◼ Day One: High court takes up fight over Obama health law - AP via Drudge
President Barack Obama's health care overhaul is front and center at the Supreme Court for three days of hearings to determine the fate of a law aimed at extending health insurance to more than 30 million Americans.◼ Rejecting 'Obamacare' would be 'grave and profound' - AFP
Q:) Why is there such visceral opposition to this law among Americans?◼ Supreme Court begins review of health-care law - Will High Court punt, call case premature? - Washington Post
A:) Whenever you have landmark legislation, people are afraid of change. That's not surprising. And this is something that is going to dramatically change insurance markets, health care markets, and you know, there's a lot of people who can be worried about that and who, if they don't like the law, should vote against those who voted for it. Vote against President Obama, or vote against the members of Congress. What I think is not appropriate is to take that policy debate and put it in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. If they don't like the law, there's an easy vote and that's in November.
◼ Court’s open-minded GOP appointees may give health care a chance - Democratic appointees on board with Obama
A curious thing about this week’s Supreme Court hearings on President Obama’s health care law is that while nobody doubts how the four Democrat-appointed justices will decide, there is no such certainty on how the Republican appointees will rule in the case, which will go a long way toward defining the scope and limits of government power in the 21st century.◼ Obamacare Versus the U.S. Constitution - CNS
Virtually everyone agrees that the four Democrat-appointed justices will move to uphold the law. Few doubt that Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, appointed by Mr. Obama, will join Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, appointed by President Clinton, in upholding as constitutional the mandate that individuals obtain medical insurance and the massive Medicaid expansion.
But among the five other justices, conservative stalwart Clarence Thomas is the only one viewed as a sure vote against the mandate and possibly other parts of the law.
So court watchers are left scratching their heads over Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. While these four are generally regarded as conservatives, conservative jurisprudence isn’t as ideologically predictable on the issues the case raises.
“There’s two types of conservatives,” said Russell Wheeler, a court scholar at the Brookings Institution. “There’s the judicial restraint school that says unless the bill is outlandish, we’re not going to second-guess Congress. And there’s this other view that says the court should be an active examiner of what Congress did because Congress will overstep its boundaries.”
