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Commerce Clause? for those that know what they are talking about.

Wakelaw2006 said:
No, Part III-A was the Part in which Roberts's opinion said the individual mandate was unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause. That Part was not joined by any other Justice (though obviously the Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Alito dissent agrees).

ETA: didn't mean to pile on - was looking for the correct Part to reference and it took too long before the last two posts.
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Well, I made an A+ in Con Law at a top 10 law school with a future Supreme Court clerk in the classroom (i.e. I was the only one in the classroom who pulled that grade). Does that make me an "expert" like msf or whatever his name is? I don't know. But to me it isn't constitutional under the commerce clause IMO for all the reasons that have been discussed ad nauseum. You are regulating inactivity - which is nonsense. And I also said it wasn't a constitutional law because it wasn't positioned as a "tax" under the law - the old, I can't make the statute say something it doesn't say position.

The fact you can be taxed for electing not to buy a product is also troubling. The thought the government can tax you for any reason it wants is really bothersome. I'd like to read the opinion to see if the court offered any limits on that line of logic. Because, to be frank, it otherwise pretty much sucks.
 
DeacMan said:
Well, I made an A+ in Con Law at a top 10 law school with a future Supreme Court clerk in the classroom (i.e. I was the only one in the classroom who pulled that grade). Does that make me an "expert" like msf or whatever his name is? I don't know. But to me it isn't constitutional under the commerce clause IMO for all the reasons that have been discussed ad nauseum. You are regulating inactivity - which is nonsense. And I also said it wasn't a constitutional law because it wasn't positioned as a "tax" under the law - the old, I can't make the statute say something it doesn't say position.

The fact you can be taxed for electing not to buy a product is also troubling. The thought the government can tax you for any reason it wants is really bothersome. I'd like to read the opinion to see if the court offered any limits on that line of logic. Because, to be frank, it otherwise pretty much sucks.
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I agree with this post. I don't begrudge the Obama crowd for revelling in what amounts to a political win. No doubt it was. If---just for a moment---we move past the election year politics and look at the way Roberts ruled, it is a curious and perversely courageous decision.

On the one hand, it would have been easy for him to be as lazy and loyal to his ideology as the other four Justices in the majority. He could have said "My individual decision to not insure my own health has nothing to do with interstate commerce. If individual states want a mandate, fine, but this isn't an interstate commerce issue. Wickard-like aggregation is for power gluttons and everyone knows it is a crock of bullshit, so that's out. And no, it's absurd to claim that the government can tax my abstention from a consumer choice; garbage. This whole thing is gone, see ya."

In my opinion, he's incorrect in his outcome, but I admire his integrity. He flat out says--if you can read what he's forcing out between the lines---that he thinks Obamacare is shit policy (paraphrase: "not our job to save voters from their own (read:bad) policies"), but he has the integrity to stay faithful to his own reading of the tax power. Proud of the integrity of this conservative Judge. It is good to see and a healthy thing for the Court (Sharp Cf. the grandstanding and shenanigans going on in Congress this very day).
 
This will be a seminal case in the lines of Lopez and the continuing restrictions of the CC limitations. Strange that the decision upholding the law will be in the long term a restaint on Congress. Brilliant arguments on all sides.
 
mfdeacs99 said:
This will be a seminal case in the lines of Lopez and the continuing restrictions of the CC limitations. Strange that the decision upholding the law will be in the long term a restaint on Congress. Brilliant arguments on all sides.
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Well I don't have the sterling legal qualifications that you do, I really don't see this as being that influential of a restraint on the future actions of Congress. Roberts' reading of the Commerce Clause would apply only in situations where Congress would force someone to do something that they are not already doing, which is a situation that Congress had yet to attempt to justify under the Commerce Clause to this point in American History. And I'm not sure that I can envision many other scenarios in which it would apply
 
We will see a massive sea change to use of the taxing clause. Probably esoteric or not, but politically using taxes is not usuaully popular.

Absoulte clash of the titans in the opinions. Given the goals and incentives, and amazing performance. Roberts, Breyer, Ginsburg, Scalia and now, possibly Kennedy are making a mark as intellectual giants in the Court. I was really impressed with the three main opinions.
 
mfdeacs99 said:
We will see a massive sea change to use of the taxing clause. Probably esoteric or not, but politically using taxes is not usuaully popular.

