Supreme Court at 2011 State of the Union Address
Have you ever been fired for doing your job wrong? I am sure it happens everyday. People are given instructions and expected to follow them. If the instructions aren’t followed, they get fired. With that in mind, the Supreme Court should be fired.
If you owned a furniture company and you hired workers to assemble a desk but they presented you with a chair at the end of the day, they’d be fired. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Fired. And rightfully so. There is no excuse for doing whatever you feel like when you’ve been hired to do a specific task.
“I made the desk but then the pieces of wood screamed ‘chair’ to me. I had to listen to the wood,” is exactly what a fired employee would sound like.
This idea of “do the job you’re paid to do” seems simple to humans in the real world, but viewed through the prism of politics and judicial review, it becomes murky.
The directions given to the Supreme Court were to finally settle, once and for all, whether or not Obamacare, and its parts, were constitutional. If not, strike those parts down. There is an argument for and one against. Take that information and your understanding of law and constitutionality into your chambers and come back with a yes or no.
What did we get? New Obamacare!
The directive given to the court was to either uphold or strike down the individual mandate based on the argument that it is commerce and Medicaid expansion being coercion. Once the justices determined the mandate was not commerce related they should have struck it down. Similarly, once they determined forcing states to expand Medicaid by threatening to withhold all Medicaid funding was also unconstitutional they should have struck that down as well. But they didn’t.
In a display of monumental judicial overreach, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, turned the mandate into a tax, said the Federal Government can’t withhold all funding from states that don’t expand, and called it constitutional. Hooray for judicial restraint!
The incredible part is that every Democrat argued the mandate was not a tax.
Kinda like this:
It was not the court’s job to rewrite Obamacare so that it was constitutional. Their job was to determine if Obamacare, as written and presented, was constitutional.
It is as if I brought a mechanic my car and rather than just doing the repairs they bought me a whole new engine and handed me the bill for it. Yeah I guess that would solve the problem of my car not running, but that isn’t what you were supposed to do.
I read the decision as one that should have struck down Obamacare, a decision I was hoping for, but for or against it, the Supreme Court’s decision to rewrite the law should be shocking to everyone and they should be fired for it.
Related articles
The Supreme Court’s collateral damage(salon.com)
ObamaCare Will Define John Roberts’ Supreme Court(newser.com)
Top Five Reasons Obamacare Is Bad for Doctors(heritage.org)
