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The Escape Artist

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First Read: “Yesterday’s SCOTUS outcome was typical of what we’ve seen for Obama over the past four years: He finds his back against the wall — sometimes due to his own doing, sometimes not — and then escapes disaster. We saw this during the Dem primary season before Iowa (remember the summer of ’07); during Jeremiah Wright; during the ’08 general after the McCain-Palin bounce, during the 2009-2010 health-care fight; and now after the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday, which easily could have gone the other way.”

“And make no mistake: The decision upholding the law was something Obama and his allies NEEDED; they had to have something to show for the steep price they paid for the health-care law. This was a hurdle the president had to clear to get to November; but the ruling is no political booster rocket. He simply doesn’t have a new drag. Of course, as relates to his re-election, Obama once again finds his back against the wall. The unemployment rate is at 8.2%, and a majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Can he again pull a rabbit from his hat here? We’ll find out in four months.”

Romney and Obama May Now Ignore Health Care

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BuzzFeed notes that both presidential campaigns, “like the media, also have good reason to move on, as a slow summer week interrupted by the July 4 holiday approaches.”

“For Obama, the health care measure’s abiding unpopularity means that he is, at best, mounting a spirited defense. Romney, meanwhile, has centered his campaign on the clear case that the American economy is broken and he can fix it. He has avoided policy specifics, promising to ‘replace’ the current health care legislation without advancing a specific plan. A campaign centered on health care policy — which might have come from a different Supreme Court verdict — would have pulled him into the weeds of an issue on which his own support for near-universal, government-backed health care in Massachusetts makes him a flawed messenger.”


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Effects of Court Decision on Campaign Still Not Clear

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Politico: “Over the next six weeks or so, health care will be an unpredictable race within a race: The Obama campaign will seek to downplay the more divisive details of the law and tout the court’s approval of his signature legislative accomplishment as proof of his effectiveness — courtesy of an unlikely bipartisan partnership with a powerful conservative, Chief Justice John Roberts.”

“For Mitt Romney, who had every reason to expect the conservative high court to strike down at least a big part of the law, the decision requires a bit of recalibration. He had hoped to portray a full or partial repeal as evidence Obama squandered the trust of the American electorate by wasting two years that could have been used to create more jobs.”

Washington Post: “If conservatives
needed any more motivation to unseat President Obama, they got it
Thursday from the Supreme Court, which provided fresh political
opportunities for Mitt Romney even as it handed the president a legal
victory… Romney’s history, however, may make it difficult for him to capi­tal­ize on that argument.”

Europe Acts to Shore Up Banks

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“European leaders at a two-day summit in Brussels said they would speed up plans to create a single supervisor to oversee the euro zone’s banks, and agreed on measures aimed at reducing soaring borrowing costs for Spain and Italy,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Reuters notes it’s “a sign the bloc is adopting a more flexible approach to solving its two-year old debt crisis.”

Alex Burns: “Like the health care decision, it’s not as if a move toward economic stability in Europe is going to give the president a big boost at the polls. But it staves off a different outcome (another global financial crisis) that could have been catastrophic for Obama, and that grim scenario looks somewhat less likely today.”

House Votes to Hold Holder in Contempt

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The House of Representatives voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over the “Fast and Furious” investigation. The vote was 255-67, with 17 Democrats voting in support of a criminal contempt resolution.

Roll Call: “The stage is now set for a protracted court battle over whether the
Justice Department can shield internal documents under executive
privilege.”

New York Times: “Democrats dismissed the effort as an election-year witch hunt. They said
previously disclosed documents and testimony had established that Fast
and Furious was the work of Arizona-based law enforcement officials who
were frustrated by the difficulty of bringing low-level gun cases, and
they contended that Republicans were seeking to embarrass Mr. Holder for
political reasons.”

The Fix: “And yet, for all of that amped-up oratory from top leaders in their
respective parties, the likely effect of today’s vote… is to convince people that all the bad things they think
about Congress are, well, true.”

Exchange of the Day

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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.

Why Repealing Obamacare is a Fantasy

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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.”

Obama Initially Had Wrong Information on Decision

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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.”

How Republicans Could Eliminate the Mandate

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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.

Emanuel Glad Obama Didn’t Listen to Him

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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.”

Did Roberts Reverse Himself?

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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.”

Roberts Chooses Judicial Restraint Over History

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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.”

About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan 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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