Absoulte clash of the titans in the opinions. Given the goals and incentives, and amazing performance. Roberts, Breyer, Ginsburg, Scalia and now, possibly Kennedy are making a mark as intellectual giants in the Court. I was really impressed with the three main opinions.
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I doubt it. Today's holding only dictates that the Commerce power presupposes commerce to be regulated, and I can't imagine a lot of future cases that lack such commerce. I'm sure there may be a few, but to say there's going to be a sea change is an overstatement.
 
MysteryMen said:
Well I don't have the sterling legal qualifications that you do, I really don't see this as being that influential of a restraint on the future actions of Congress. Roberts' reading of the Commerce Clause would apply only in situations where Congress would force someone to do something that they are not already doing, which is a situation that Congress had yet to attempt to justify under the Commerce Clause to this point in American History. And I'm not sure that I can envision many other scenarios in which it would apply
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Woops. + 1. This has already been stated.
But yea, i lack the sterling resume too.
 
Finally getting around to reading the decision and am a bit confused by how Roberts got around the Anti-Injunction Act by not treating it as a tax. Can anybody explain that one to me?

nvm...seems that he is addressing this contradiction in p. 33-34, though it is pretty convoluted stuff.
 
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http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf

now in Scalia's dissent, which is amusing as always. He really puts the screws to his friend Ruth (beginning on page 14 of the dissent) in his typical Scalia way-- humor mixed with ridicule.

seems he was also a bit confused by Roberts' justification of it as not a tax on one hand, but a tax on the other... "What the Government would have us believe in these cases is that the very same textual indications that show this is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act show that it is a tax under the Constitution. That carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists." The man has a way with words.

Anyway, just finally got around to reading the opinion. As expected, impressed with the dissent and the general smackdown of the CC. I always thought it could be upheld as a tax, but Scalia makes the compelling case that it isn't a tax (I didn't realize there was a lot of case law differentiating between taxes and penalties). He also had an interesting point that Congress struck down an earlier version of the bill that made the mandate a tax. I'm a bit concerned that taxing could now be justified for anything, though, and I wonder how this gels with old poll tax cases and what is sure to be an equal protection challenge for gay marriage and federal tax law. When is a discriminatory tax NOT justified if this decision is now the law of the land?

Disappointed in the decision because the bill is the beginning of the end of HC and will fuck over a lot of companies and people happy with their HC, but glad that the majority exercised some common sense on the CC and put its foot down. Ginsberg's concurring opinion was mind-bogglingly dense in basically justifying CC expansion into anything, trusting to Congress's "rational" intentions. I couldn't get through her entire opinion, but both her's and Scalia's embody to a tee how very smart people can come to opposite conclusions. The liberal wing tends to get all touchy feely and talk about hypotheticals and intentions, while the conservative wing of the court tends to examine what actually is.

Also, I think this case probably set a record for use of the word broccoli in the opinions. I laughed every time it was mentioned.
 
LOL Its hillarious how RJ and Shoo always comment on the legal threads as if they know what they're talking about, when they're clearly not lawyers.
 
I'm not a lawyer, but I read the decisions and try to comprehend them accordingly. I listen to the legal minds on this board-- even the ones I don't agree with.
 
DeacMan said:
Well, I made an A+ in Con Law at a top 10 law school with a future Supreme Court clerk in the classroom (i.e. I was the only one in the classroom who pulled that grade). Does that make me an "expert" like msf or whatever his name is? I don't know. But to me it isn't constitutional under the commerce clause IMO for all the reasons that have been discussed ad nauseum. You are regulating inactivity - which is nonsense. And I also said it wasn't a constitutional law because it wasn't positioned as a "tax" under the law - the old, I can't make the statute say something it doesn't say position.

The fact you can be taxed for electing not to buy a product is also troubling. The thought the government can tax you for any reason it wants is really bothersome. I'd like to read the opinion to see if the court offered any limits on that line of logic. Because, to be frank, it otherwise pretty much sucks.
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Congrats? You're talking to lawyers so noone is impressed with your con law grade- we've been through law school and know that means nothing.

THEN you admit to not having read the opinion despite your need to talk about it.
 
I personally think under the precedents they have a better argument using the Commerce Clause.

That being said, I think the Court has expanded the importance of that Clause far beyond its intended scope. Of course, I'm not going to argue that Heart of Atlanta was the wrong result.
 
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