Opinion: Conservatives Mislead in Health Debate - Newsweek

[DearAbby]

When, minutes after President Obama signed the health-reform law, 14 Republican state attorneys general asked federal courts in Florida and Virginia to declare the law’s mandatory insurance requirement unconstitutional, even conservative legal experts scoffed. Former Reagan administration Solicitor General Charles Fried, now a Harvard Law professor, told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren that if the Supreme Court struck the law down, he would “be happy to come on this program and eat a kangaroo skin hat” he recently purchased in Australia. George Washington University professor Orin Kerr, who counseled Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn on Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation proceedings in 2009, gave challengers a “less than 1 percent chance” of success.

Unfazed, opponents ratcheted up their court fight. Republican officials from seven additional states joined the original two suits, while private conservative advocacy groups have brought at least 17 copycat cases nationwide. Further, opponents expanded their constitutional campaign to politics and the media. On all fronts, they have generally avoided frontally challenging the nearly wall-to-wall expert belief that the reform law’s “individual mandate” to purchase insurance passes muster with governing Supreme Court precedent. Instead, they have aimed at sowing doubt about whether, even if experts are right about constitutional law as it stands, existing precedent gives the federal government too much power. Toward this end, opponents have honed a set of core buzzwords and messages designed to reframe the debate and gradually shift the political and legal consensus. By the time the cases reach the Supreme Court, reform opponents hope it will seem legitimate for the court’s conservative majority to blow off judicial restraint, blow through loopholes in existing law, and effectively rewrite it.


More:

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/04/opinion-conservatives-mislead-in-health-debate.html

Edit : Too long preview, my apologies

[MisterP]

1. we're supposed to be happy with the mandates now? nt