5 Things I Learned from the Supreme Court Ruling

Next page: The fight isn’t over

#3: The fight isn’t over.
It took mere minutes for the ruling to come down before I got my first press release from a grass roots group that vowed to launch yet another repeal effort of PPACA. Similarly, later that day, I saw news items from politicians who suggested that the states simply ignore the ruling and ignore PPACA altogether. That struck me as an interesting position to take; when you live in a country founded on revolution and breaking the law (the Founding Fathers were criminals and traitors until they won the war, after all), you can’t take a suggestion like wholesale defiance of the government lightly. Nor can you just decry it as nonsense or sedition. It is, whether we like it or not, an unspoken part of our system, that notion that there is a range in which we are willing, as a people, to talk things through and vote on them. And then there is a range where we are willing to just do what we want anyway and the government largely looks the other way, unwilling to press the issue because to do so would create more problems than it fixes. (Music piracy and copyright law is a good example.) And then there is a range where we are willing to defy the government in ways that the government feels are impossible to ignore and call for action.

A lone senator calling for states to forget that PPACA was upheld sort of falls in the second category…until that hard-to-define point where it doesn’t, and then we have a serious issue on our hands. Is that what we are really headed for? I doubt it. Lest we forget, there were a lot of people who, following the ruling, vowed in anger that they were leaving for Canada, a collective tantrum that drew plenty of gloating chortles from the left, where it was pointed out that leaving the United States for Canada to protest the passage of universal health care is a bit like leaving New Jersey for Arizona because it’s too hot in the summertime.

Perhaps the most realistic sign that this political and legal struggle is not over, however, came from a friend of mine who wondered aloud what kind of lawsuit will result when the first person is hit with that fine for failing to buy coverage, and they refuse to pay. At that point, we’re talking about enforcement issues, and while I don’t see the government opening re-education camps over PPACA’s first wave of non-compliance on the individual mandate, there will come a point where the government can be expected to pursue this requirement and enforce its penalties against those who can not or will not comply with it. What then? Part of me suspects that most folks will simply comply or pay the fine because they will have had time to cool off and get used to the idea of it all. And part of me suspects folks will abide one way or the other because it’s easy to talk about spitting in the eye of Washington; it’s another thing to actually do it. Exhibit A: Everybody who temporarily becomes a libertarian (myself included) every April 15.

There also exists the possibility that if Mitt Romney wins the presidential election in November, he might spearhead a legislative overthrow of PPACA, but as much as this would comfort many of PPACA’s critics, a conservative political wonk I know writes that off as a bad idea. At some point, he said, the GOP has to realize that the harder they fight health care for poor people, the worse they look. His point was that as long as the economy continues to sputter, taking a fresh legislative stab at something that goes after people’s insurance costs is likely to backfire. I am not sure readers of this blog would agree, but it was an interesting idea. We’ll see. All I know is that somehow I am reminded of those stories of soldiers in far-flung battlefields who keep fighting long after the war is over because they never got the cease-fire. PPACA strikes me as being like that at the very least.

 Next page: People are still misinformed

#4: People are misinformed (Part II)

A recent quiz from the Kaiser Health Foundation asks you 10 questions about the details of PPACA and then compares you against the average results across the country. I got 10 out of 10, but then again, I ought to; it’s part of my job to be in the know on these things. But what was a little depressing was how much my results places my understanding above that of my fellow Americans. I encourage you to take the quiz yourself and read not only the results but the percentages of Americans who got each question wrong. It is a revealing look at what people know, don’t know, and think they know about PPACA. Bottom line: not much.

