No initiative has triggered an outbreak of Obama derangement syndrome among Republicans quite like Obamacare. Only this explains an erstwhile intellectual like FOX News commentator Charles Krauthammer, himself a psychiatrist no less, proffering partisan talking points as legal criticisms of the Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare. Not to mention the damning irony that their antic criticisms stem from the salutary fact that Obama cares about the poor and uninsured … and they don’t.
In fact, their derangement is so acute in this case that self-professed law-and-order Republicans seem oblivious to the contradictions inherent in damning Chief Justice John Roberts for daring to write a legal opinion that is not consistent with their political dogma.
They are impugning his professional integrity by claiming that Roberts was just hell-bent on doing anything “to save Obamacare” – even if that meant resorting to what their partisan standard-bearer on the court, Justice Antonin Scalia, derided as “interpretative jiggery-pokery.”
Never mind Roberts’s unassailable legal reasoning, which holds that the clear intent of the legislation at issue was to provide healthcare for the uninsured. Further, that long-established practice requires the Court to interpret legislation in ways that honor legislative intent; not in ways that defeat it – as Scalia was just hell-bent on doing.
To be fair, these Republicans can be forgiven their expectation that all controversial Supreme Court decisions will be decided along party lines. After all, far too many cases since the mid-1990s have been 5-4, with justices appointed by Republican presidents upholding the Republican point of view, and vice versa. I’m on record decrying this rank politicization of the Court.
But Republican criticisms in this case are belied by the glaring fact that no less a justice than Anthony Kennedy, the only one appointed by their political patron saint, Ronald Reagan, also voted to uphold Obamacare.
Therefore, whenever you hear pundits on TV fulminating against this decision, just think Justice Kennedy; and whenever you hear your friends or colleagues parroting their fulminations, just say Justice Kennedy.
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