Busy Beltway Thursday- Supreme Court Upholds Key Obamacare Provision; House Finds Holder in Contempt

In a surprise ruling, the Supreme Court upheld President Obama's signature healthcare law on Thursday morning by a 5-4 margin. Chief Justice Roberts had ruled that the individual mandate in Obamacare was unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause. However, he ruled that the mandate could be considered a tax despite Obama and the Democrat's insistence that the mandate wasn't a tax when they were trying to sell the public on it back in 2009.

Via Scotusblog and Legal Insurrection:

“In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.”

In even simpler terms, it's a tax for existing, basically. Using this ruling as precedent, there really would be nothing from stopping Congress from imposing a recurring annual 'Not Buying a Chevy Volt' surtax on any new vehicle purchased in the USA- including a Chevy Volt because only Volts with a certain VIN number are exempt.

While the decison may seem to vindicate Obama and the Democrats who supported it at first, the estimated $1.75 trillion pricetag means that the Democrats have passed the largest tax increase in American history durin a timeframe when the national unemployment rate was never less than 8.1%. The [rather tortured- NANESB!] definition of the mandate as a tax means that it can be struck down or eliminated in Congress with a simple majority instead of a supermajority. This also makes one wonder if the numerous Obamacare waivers the Administration passed out could be considered 'tax cuts for the rich'? Also, will any of the 800,000 or so illegal immigrants that he just gave totally-not-amnesty-amnesty to this month recieve waivers?

Reaction from both sides was immediate, with Obama taking the opportunity to hawk campaign t-shirts and reassure Americans how awesome his new tax was while reading from a prepared statement earlier today. At the same time, Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney's campaign raised nearly $2 million dollars from online donations within hours of the Supreme Court's decision.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives went ahead with a scheduled vote to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over the ATF Fast & Furious gunwalking scandal on Thursday afternoon.

The vote follows a roughly 16-month investigation by the chamber’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee into the failed gun-running sting known as Fast and Furious -- run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a division of the Justice Department led by Holder.

Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., filed two subpoenas over that period requesting additional information. But he has more recently focused on information related to a February 2011 letter to Congress that falsely claimed the ATF was unaware the operation involved the underground sale of the assault weapons.

“Today, a bipartisan majority of the House of Representatives voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for his continued refusal to produce relevant documents,” Issa said after the vote. “This was not the outcome I had sought and it could have been avoided had Attorney General Holder actually produced the subpoenaed documents he said he could provide.”

In December 2010, US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed by heavily armed smugglers in a shootout near the US/Mexico border in Arizona- two of the weapons recovered at the scene were traced back to Fast & Furious. Attorney General Holder originally testified that no gunwalking took place under Fast & Furious before later admitting that ATF Field agents were ordered to allow more than 2000 firearms to be smuggled into Mexico by straw purchasers, losing track of all of them. In addition to Brian Terry's death, numerous guns from Fast and Furious have been turning up at hundreds of crime scenes in Mexico. Many on the House Government Oversight Panel requested more documents from Holder regarding gunwalking during often-contentious hearings, but in a move many saw as designed to shield Holder from further oversight scrutiny, President Obama invoked executive privelege on certain DOJ documents and correspondence.

One school of thought out there is that the sole purpose of Fast & Furious was to create more anti-gun sentiment and pass additional gun control laws after saturating an already volatile Mexico with weapons that could be traced back to the USA. This was dismissed by some in the media as being the stuff off kooky black helicopter conspiracy tinfoil hat brigades. Yet nearly every Democrat on that spoke on the House floor Thursday took the opportunity to call for additional punitive gun control laws here in the USA, despite the fact that the DOJ orchestrated arms trafficking already violated several laws on the books.

After a lengthy and incoherent diatribe by former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and a walkout by the Congressional Black Caucus, the measure to find Holder in contempt passed on the House floor by a 255-67 margin, with at least 17 Democrats breaking from their party to vote on their contempt vote.

Last week's vote in the House oversight committee to bring the contempt vote to the floor of the house passed along

Supreme Court Upholds Provisions of Arizona's SB1070 Immigration Law

The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a provision in Arizona's controversial SB1070 that allowed state and local officers to enquire about a suspect's immigration status but struck down other provisions that included requiring all immigrants to obtain or carry immigration registration papers, making it a state criminal offense for an illegal immigrant to seek work or hold a job and allowing police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants without warrants.

The portion of the law allowing city, county or state police in Arizona to investigate the immigration status of an individual detained or questioned if there is reasonable suspicion that individual is in the country illegally is expected to face additional challenges from civil liberties and open borders activist groups.

After the Supreme Court announced their ruling, the Obama Administration and the Department of Homeland Security would suspend existing agreements with law enforcement in Arizona, issuing a directive to Homeland Security to ignore many of the calls they might get from police and sheriff's departments in Arizona.

