What SCOTUS and the GOP are really out to destroy with ACA: Dismantle Medicaid, all Social Programs [View all]
Beginning Monday of last week, the US Supreme Court held three consecutive days of oral arguments on a number of issues related to the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s 2010 health care legislation (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), including the “individual mandate” provision requiring citizens to purchase heath insurance from private corporations.
To the apparent surprise of many legal commentators and the nominally liberal justices on the court, the right-wing faction used the opportunity to launch a political offensive not just against the Obama health care legislation, but also against federal social programs in general.
The four-justice right-wing bloc on the Supreme Court, consisting of Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, represents the most reactionary sections of the ruling elite. Wednesday’s arguments, in particular, revealed that this bloc is seeking to exploit the regressive and unpopular Obama health care “reform” to lay a pseudo-legal basis for far-reaching attacks on all federal entitlement programs, beginning with Medicaid.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been the subject of intense litigation involving more than two dozen federal lawsuits since it was passed in March 2010. The principal challengers have been 26 of 50 state governments and the National Federation of Independent Business, as well as numerous private individuals. Over the past two years, judges in the lower federal courts around the country have issued conflicting and contradictory decisions, which the Supreme Court is tasked with resolving in the present case, Florida v. Department of Health and Human Services.
It now seems clear that Chief Justice John Roberts made the decision to schedule three days of arguments, an extraordinary step, precisely to create an opportunity to lay out the case for going back to the days before the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal when the Court routinely blocked social legislation. In this case as in all others, the right-wing bloc on the court proceeds from a political goal, not legal precedent or principle, and improvises its legalistic arguments to achieve that goal. In the three days of arguments last week, the justices, particularly Scalia, barely sought to conceal their political motives.
More: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/apr2012/cour-a02.shtml
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