Josh Marshall today goes one step further by blaming not just Bush but "decades of Republicans packing the federal judiciary with activist judges". This partisan judiciary has the power to overturn good works initiated by Obama and prevent further positive changes to the laws.
When the health care law passed earlier this year, Democrats and Republicans had already been bickering for months over one of the central provisions of the legislation: the individual mandate. Can Congress, under the Constitution's commerce clause, compel people to purchase health insurance? The fight was just one of many health care-related disagreements that have divided conservatives and liberals since the issue took center stage, but it's the one major aspect of the new policy that gave Republicans an opening to take the Affordable Care Act to court.
Normally, a lawsuit challenging the scope of Congress' power under the commerce clause would be open and shut -- it's been a perennial loser for plaintiffs going back decades. But in that time, the court has moved to the right, and become more partisan. And the early rulings in these health care lawsuits indicate what Republicans knew all too well -- that Republican-appointed judges will be as sympathetic to their arguments as Democrat-appointed judges will be opposed. And that could presage several major victories for conservative foes of the health care law as their challenges make their way toward the Republican-leaning Supreme Court.
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One of the most recent editions of The New Yorker had a survey of the rabidly politically partisan U.S. Supreme Court. They have tortured establish legal precedent time and again to pervert justice while the Right decries judicial activism except the really wacky kind that fixes elections, advances corporatist fascism over democracy and assures the ascendancy of the oligarchs. The Roberts court has become a tool of the executive and legislative branches, or at least the Republican arms of them. So much for separation of powers. In America, law is now politics in another form. Yet they wonder why American democracy is doomed.
A buncha things:
1. Given that bush II's whole presidency was stolen, i always thought that everything he did, every judicial position he filled, should be terminated.
2. The repugs didn't do it on their own. The Democrats allowed the Repugs to stall and obstruct numerous Clinton appointments and then became as sweet as honey when bush II stole power and started advancing corporate-fascist stooges. (Almost makes you think the whole thing's a sham, don't it?)
3. I actually think that Obama's health care reform was garbage and that the "individual mandates" would be successfully challenged regardless of the ideology of the judge.
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