Roberts Rules: United States Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare 5-4 Making USA the Last Industrialized Nation of Western Civilization to Provide National Health Care: Radical Elements on the Court Are Defeated

We bow our hat to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. for the first judicial opinion of his judging realm worthy of his lofty title. See Roberts Rules for Order by Hendrik Hertzberg at The New Yorker (the image below is linked from the Wikipedia):



In a nip-and-tuck 5-4 decision (read the opinion here) in a case formally titled National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the U.S. Supreme Court -- surprisingly, to many observers --  upheld national health care in the United States as a constitutional form of taxation in a decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare".

 (see the text transcript of the video at whitehouse.gov)

Adam Liptak has the story at the New York Times
in Supreme Court Lets Health Law Largely Stand, in Victory for Obama

and Paul Krugman gives an analysis at The Real Winners, writing:

"[A]lmost all of us stand to benefit from making America a kinder and more decent society....
[T]he law that the Supreme Court upheld is an act of human decency that is also fiscally responsible. It’s not perfect, by a long shot — it is, after all, originally a Republican plan, devised long ago as a way to forestall the obvious alternative of extending Medicare to cover everyone. As a result, it’s an awkward hybrid of public and private insurance that isn’t the way anyone would have designed a system from scratch. And there will be a long struggle to make it better, just as there was for Social Security. (Bring back the public option!) But it’s still a big step toward a better — and by that I mean morally better — society."

The decisive vote in the case was cast -- surprisingly to this observer -- by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., while the 4 dissenters were predictably "the lost triumvirate" of Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas, lost in past centuries, to be exact, but here inexplicably joined by traditional "swing justice" Anthony M. Kennedy, who appears to have derailed in midstream.

How could Justice Kennedy possibly be so fully on the wrong side of the law in this landmark decision affecting the good health of almost all Americans in this, the 21st century? When the chips were down, Kennedy failed.

The normally prudent Kennedy must lack any real conception of the massive domestic chaos and international loss of face that would have resulted from the defeat of the Affordable Care Act.

As Erwin Chemerinsky writes at SCOTUS blog in his excellent analysis of the court decision and majority opinion:

"Since 1937, no major federal social welfare law has been declared unconstitutional as exceeding the scope of Congress’s authority....

If the Supreme Court had taken the approach urged by the four dissenters and invalidated the entire Act, it would have been something that had not been seen since the Supreme Court struck down key pieces of the New Deal in the 1930s.

Nor from the perspective of constitutional doctrine is the Court’s reasoning surprising.  The Supreme Court found that the minimum coverage requirement – the so-called individual mandate – is essentially a tax. Individuals must either have health insurance or pay a tax. In every way, it functions as a tax; it is collected by the Internal Revenue Service and is a small percentage of income or a flat rate. Since 1937, not one federal tax has been declared unconstitutional.

The result was best forecast by a question asked by Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the oral argument.  She asked the attorney representing the states challenging the law, Paul Clement, why couldn’t Congress raise everyone’s taxes to pay for health care and then give an exemption to those who already have health care? Of course, Congress could do this and that is exactly how the individual mandate functions. It is true that President Obama never called it a “tax,” but many members of Congress did, and labels certainly are not decisive in constitutional law."

That is the correct and prudent legal analysis, made by a Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, who thereby obtains our scholarly admiration. Well done, sir!

Note in this regard, by the way, that the dissenters are not the "conservatives" that they claim to be and that others see in them.

Quite the contrary, they are more like radical revolutionaries trying to change the substance and foundation of the American republic -- for the worst.

They failed. Thankfully.

China, America, the EU, Energy, the Environment, Dumping, Antidumping, Protective Tariffs, Quality of Manufacture, Capitalism, Socialism

One can not escape the feeling that a lot of people in the United States government, and elsewhere, do not understand modern environmental needs and issues, especially as regards energy. Gas-guzzling vehicles. Apathy about the environment. No sensible energy policies. Worse, in this industrial sector, as most others as well, the manufacturing system is from yesteryear.

Keith Bradsher and Diane Cardwell have the story at the New York Times in U.S. Slaps Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels - NYTimes.com. What a paradoxical sector on which to put up protective tariffs. One would think the more cheap solar panels the better, given the need to lower energy costs.

What is particularly baffling is that sources in the the USA are COMPLAINING that the Chinese "non-capitalist methods" give them an UNFAIR ADVANTAGE!

The article quotes lawyer Alan Price from the law firm representing the USA in the solar panel case, Wiley Rein, as follows:

"China’s method is straightforward: it sets forth industry-specific Five-Year Plans and then uses all forms of national and local subsidies and other governmental support to quickly transfer jobs, supply chains, intellectual property and wealth, to the permanent detriment of U.S. and global manufacturers," he said. "China’s ability to ramp up and overwhelm an industry is unique and particularly devastating with new and emerging technologies, where global competitors may be less established and can be knocked out more easily and quickly."

The question then arises what the "good old boys" and the staunch supporters of American capitalism are doing wrong in the USA in turning modern America into a manufacturing wasteland that is no match for socialist countries?

If we follow the train of Alan Price's thinking, and he may well be right, a much larger socialistic Chinese behemoth is apparently far more nimble and adaptable than the backward American manufacturing system, which, by our experience, is often mired in past nostalgic centuries, methods, ideas, attitudes and politically absurd conceptions.

What did we just read, that Hewelett-Packard is to let go of as many as 30,000 employees? at a company now headed by a political favorite of the GOP?

The only measures that most American CEOs seem to understand to increase profits are outsourcing and/or cost-cutting by getting rid of employees, leaving a mass of unemployed for the government to look after.

The idea at HP is said to be that the money saved will be invested in a better-trained sales force able to generate more cash. Surely that is a joke. Is the delusion there that such measures will make HP more competitive with Canon and other competitors? Not on my desktop.

My first printer was an HP. Since then, the company HP has been resting on its laurels. Grow, or die. That is a rule of life, and a rule of business.

How about better and more competitive products? Where, in Europe, does one find products on sale that are "made in the USA"? American wares, with few exceptions, are also-rans. How much of American resources are going into research and progress, rather into the ever-filling pockets of the upper income classes?

Start there if you want to keep from being over-rolled by the Chinese.

If America thinks it is going to prosper in the future, putting up protective tariffs is not going to help a defunct system living from patent trolling, trade barriers, and completely out-of-date political ideas. No way.

Either you have free trade, or you go back in all product sectors to the old system of protective tariffs, which may not be advisable for an American manufacturing sector that has been less competitive as time goes on.

America's problem is not dumping by China.

America's problem is a structurally unsound economy geared to filling the wealth demands of company owners, vastly over-inflated salary levels of corporate executives, and unrealistic demands of stockholders for stock price appreciation. The idea that companies should concentrate on state-of-the-art production of goods and services appears to be a novelty.