On the Eve of The Supreme Court Decision

While we await the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, the New Yorker appears with an article by Ezra Klein, "Unpopular Mandate,"  which expands understanding: It begins by summarizing the history of how this law came into existence, and ends with a study of belief systems. 

As for the history of this law, it, oddly enough, originated in ideas which had their gestation in Republican think tank, The Heritage Foundation, in 1989, the idea of a mandate to buy something appealing to conservative thinkers and it was served up as an alternative to what conservatives really feared, the single payer. Years later, Democrats, realizing they could never get a single payer (read government) system like Medicare-for-all through the narrowly divided Congress, picked up this idea. Democrats like Ron Wyden managed to get some Republicans to support the principle and through various iterations it emerged as a compromise from the Democrats. 

But, of course, when the Republicans saw a Democratic success gathering force, they reacted in a great panicked howl and the day after the law passed, Republicans launched their lawsuits to bring it down.  All the authorities said there was absolutely no way this law, this mandate,  could be unconstitutional--all the authorities but the unschooled ignoramuses like Mad Dog, who knows very little, but he does know one big thing--This Supreme Court will always vote for those in power and against those trying to disrupt the status quo. 

Klein ends by reviewing a set of studies in which people who identified themselves as either very liberal or very conservative were presented with two sets of proposals for a welfare policy, one which proposed  more generous welfare benefits than have ever been enacted, but it was labeled as emanating from a very conservative Republican source; the other was a proposal for a meager, scaled back program,  labeled as embraced by Democrats. 


Intriguingly, the conservative readers embraced the generous ultra welfare program, presumably because the label "Republican program" over rode the effect of the actual content of the program. The readers really did not care about the specific content, all they cared about was the "reference group" or, I would argue, they started with the idea of where they wanted to go, and they circled back to that no matter what the "facts" of the program were. (The liberals did the same thing, choosing the decimated program for the poor because it was labeled the Democratic alternative.)


This is sort of the "Only Nixon Could Go to China" syndrome. Well, if Nixon says it's okay to make nice with the Chinese, it must be. We can trust him on this. He's the ultimate cold warrior. If Kennedy had tried to do this, or Clinton, or certainly Obama, well then, it would have been treason.

And that is clearly the way the five member majority of the Supreme Court functions: It considers the source and circles back to where it wants to be. The details, the substance, all principle is over ridden by the ultimate goal--in the case of the court, to thwart the liberal, the Democrat and to support the conservative.

By this reading, had this very same law had been presented to the Court as a Republican  law, challenged by the Democrats, Antonin Scalia would have risen up in righteous indignation over the attack, asking why the Democrats objected to the operation of a market place solution in a capitalist society?

If this election were about something really substantive, for my money, it would be about electing a Democratic president with enough of a Democratic majority in both houses, to push through a reform of the Supreme Court, with three new justices and only the most recent 9 being able to vote on new cases.  Remember the Constitution does not specify how many justices, and no amendment would be necessary.


I would love to see Obama re elected, but truth be told, if he is not given a Congress to support him it would be like pushing the man out of the plane without a parachute--there's no way he can bring you anything if you don't provide him with the means. He'll just wind up flattened on the ground.