This is largely the fault of the people who wrote and passed the law. The original drafts for it were so thick that I’m surprised Congress wasn’t cited by the EPA for depleting too many trees. Even the final version of the law, several hundred pages thick, probably was enough to stop a low-caliber bullet. (I thought about making some YouTube videos testing my theory that the law would definitely stop a .380, maybe stop a 9mm and a .45 would gut it, but I think the day we begin to mix firearms and insurance journalism is the day we all cross a line that can’t be uncrossed. Plus, I’m not about to buy a .380 just for a ballistics test against dodgy legislation. Now a .45, on the other hand…)

Kidding aside, the law is not easy to understand. It is mountains of governmental legalese so high as to dissuade even the most curious reader. Even when boiled down, the essential parts of the law failed to make a dent on the public’s ignorance. Part of this is because a real ignoramus isn’t likely to want to know, and the politically partisan on either side know what they know and that’s that. They don’t like their beliefs to be questioned.

It says much that after all this time, the Obama administration has still failed to address the public’s most basic need for information on this thing. Putting up a website where you can get information is easy, and frankly, ineffective. Why not address the nation to explain the law and what’s at stake? Sure, such a thing would be ripe for political stumping, but it strikes me that if you’re the chief executive and you’re name is hung on this piece of legislation that has the entire country yelling at each other on the Supreme Court steps, you owe it to people to try to explain it in terms that even a child could understand. There is no reason to be scooped by Reddit on this one.

Next page: The Supreme Court and politics

#5: The Supreme Court should be immune to politics, but isn’t.
And here, we come to the heart of it. When people asked me before the ruling what I thought the ruling might be, I told them what I had been hearing: that the Court would rule 6-3 in favor of upholding the law. This came from suggestions my news team got from sources in Washington, and obviously, trying to predict a Supreme Court ruling is a bit like reading tea leaves. The ruling was, of course, 5-4, with Chief Justice Roberts making his now-famous swing vote. Originally, he had planned to vote to strike down the individual mandate as unconstitutional, but later reversed that, despite intense pressure from Justice Kennedy to stay the course. He did not, and in so doing, upheld PPACA and earned the ire of conservatives across the land.

The reaction from all of this was pretty interesting. In conservative media, there have already been numerous articles and columns that ask the question, “Why can’t conservatives pick a good justice?” The idea being that liberal justices can be counted on to vote along the lines of their political camp, which conservative justices are a little less reliable. Liberals seem to be looking at this from the standpoint that Roberts swung his vote to uphold the integrity of the court itself, something conservatives have questioned. Why is it the integrity of the court when it’s upholding a liberal issue and not a conservative one? Somewhere in the mix are legal experts who explain Robert’s change of heart as being that of a judicial “priest,” one who puts the position of the Court over the wants or needs of any one political camp.

Already, there are comments that Roberts’ ruling is in fact more conservative than it appears and that in the long run, it concedes PPACA so it can more closely restrict federal powers down the line. That certainly could be so. But I think there is a bigger issue here, and it is the deep politicization of the Supreme Court itself. When prognosticating about the PPACA ruling, one of the reasons why I was convinced PPACA would be upheld was not out of any political feeling one way or the other. It was because there has already been a large amount of money paid out to citizens by way of PPACA, and if the law fell apart, that money would have to be returned somehow. The ensuing bureaucratic chaos that would have been considerable, and while the justices are supposed to make their decisions in a vacuum, based on their reading of the law, they are still people. They still buy groceries and see movies and get cut off in traffic and live lives out in the world, and I suspected that to some degree, there would be the sense that overturning this would cause more headache for everyday people than not. Maybe I’m wrong there; I can’t really presume to know what or how any of the justices think.

But the degree to which you can count on conservative justices ruling conservatively and liberal justices ruling liberally is…depressing. I am reminded of the little-known cadre of lawyers who actually draft the bills that are put before Congress. They are a team of non-partisan attorneys whose sole job is to receive from legislators from both parties an idea of what laws they want to craft, and then they figure out how to craft it in the framework of the laws currently on the books. It is a hard, often thankless job that requires great intellect, legal skill and technical finesse. Somehow, this function runs without being politicized. I so dearly wish the Supreme Court would do likewise. Because the rift among the justices is a rift among a pillar of our government that should be above our political rivalries. And yet, it is not. The PPACA ruling proves that beyond any shadow of a doubt.