hold). This is a baby that should not be split. His attempt to do so undermines his ruling, the court and the Constitution.

 

I think the title of this thread sums it up perfectly. He is simply a coward, the law was simply too big for him to take on, he got scared, he punted the ball.

 

Wow. Brilliant, succinct and understandable. And it stands the ultimate test of any legal decision, common sense. Roberts' devious bumbling just as obviously fails on all scores.

 

Small business, Evangelical, Mormon and Muslim churches, Boy Scouts, rank and file military, farming/ranching, oil/gas/mining industries and Broadway theater(ok, just kidding).

It's a legitimate question, but do you honestly dispute that the legal profession is not significantly more liberal than the country as a whole?

ps. congratulations, you survived the purge and are not on ignore.

 

Common sense. Lawyers are educated. Therefore they go to school.

 

To answer your question: No. The Social Security system is designed to work this way: Those who die before there most probable death age subsidize with there unexpended contributions plus interest the pensions of those who live longer then their most probable death age.

Your Social security pension benefits are currently computed based on your most recent 35 years of contributions. Naturally the earlier the contribution to the Trust Fund was made the more heavily it gets weighted in the computation because, among other reasons, those earlier dollars have earned more interest than more recent dollars.

Social Security's shared risk feature provides its primary advantage over an individual 401 K plan, viz., you must contribute significantly less per month during your working years to social security then to a 401K plan to provide the same retirement benefit.

The disadvantage of Social Security is that if you are unlucky and die either before you start drawing on your earned Social Security benefits, or before your most probable death age, you leave no residual contributions plus earnings to your Estate to be enjoyed by your heirs, whereas with a 401K plan you do.

Social Security is highly advantageous to the low wage earner who could never contribute enough to a 401 K plan (or other private plan) to be assured of a subsistence retirement benefit that they could not outlive. It is also an extremely good deal for the middle class worker who has enough disposable income to supplement social security with a private plan such as a 401 K. And it is not at all a bad deal for the top out of sight wealthy class, the Zuckerbergs, Gates, Pages, Buffetts, Blankfeins, etc., because it means they will be less likely to be confronted with beggars or step on piles of human shit when they step out of their Bentleys.

Incidentally, the actuaries have calculated that a two cent on the dollar of earned income increase is needed to adjust for changing demographics and to keep social security sound beyond 2037. One cent per employee, one cent per employer. Currently there is roughly a three trillion dollar surplus in the Social Security Pension Trust Fund. It is illegal to spend Trust Fund assets on anything other than Social Security. However the Treasury has borrowed the Trust's money to pay for Americas endless wars. Now the Treasury has no money to pay what it owes to the Trust, just as it has no money to pay the interest and principle on the Treasury bonds in your 401K. You are fucked either way.

Wall Street is trying to kill social security. I wonder why!

 

people are saying roberts may have switched his vote in the end. Because the dissent reads like majority.

 

It's obvious that people are not objectively judging the law or legal opinion, but simply ignoring it and favouring whichever legal 'interpretation' fits their political biases. This applies both to most of the Supreme Court, and to most of the people on this thread (or in the general public).

If this were not the case, then legal opinions would be poorly correlated with political views. The reality is unfortunately the opposite. It would be refreshing if people assessed a legal case purely on its merits, without bringing their partisan political bias to the table.