@27 – Most parliamentary democracies have a requirement that the content of the bill stay within it’s “long title” (full title). Sadly, America doesn’t.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/28/12459913-how-far-the-four-dissenters-were-willing-to-go?lite

The conventional wisdom, which was neither conventional nor wise, was that the individual mandate was in deep trouble, but it was unrealistic to think the justices would be so radical as to kill every letter of every word of every page of the law. Such a breathtaking move would simply be unnecessarily radical.

And yet, as of this morning, four justices — Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas — insisted on doing exactly that. The four dissenters demanded that the Supreme Court effectively throw out the entirety of the law — the mandate, the consumer protections, the tax cuts, the subsidies, the benefits, everything.

To reach this conclusion, these four not only had to reject a century of Commerce Clause jurisprudence, they also had ignore the Necessary and Proper clause, and Congress’ taxation power. I can’t read Chief Justice John Roberts’ mind, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the extremism of the four dissenters effectively forced him to break ranks — had Kennedy been willing to strike down the mandate while leaving the rest of the law intact, this may well have been a 5-4 ruling the other way.

It’s also worth pointing out that, in his decision, Roberts established the controlling precedent that the Commerce Clause can not be applied to things people are not doing. To do this, he joined in the opinion of the 4 dissenting judges. That was a pretty ninja maneuver.

Another interesting point: The Supreme Court effectively ended the debate over whether or not this was a tax-hike, by affirming it is, because that’s the only way this could be construed as constitutional. This could, in its own way, but Obama on the defensive. Check this out:

Sep 20, 2009
Obama: Mandate is Not a Tax
ABC News Interview

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC NEWS HOST: …during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, hold on a second, George. Here – here’s what’s happening. You and I are both paying $900, on average – our families – in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now what I’ve said is that if you can’t afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn’t be punished for that. That’s just piling on. If, on the other hand, we’re giving tax credits, we’ve set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we’ve driven down the costs, we’ve done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you’ve just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that’s…

STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it’s still a tax increase.

OBAMA: No. That’s not true, George. The – for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy.

OBAMA: No, but – but, George, you – you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Here’s the …

OBAMA: What – what – if I – if I say that right now your premiums are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say well, that’s not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I don’t want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I give you tax credits that make it affordable, then …

STEPHANOPOULOS: I – I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax – “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, no, but…

OBAMA: …what you’re saying is …

STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.

OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that. Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it’s a tax increase?

OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion.

Thanks for pointing out that they rejected the Commerce clause thing. I had not read that anywhere else. That surprises me—I thought that and the general welfare clause justified everything in the eyes of our impartial protectors.

http://tribune-democrat.com/local/x1483811911/-Is-that-a-crime-Witness-says-man-shot-by-police-was-rushing-cousin-to-hospital

On a related note, there was a nice district of PA court case this week about whether police can shoot at moving cars. Don’t have time to blog it this morning — paying work beckons — but hopefully this weekend. In the new court case the court makes the excellent point that shooting at a moving car increases, rather than decreases, the risk that an innocent person will be hurt by the moving car. Shooting the driver does not generally stop the car.

It’s absolutely nothing new. It’s been a standard part of the Senate’s operations for quite some time. The House creates a revenue of some bill that they send to the Senate. The Senate takes the revenue bill created in the House and guts it and passes a substitute amended version that contains whatever items require origination in a revenue bill. It’s known as concurring by amendment. It’s just that it only ever seems to be controversial when someone is desperately fishing for some sort of procedural flaw in a bill they hate when they can’t find any better angles.

And by the way, deem and pass was a fairly standard procedure in the House well before anyone spoke of using it in the health care debate, not that it was even used. The first record of it’s use was in 1933, a tool that was used something like 35 times by the GOP majority in the 109th House, and something that had been used in the passage of major legislation. It’s not anything new and it wasn’t all that controversial until the GOP flipped their lid in the PPACA debate because it might make it a bit easier to pass a bill the GOP didn’t like.

So, I wonder, how/why do Florida news outlets keep taking these insane stories straight from the police, verbatim, without proper scrutiny?

Meh. The suggestion wasn’t exactly implausible, and what would “proper scrutiny” be? Wait for the toxicology? Well, sure. In the meantime, somebody would have arrived at the speculation regardless.

Second, the bill number for PPACA in the Senate was HR 3590. If you’re not aware, HR means “House Resolution”.

HR 3590 originally had nothing to do with healthcare. What happened was that the senate took the title of the old bill, stripped out its contents and then inserted the PPACA language in order to get around that inconvenient little restriction. It was a blatant end-run around that constitutional requirement, right along with the “deem and pass” bullshit that Pelosi pulled.

Unfortunately, I doubt the Supreme Court has the cajones necessary to call the Senate on its shenanigans, especially after today, so I doubt a new challenge on that basis would succeed.

“Also, police report that what he ate was not the victim’s face, but a chicken sandwich the victim had purchased at McDonald’s. We apologize for the confusion.”

First, you mean originate from the House, not the Congress (which is the term for the combination of the House and Senate).

Second, the bill number for PPACA in the Senate was HR 3590. If you’re not aware, HR means “House Resolution”.

The Senate knew revenue-raisers in the bill could bring about that issue, and so as a result they used a hollowed out House resolution as the shell for the bill. Thus, PPACA “originated in the House” for purposes of that requirement, even though the Senate was the first chamber to pass PPACA.

The fact that it was upheld as a tax hasn’t created any new vulnerabilities for the law, and particularly not one with something as simple as the revenue bill requirement.

But I would find it more heartening if royalty held no political power and terrorist groups who align with communists and Islamic terrorists have none either.

When an individual commits murder or mayhem, he is generally put in prison or killed. When a government or rebellion do this and the fighting stops, people much worse than the murderers in prison take pictures for the cameras and then continue to hold political sway.

So, I guess I’d say I find the picture disheartening.