Conservative Scholar: Supreme Court Should Uphold Obamacare

[onehandle]

Source: Huffington Post

Yet another prominent conservative legal scholar has stepped forward to urge the Supreme Court to uphold health care reform as firmly within the court's precedents.

In a column published on The New Republic's website, Henry Paul Monaghan, a professor of constitutional law at Columbia Law School, applauded the Supreme Court's conservative justices for their aggressive questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli during oral arguments three weeks ago, but went on to "submit that sustaining the mandate would not give rise to the justices' fears of boundless federal authority."

snip...

Monaghan's arguments echo not only those made by the federal government in its briefs and at oral argument, but also those of the handful of other Reagan-era graybeards of the conservative legal movement who have backed Obamacare's constitutionality in the two years leading up to the Supreme Court's review. And as The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn points out, Monaghan's conservative credibility is rock solid.


Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/16/supreme-court-health-care-henry-paul-monaghan_n_1429228.html

[DJ13]

1. Well, it WAS their idea in the first place

[Gman]

2. You know, just like abortion... if SCOTUS outlaws the health care reform

that would take away a powerful GOTV and fundraising tool for the right. Next to abortion, it's the biggest tool they have right now. This is one reason I think it's possible that SCOTUS will not outlaw health care, just as they have not outlawed abortion.

Obama's reelection prospects would be enhanced simply because of lower turnout at the polls. Dem candidates would do well in congressional and Senate races.

[Uncle Joe]

3. I would not expect anything else from the corporate supremacist mindset.

The "prohibitively high cost" of medical care can be directly connected to the for profit "health" insurance industry system but Monaghan can't bring him self to admit that indisputable and critical fact.

Using Monaghan's logic this monopoly just by it's very nature should have Constitutional self-fulfilling legitimacy, it is therefor it should be.

Moreover, the market for health care is distinctive (if not entirely unique) in several key respects. Virtually all of us will need and obtain health care at some point, but we often cannot predict when or in what ways we will need it. And for the vast majority of us, direct payment for the health care services we obtain would be prohibitively expensive. Yet not obtaining needed medical care can be the difference between life and death.

These features help explain why, unlike many other markets, insurance is the overwhelmingly dominant means of payment in the health care market. They also explain why Congress has required that individuals be given emergency care without regard to their ability to pay. As a result, and again unlike other markets, uninsured individuals who are unable to pay directly for needed medical services necessarily shift the cost of those services to others -- to health care providers, the government, individuals with insurance, and taxpayers.

Thanks for the thread, onehandle.

[stlsaxman]

4. He knows that the only way to keep from going to Single Payer is

uphold the ACA.

All of Scalia's sponsors know this, too.

[Jamaal510]

5. I guess this means we should root for Obamacare to fail, then?

[elleng]

8. Some people around here seem to feel that way, Jamaal.

[Snake Alchemist]

6. That should tell you EVERYTHING you need to know. nt

[Fumesucker]

7. Oh, it does..

Not that I didn't already know it..