Obama health reform law: clues to how the justices might behave

The four justices who make up the US Supreme Court's liberal wing are expected to uphold the constitutionality of the Obama health reform law. How the other five will see it is less certain.

Predicting US Supreme Court decisions is often compared to reading tea leaves, and is frequently much less accurate. But there are some clues about how the justices may approach their assessment of the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Analysts expect the four members of the court's liberal wing – Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan – to vote to uphold the constitutionality of the ACA's individual mandate.

Analysts are less certain about how members of the court's conservative wing might behave.

Some observers have cited Justice Antonin Scalia's concurrence in a 2005 case in California upholding the federal government's power to prosecute the use of medical marijuana even when the drug was home grown and home-consumed legally under a state law.

In upholding the applicability of federal drug laws, the court – and Justice Scalia – found that the regulation necessarily reached home use of medical marijuana because such activities might otherwise undermine the comprehensive federal scheme to ban marijuana.

RECOMMENDED: Obama health care law at Supreme Court: mega case for the history books

Five years later, in a case called US v. Comstock, the high court again embraced a broad reading of the scope of federal power when it upheld a law that authorized the continued detention of sexual offenders after they had served their criminal sentences.

The law was challenged on grounds that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority in passing the detention law. The justices upheld the law 7 to 2.

In that case, Scalia joined a dissent written by Justice Clarence Thomas denouncing the government's underlying justification for the federal detention law as a pretext to encroach into areas assigned solely to state governments.

The Comstock decision is important because three members of the court's conservative wing joined the majority opinion.

Two of those members, Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Samuel Alito, wrote concurrences distancing themselves from the majority opinion's expansive reading of federal authority.

Unlike Justices Kennedy and Alito, the third conservative in that majority opinion – Chief Justice John Roberts – offered no written explanation of his view of the case.

Some analysts speculate that Kennedy may be the most likely justice to swing to the liberal side of the court and provide a fifth vote to affirm the ACA.

From his prior decisions, the one justice who seems least likely to vote to uphold the ACA is Justice Thomas.

In the meantime, legal scholars and journalists will be listening closely during oral argument to the tone and character of questions posed by the justices to try to discern revealing hints of which way they may be leaning.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Obama health reform law: clues to how the justices might behave
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/0324/Obama-health-reform-law-clues-to-how-the-justices-might-behave
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe