I am predicting a 6-to-3 opinion* ~Plus, largest health provider keepinig some of the common sense aspects of the bill

* but if it is strictly along party lines (originalists [4+swing] versus legal positivists), then it will be a 5-4

Via Gateway:

In as soon as ten days from now, the Supreme Court is expected to render its decision on the unconstitutionality of ObamaCare.  During the week of June 25th, America will learn whether Obama’s attempt, using his draconian health care law and an unprecedented individual mandate, to take over 1/6th of our nation’s economy will fail to pass through the branch of government designed to protect our citizens from overreach and tyranny.

While we wait, Forbes has some good news.

So much for a national health care law.

Based on Intrade, there is a 69.9% chance that the Supreme Court will strike down the individual mandate in the national healthcare reform act, known in the political soap opera world as “ObamaCare”.

…read more…

 

Some GREAT[!] Audio from Todays Supreme Court Justices, Kennedy & Roberts (Updated with Sotomayor and Scalia)

Keep in mind that Kennedy is the “swing” vote, and it seems he is leaning towards the conservative side.

Justice Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, appeared skeptical of solicitor general Verrilli’s claims that the individual mandate is not based upon the idea that the government can force people into commerce and that there is no limit on its power to do so. I would be hopeful that she would apply the law/Constitution properly. She could have been trying to allow the Obama admin lawyer a forum to restate his case, better than when questioned by the other Justices. We will see.

REJECTED

The court had an opportunity to simplify matters ahead of time by accepting the expedited appeal and consolidating the cases. Their decision to stay out of the process at this time may mean that they are interested in hearing from the appeals courts on the wider variety of arguments already in play, rather than focus mainly on the Virginia case. It also may indicate that the justices aren’t concerned about the appeals taking a very long time to get to them anyway; as the AP notes, they’ll still probably get at least one of the cases in the 2011-12 term, giving them plenty of time to rule on the law before much of it takes effect.

US SUPREME COURT May Limit Speech (rightly so)

Despite free-speech concerns, Supreme Court justices sounded sympathetic Wednesday to a lawsuit filed by the father of a Marine killed in Iraq whose funeral was picketed by protesters with signs like, “Thank God for IEDs.”

The justices appeared inclined to set a limit to freedom of speech when ordinary citizens are targeted with especially personal and hurtful attacks. The 1st Amendment says the government may not restrict free speech, but it is less clear when it shields speakers from private lawsuits….

…(read more)…

How long before this is applies to peaceful protesters at abortion clinics? What I mean is that if the “health of the mother” can be interpreted as her not wanting a child who has a clef-palate and can get an abortion at the 8-and-a-hald month mark… then why  can’t a limit to freedom of speech when ordinary citizens are targeted with especially personal and hurtful attacks be applied to a woman walking into a clinic. As much as I agree that there should be a limit placed on these whackos, what will the progressive left do with this ruling (if it comes)?

 

 

Judge Robert Bork Says Kagan Is A No-Go

IBD has an article by Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who almost single handily stopped radical feminists from great strides decades ago. Here, she makes a great point about why Kagan shouldn’t be allowed into our judicial system at such a high level:

…Now that Obama is president, he has the power to nominate Supreme Court justices who will “break free” from the Constitution and join him in “fundamentally transforming” America. That’s the essence of his choice of Elena Kagan as his second Supreme Court nominee. She never was a judge, and her paper trail is short. But it’s long enough to prove that she is a clear and present danger to the Constitution.

When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she presented a guest speaker who is known as the most activist judge in the world: Judge Aharon Barak, formerly president of the Israeli Supreme Court.

The polar opposite of the U.S. Constitution, which states that “all legislative powers” are vested in the elected legislative body, Barak has written that a judge should “make” and “create” law, assume “a role in the legislative process” and give statutes “new meaning that suits new social needs.”

Barak wrote that a judge “is subject to no authority” except himself, and he “must sometimes depart the confines of his legal system and channel into it fundamental values not yet found in it.” Channel? Does he mean he channels in a trance, as Hillary Clinton supposedly channeled discourse with the long-deceased Eleanor Roosevelt?

Despite Barak’s weirdo writings, or maybe because of them, Kagan called him her “judicial hero.” Judge Robert Bork, a man careful with his words, says Kagan’s praise of Barak is “disqualifying in and of itself.” Bork said that Barak “establishes a world record for judicial hubris.” He wrote that Barak embraces a judicial philosophy that “there is no area of Israeli life that the court may not govern.”

…(read more)…

5-4 Supremes Upheld the 2nd Amendment

The question is… what would the decision be with Kagan? 5-4 upholding it. We are getting a liberal replacing a liberal. No harm no foul.

The Supreme Court held Monday that Americans have the right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they live, advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices cast doubt on handgun bans in the Chicago area, but signaled that some limitations on the Constitution’s “right to keep and bear arms” could survive legal challenges.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, said that the Second Amendment right “applies equally to the federal government and the states.”

(Photos from a Patriot’s Day gun rights rally)

The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.

Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the home.

That ruling applied only to federal laws. It struck down a ban on handguns and a trigger lock requirement for other guns in the District of Columbia, a federal city with unique legal standing. At the same time, the court was careful not to cast doubt on other regulations of firearms here.

Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging gun control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill, where handguns have been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright bans.

Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment.

The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws.

Monday’s decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws. Instead, it ordered a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that the statutes eventually would fall….

…(read more)…


Elena Kagan, Our Next Supreme Court Justice?

Here is a quick 8-point input on Obama’s Supreme Court choice from the CORNER (NRO), Elena Kagan:

It’s now being widely reported that later this morning President Obama will announce his decision to nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. Drawing on my many previous Bench Memos posts, I offer some initial comments on a Kagan nomination:

1. I have plenty of respect for Kagan’s intellect and ability, and she deserves considerable credit for her tenure as dean of Harvard law school, including for her generous treatment of conservatives, which has earned her considerable goodwill. But

2. Kagan may well have less experience relevant to the work of being a justice than any justice in the last five decades or more. In addition to zero judicial experience, she has only a few years of real-world legal experience. Further, notwithstanding all her years in academia, she has only a scant record of legal scholarship. Kagan flunks her own “threshold” test of the minimal qualifications needed for a Supreme Court nominee.

3. There is a striking mismatch between the White House’s populist rhetoric about seeking a justice with a “keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people” and the reality of the Kagan pick. Kagan is the consummate Obama insider, and her meteoric rise over the last 15 years—from obscure academic and Clinton White House staffer to Harvard law school dean to Supreme Court nominee—would seem to reflect what writer Christopher Caldwell describes as the “intermarriage of financial and executive branch elites [that] could only have happened in the Clinton years” and that has fostered the dominant financial-political oligarchy in America. In this regard, Kagan’s paid role as a Goldman Sachs adviser is the perfect marker of her status in the oligarchy—and of her unfathomable remoteness from ordinary Americans.

4. Kagan’s record thus manages to replicate the primary supposed defect of the judicial monastery—isolation from the real-world lives of ordinary Americans—without conferring the broader benefits of judicial experience.

5. Kagan’s exclusion of military recruiters from the Harvard law school campus promises to draw considerable attention precisely because—as Peter Beinart, the liberal former editor of the New Republic, has written—it amounted to “a statement of national estrangement,” of Kagan’s “alienating [her]self from the country.” In her fervent opposition to the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law and the Solomon Amendment, Kagan elevated her own ideological commitment on gay rights above what Congress, acting on the advice of military leaders, had determined best served the interests of national security. At a time of war, in the face of the grand civilizational challenge that radical Islam poses, Kagan treated military recruiters worse than she treated the high-powered law firms that were donating their expensive legal services to anti-American terrorists.

6. Kagan has argued that the Senate should carefully explore a nominee’s views on judicial philosophy generally and on hotly contested constitutional issues in particular. Her argument has special force for someone who has been so guarded about her own views. Indeed, its force is all the greater since Kagan has indulged her own ideological views in the one area, gay rights, in which she has been vocal: as law school dean, Kagan embraced an utterly implausible reading of the Solomon Amendment, and as Solicitor General, she has acted to undermine the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law and the Defense of Marriage Act that she is dutybound to defend.

7. Kagan shows signs of moderation on issues of presidential power and national security. But there’s no basis for hopes that she might secretly harbor conservative legal views on other matters.

8. Kagan’s records from her White House years in the Clinton administration promise to offer important insights into her legal thinking. It makes no sense to schedule her confirmation hearing until it’s clear when those records will be made available.