What if Supreme Court strikes down health care law ?

A friend comments:

"For Democrats, it’s the sort of transformational, going big-ness that drew them to Obama in the first place."

Strongly disagree. Here's the thing you're overlooking, Chris. You're characterizing Democrats as acting monolithically, like Republicans.

That is your slight error here.

The fact is one of the reasons the health care plan is so unpopular is that it roughly split Democrats in two, many of whom were extremely peeved by Obama's caving to pharmaceutical companies and not pushing for a public mandate while selling out to the private health care industry.

None other than Keith Olbermann was extremely opposed to the individual mandate, threatening civil disobedience should it pass.

So, when you look at what might happen if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate, you are looking at something that many Democrats strongly oppose as well.

Also, you should try to analyze how will President Obama himself react? As a Constitutional scholar, he has his own ideas about how to interpret the Constitution. Will he not accept the ruling of the Roberts court on health care, the ruling of the court whose Chief Justice he opposed partly out of concern about how that Chief Justice might interpret the Commerce Clause (read Obama's floor remarks when he opposed Roberts)?

Let's suppose president / presidential candidate Obama accepts the ruling against the individual mandate, should that happen. It could mean president Obama will re-introduce the idea of a public option as a way to extend health care coverage. This could have the effect of rallying disillusioned Democrats back to his side.

Why Obama Voted Against Roberts

A friend comments:

Nice find Andrew. The fact is the "commerce clause" is a good example of how parts of the Constitution are extremely ambiguous and don't allow originalist interpretations to prevail and it was in this context Obama mentioned it. That it should re-emerge in the context of the health care debate may speak more to Obama's prescience as a constitutional scholar than to his foresight. If you were following the arc of Obama's political career you would know it was Hillary Clinton and not Obama who campaigned for mandates. As a matter of fact, Obama campaigned against them. Mandates only became part of his policy objective well after he was elected president and was just an example of him reaching out to conservatives and trying to bridge the gap because it was people like Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation that were pushing this idea before Mitt Romney adopted it in Massachusetts. As a political coward, Obama went towards mandates without a public option as a way of lowering the ranks of the uninsured without offending private health care industry, a sort of have it both ways approach typical of Obama - maintain cushy relations with the elite of private industry while performing a public good, but simultaneously alienating all sides.

Missy Sullivan

I would often go to church with my mother. Unlike some fancy churches they have nowadays, where the priest would sit on a stool and play a guitar for the congragation, my mother used to take me up to the church at Don Bosco parish, which was in a fieldhouse called the Marian Shrine. In the summer, people used to come from all over to visit this outdoor worship service, sit on the clean white benches and pray. But in the winter months, there was an indoor service, with wooden pews which were as bare bones as you can imagine. Well, anyhow I had spent my entire life up there, and this is what I was used to. There used to be a summer camp up there and a pre-kindergarten program that my mother took me to one year. I remember, and my mother can tell the story, that one time she asked me if I wanted to continue to go to the program and I said no, that I would prefer to stay with her. My mother was glad to take me and keep me with her. I didn't like associating with the other children, for some reason I preferred to be by myself. (expand) And there was this other thing, which I didn't know about at the time, which was my mother had to clean the toilets up there when she went there looking for part-time work. That must have set her to make up her mind to go back to school, which she did when she entered the nursing program at Rockland Community College and get her license as an R.N. What adventures she would have then and what that would lead her to !

But first, so I didn't like going up there too much. There was some farm land that I used to sled down inthe winter with Ivar Cruz and a couple of boys from the neighborhood. I remember Ivar had a tube of silicone that he used to spread on the underside of the sleigh. "What's that for?" I asked him when I saw him with the tube of silicone in his hand. "That's so we can go fast as a rocket down this hill," he said with a grin, "We want to be able to reach our maximum velocity." Other memories, like when I used to play soccer, I would just leave me house thru the backdoor and amble up those two pastures and head up thru the cornfields to find my friends, who lived in the surrounding suburban neighborhoods of Rockland County, Stony Point and Garnerville and Pomona and Haverstraw, couldn't walk to because they had to be dropped off by their parents. So I was always kind of a lone wolf, shy and astray from the "pack". Anyhow I don't know too many kids who use to always go to church with their mothers. But I would sit there and watch my mother pray with her eyes closed and we would go up to this church where no one spoke to each other, it was like something out of the middle ages. First of all, there were very few people in attendence and it was kind of cold. I don't remember too much about the priest or anything about the sermons. The priest I have known in my life have all spoken a kind of double-talk where the homily, if you want to call it that, is over and you can't remember anything that was said. Nothing about Jesus is ever mentioned, just one of the letters from one of his disciples and all in very obscure language. I began to thik to myself, "What are we dong here?" For me, a mass was always about preparing for death, it incorporated a small death on the part of the participant and I was glad to be there with my mother. I didn't like going to church as a family, for instance when my sister would come or on those rare occasions when my father would come. I have some strong reservations about my father being saved and to me he always brought his small-mindedness to bear on every situation, including the celebration of the word of God. Why should this situation be any different. One time, after my head injury, my mother brought the three of us up to Don Bosco Marian Shrine for a healing mass. Little did I know that the power of the holy spirit would be called upon to enter all of us, one by one we march towards the priest at the height of the mass, the final act or denoument of the scriptures. The priest laid his hands on my forehead, making the sign of the cross on me, and I found myself floating backwards calmly resting on my back. My mother burst into tears and was crying like a fire hydrant had opened and was had her arms wrapped around the priest for a long period of time. She, too,received the holy spirit and floated onto her back and was engaged with Christ in the outdoor temple. But when his turn came, my father refused the holy spirit and struggled against his pwer. He started to fall backwards but would not succumb. So I have my doubts about whether my father is a true Christian.

Anyhow I was in this church with my mother, and I have taken you all thru my ages in this little piece, but really I want to say that I first started going to the marian shrine when I was in pre-school and then playing soccer I was an early teenager, and then I was still going to church with my mother up there after my head-injury which was when I was like 19 years old. So this one day, when I had received the sacrament, which is the body of Jesus Christ, I had this vision of me and a woman holding a child, a baby really. And I knew who this woman was, it was Missy Sullivan, a woman I knew at RCC who I had never paid much attention to. She had been hanging around the newspaper office once in a while with her friend Rachel B. And I had even asked Rachel out on a date; I was just in awe of her and her beauty and her holiness, if you can believe it. But now the Lord was telling me to look to her friend, Missy Sullivan. So I asked Missy out at school and do you know what ? She said yes !

When she picked me up (I couldn't drive for a year because I had seizures after my car accident in 1992 and NY State Law is that you can't drive for a year if you had a seizure) she drove a grey Chevy or something, I've never been too good at memorizing makes and models. I went to climb into the front seat (we must have been going to a movie, I think it we were going to see Jurassic Park) there was a thick book in the passenger seat. She told me it was her Bible and that God doesn't bring anything into her life without a reason.