House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) hastily called a Democratic caucus meeting to discuss the Supreme Court’s health care decision and ran into a longtime friend, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and they hugged, the Los Angeles Times reports.
“What a great victory!” Pelosi said.
“You bet your ass,” Miller responded.
“I did,” she said, as they laughed.
Bill O’Reilly promised on the March 26th episode of The O’Reilly Factor to replay his interview with Caroline Fredrickson and “apologize for being an idiot” if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of upholding the individual health care mandate.
“As president, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts…”
— MittRomney.com, as found by Andrew Sullivan.
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Mitt Romney promised today he would “replace” Obamacare on his first day as president, but it’s obviously much harder than that.
David Frum: “Even if Republicans do win the White House and Senate in 2012, how much appetite will they then have for that 1-page repeal bill? Suddenly it will be their town halls filled with outraged senior citizens whose benefits are threatened; their incumbencies that will be threatened. Already we are hearing that some Republicans wish to retain the more popular elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Which means the proposed 1-page bill will begin to grow.”
Ryan Lizza:
“Far-sighted conservatives always thought that their great hope for
toppling Obama’s most important legislative achievement was through the
courts. They were correct.”
President Obama was just outside the Oval Office this morning “when he got the news — erroneous, as it turned out — that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the individual mandate in his signature health care law, deeming it unconstitutional,” ABC News reports.
“Standing with White House chief of staff Jack Lew and looking at a television in the ‘Outer Oval’ featuring a split screen of four different networks, the president saw graphics on the screens of the first two cable news networks to break the news — CNN and Fox News Channel — announcing, wrongly, that he had lost.”
Nate Silver notes that “given the public’s confusion over the health care law, my view has been to keep it simple: Mr. Obama got the good headline here, and that is likely to be most of what the public reacts to.”
Bloomberg TV: Who wins in Supreme Court health care ruling?
Timothy Carney notes that repealing the individual health care mandate takes only 51 votes in the U.S. Senate because you can’t filibuster a bill passed under “budget reconciliation.” Since the Supreme Court ruled today that the health care law’s individual mandate is a tax, Republicans “could simply lower the tax for not having health insurance down to $0.00, as a matter of budget reconciliation.”
“Since it’s a tax and not a mandate, there can’t be any penalty for not having health insurance above and beyond the tax. So, voila! No more mandate!”
However, a reader points out that the Byrd rule prohibits using reconciliation to cut taxes without offsetting revenue increases.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told the Chicago Tribune that the Supreme Court’s healthcare decision was “historic” and that it was a good thing President Obama ignored his warnings about the political perils of tackling health care.
Said Emanuel: “I gave him my advice. I told him many times (about) the political cost of doing this. And thank God for the country, he didn’t listen to me.”
He added that having Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee, tip the balance of the court was “rich with irony.”
David Bernstein: “Back in May, there were rumors floating around relevant legal circles that a key vote was taking place, and that Roberts was feeling tremendous pressure from unidentified circles to vote to uphold the mandate. Did Roberts originally vote to invalidate the mandate on commerce clause grounds, and to invalidate the Medicaid expansion, and then decide later to accept the tax argument and essentially rewrite the Medicaid expansion (which, as I noted, citing Jonathan Cohn, was the sleeper issue in this case) to preserve it? If so, was he responding to the heat from President Obama and others, preemptively threatening to delegitimize the Court if it invalidated the ACA? The dissent, along with the surprising way that Roberts chose to uphold both the mandate and the Medicaid expansion, will inevitably feed the rumor mill.”
Rick Hasen: “In this Politico op-ed, I noted how ludicrous it was to talk about the Chief facing threats, pressure, and bullying. But if the Chief is sensitive to the institutional legitimacy of the Court and a desire to preserve his political capital for other reasons, then it is possible he was waffling in the face of the torrent of commentary. But how did the waffling leak out? An interesting question to say the least.”
National Journal reports that after the Supreme Court’s health care decision House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called Vicki Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), and told her, “Now, Teddy can rest.”
Noah Feldman says the Supreme Court could have made history striking down President Obama’s health care law but instead chose the more cautious path.
