A few of our readers might know this, but I went to law school. I was there for two years and didn’t finish, and one main reason was that in those two years my disgust for the legal profession and the thorough corruption and dishonesty I saw among the people who taught it just overcame me. I couldn’t stomach the idea of doing what these people did for a living and I also couldn’t stand the outright lies being passed off as legal theories.
For example, I was in Constitutional Law classes where the infamous case of Wickard v. Filburn was discussed. That was the case where a politicized and intellectually bankrupt Supreme Court ruled that a farmer growing wheat to feed his livestock – and in the process exchanging no money with anyone – was nevertheless engaging in interstate commerce and subject to regulation by the federal government on the theory that by choosing not to engage in commerce the farmer was affecting it.
If you take the Constitution seriously, you look at Wickard v. Filburn as a shocking abuse of the justice system and a mockery of the limits on power our founding document sought to impose. But instead, I sat and watched a ConLaw professor laughingly state that the Constitution means whatever the Supreme Court says it means.
I wanted nothing to do with that parliament of whores. I probably could have made a better living had I stayed in, but I couldn’t do it.
All those feelings came back to me when I saw this today…
In the second major court win for President Obama on his signature health care law, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld ObamaCare subsidies in states that did not set up their own health care exchanges.
The decision was 6-3.
A ruling against the administration would have threatened subsidies in nearly three-dozen states. For months, though, the administration said it had no back-up plans, confident the Supreme Court would rule in its favor.
The Supreme Court previously upheld the law’s individual mandate in 2012, in a 5-4 decision.
This time, the justices said the subsidies that 8.7 million people currently receive to make insurance affordable do not depend on where they live, under the 2010 health care law.
Chief Justice John Roberts again voted with his liberal colleagues in support of the law. Roberts also was the key vote to uphold the law in 2012. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a dissenter in 2012, was part of the majority on Thursday.
“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
The law in question was clearly written. It restricted Obamacare subsidies to consumers in states which had created exchanges. We also know that this was not an accident – the paid motormouth Jonathan Gruber traipsed around the country explaining that by restricting the subsidies to state exchange customers, the administration would force Republican governors to buy into Obamacare or else face the wrath of voters. The state-exchange gambit was duplicated by the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which has been slightly more successful.
But those Republican governors refused to build state exchanges, and that put Obama in a box. Obamacare was unpopular from the start and things haven’t gotten better, so there was no voter wrath. The fact that the state exchanges were disasters in their rollouts didn’t help the situation.
So the administration did the only thing it could think of, which was to just break the law and direct the IRS to apply the subsidies outside of the state exchanges. Which triggered this lawsuit.
There is no factual question that what the federal government is doing here is illegal. You can’t make a legitimate argument that there is a legal basis to unilaterally decide to provide subsidies where the law specifically forbids them.
And yet the Supreme Court has rewritten the law to make it legal. This is the second time John Roberts, who has been a complete disappointment as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, has bailed out Obamacare by making it something opposite of what its architects claimed it to be.
This is Wickard v. Filburn all over again. There is no way to instill a love of the law and the Constitution in American law students while teaching this case.
John Roberts isn’t a jurist. He’s a cowardly politician in a black robe. So is his colleague Anthony Kennedy, another politician appointed by a Republican president who refuses to uphold the Constitution and the law in obvious legal cases where to do so would be inconvenient.
Three justices dissented in the case, which makes sense. Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia – who wrote what we’re told is a blistering opinion – are the only actual jurists on that court.
The rest are politicians, and bad ones at that.
And that’s why the practice of law has so little respect within American society. People don’t like politicians, and they don’t like whores. They see too much of both on the Supreme Court, and they know the fish rots from the head down.
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