“In the spirit of Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Felix Frankfurter, the court adopted the strategy of judicial restraint. The man most responsible for this comes as a surprise: Chief Justice John Roberts, a tried and tested conservative appointed by George W. Bush to the near-universal plaudits of the right. Roberts said in his confirmation hearings that he believed in judicial restraint. That has become a cliche, repeated by every would-be judge raising a right hand before a Senate committee. When the chips were down, Roberts did exactly what he had sworn to do under oath. He stayed the court’s hand and rejected activism.”
Jonathan Chait argues that Roberts “is not willing to do is to impose his vision in one sudden and transparently partisan attack. Roberts is playing the long game.”
“If we want to replace Obamacare, we have to replace Obama.”
— Mitt Romney, quoted by Politico, commenting on the Supreme Court upholding President Obama’s health care law.
Daily Beast: “The Chicago Tribune once wrote ‘Dewey Defeats Truman,’ The New York Post claimed that Bush won the 2000 election before it was called and now CNN joins the ranks when it reported first — and inaccurately — that the Supreme Court ‘killed’ part of President Obama’s health-care legislation.”
Within minutes, the report was disputed, but Business Insider, Digital Trends and e.politics have screenshots to allow the error to live on in infamy.
The House will vote on a full repeal of President Obama’s health care law during the week of July 9, Politico reports.
The scheduling of another repeal vote came less than an hour after the Supreme Court upheld the health care mandate.
Said House Speaker John Boehner: “Today’s ruling underscores
the urgency of repealing this harmful law in its entirety.”
Politico: “The Supreme Court has upheld the health care reform law’s individual mandate in an opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined in by Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.”
It looks a like a big, big win for President Obama.
CNN: “Because the individual mandate has been upheld, and is essentially the
funding behind everything else, this can be seen in large part as a
major victory for President Obama.”
New York Times: “The decision was a striking victory for the president and Congressional Democrats, with a majority, including the conservative chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., affirming the central legislative pillar of Mr. Obama’s term.”
Washington Post: “The potentially game-changing, election-year decision — a major victory for the White House less than five months before the November elections — will help redefine the power of the national government and affect the health-care choices of millions of Americans.”
Wonk Wire has more details on today’s decisions.
Mitt Romney previewed on the forthcoming Supreme Court decision:
“If the Court upholds it — if they say, ‘look it passes the Constitution,’ it still is bad policy and that’ll mean if I’m elected we are going to repeal and replace it. If on the other hand the court strikes it down, they’ll be doing some of my work for me, I won’t have to repeal it, but I still will have to replace it, and I will.”
The Note: “In offering his assessment, Romney showed why the Supreme Court’s ruling this morning on the Affordable Care Act could be a win-win for him. If the Court decides the law is constitutional, Romney gets to continue to use is as major Bogeyman in his campaign to defeat Barack Obama. As he previewed last night, he will continue his calls to repeal “Obamacare” between now and November. If, on the other hand, the court rules against the administration, Romney not only gets to say, ‘I told you so,’ (as long as voters are willing to turn a blind eye to his record in Massachusetts) but also gets to put an even finer point on a favorite line from his stump speech — that the president has been a failure.”
“When we talk about Obama 20 or 30 years from now, this is likely to be the bill we talk about. If the Supreme Court takes away from Obama his biggest accomplishment, this is exactly what a president really fears. In some ways, it’s worse than not getting re-elected.”
— Presidential historian Julian Zelizer, quoted by Bloomberg, on the fate of President Obama’s health care law.
The Wall Street Journal notes President Obama “has been doing more than sitting back and waiting” for the Supreme Court’s health care decision. He has “three separate speeches prepared in anticipation of the ruling on his signature legislative achievement.”
“One of the speeches addresses a complete overturn of the law, while another is crafted as if the court strikes down the law’s individual mandate but upholds other provisions. The third speech, for if the court upholds the entire law, is more celebratory, according to this person.”
First Read: “We can report that if the U.S. Supreme Court finds the health-care law
constitutional, Obama will comment from the White House fairly soon
after the decision. But if it’s unconstitutional — or if the ruling is a
mixed bag — reaction from Obama could come later in the day.”
Wonk Wire: How to read a Supreme Court decision.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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