Federal officials said they’ll still perform the checks as required by law but will respond only when someone has a felony conviction on his or her record. Absent that, ICE will tell the local police to release the person.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said the court’s decision frees police up to perform immigration checks. In anticipation of the ruling, she issued an executive order calling for guidance to be issued to every police department on how to fairly carry out the law.

On Monday the administration officials also said they are ending the seven 287(g) task force agreements with Arizona law enforcement officials, which proactively had granted some local police the powers to enforce immigration laws.

The task forces, named for the section of law that allows them, have proved popular among many localities but have been a political headache for the Obama administration, with immigrant-rights groups saying they led to abuses.

In July 2010, US District Judge Susan Bolton issued an injunction against the implementation of many parts of SB1070, but permitted one that included making knowingly harboring illegal immigrants a crime to remain. A few weeks prior, the Department of Justice had filed a lawsuit against the Grand Canyon State over SB 1070.

Interestingly, the state of Rhode Island had similar laws implemented via executive order from then-governor Carcieri, but Little Rhody never drew the wrath of the Obama Administration or open-borders activists like Arizona's SB1070 did. On the flip side, a Vermont state trooper was accused of racial profiling and Gov. Shumlin ordered an internal investigation after the trooper arrested two illegal immigrants who were passengers in a speeding car in September 2011.

Arizona's SB1070 ruling is one of two decisons from the Supreme Court- after much buildup and anticipation, the justices are expected to rule on 0bamacare later on this week.

Supreme Meltdown- After Rough Week for 0bamacare Supporters in High Court, President Obama Lashes Out At Supreme Court Justices

With last week's rendezvous before the Supreme Court in the books, the Administration's ability to convince the nine justices that the Patient Protection and Affordability Act- better known as 0bamacare- is indeed constitutional seems to have burned out before it could even begin. Many of 0bamacare's supporters blamed a lackluster performance on Solicitor General Donald Verrilli for its poor showing before the Supremes. To quote Iowahawk- they seemed more upset at Verrilli's inability to polish a turd than any substantive defense of 0bamacare.

As the hearings adjourned, it appeared as though the only questions were would only the individual mandate be struck down or the entire bill, even though it was expected that the panel wouldn't announce their decision until mid-June.

However, the inevitability of the anticipated ruling seemed to be confirmed on Monday when President Obama lashed out at the conservative justices on the Supreme Court during a joint press conference with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian PM Stephen Harper at the White House.

"Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," Obama said at a news conference with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

Conservative leaders say the law, which once fully implemented will require Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty, was an overreach by Obama and the Congress that passed it.

The president sought to turn that argument around, calling a potential rejection by the court an overreach of its own.

"And I'd just remind conservative commentators that, for years, what we have heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism, or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law," Obama said.

"Well, this is a good example, and I'm pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step," he said.

Interestingly, President Obama didn't seem this worked up over unelected federal judges striking down Oklahoma's anti-sharia law, California's Proposition 8 and key portions of Arizona's SB 1070. Those were either passed through ballot initiatives or elected state representatives- all of them being passed by a wider margin than 0bamacare was.

President Obama claims that the Supreme court- a body that deliberates on the legality and constitutionality of various laws, rules and regulations since its inception- striking down 0bamacare would be 'unprecedented', yet legal scholars say that it's rare for a sitting President to initiate a verbal confrontation with the justices on the high court. The bellicose nature of Obama's attack on the enumerated powers involving the Supreme court led some to speculate that one of the justices had leaked the case's outcome to the White House over the weekend.

Not everybody in the federal court system was taking Obama's uninformed scolding lying down. On Tuesday, in direct response to the President's remarks, a three judge panel on the 5th circuit court ordered the Justice Department to submit a three-page report over whether or not the administration believes the Supreme Court has the right to strike down a federal law [at face value, this has all the makings of a college professor rebuking an obnoxious know-it-all student and giving him an additional assignment to turn in- NANESB!].

Overturning a law of course would not be unprecedented -- since the Supreme Court since 1803 has asserted the power to strike down laws it interprets as unconstitutional. The three-judge appellate court appears to be asking the administration to admit that basic premise -- despite the president's remarks that implied the contrary. The panel ordered the Justice Department to submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power, the lawyer said.

The panel is hearing a separate challenge to the health care law by physician-owned hospitals. The issue arose when a lawyer for the Justice Department began arguing before the judges. Appeals Court Judge Jerry Smith immediately interrupted, asking if DOJ agreed that the judiciary could strike down an unconstitutional law.

The DOJ lawyer, Dana Lydia Kaersvang, answered yes -- and mentioned Marbury v. Madison, the landmark case that firmly established the principle of judicial review more than 200 years ago, according to the lawyer in the courtroom.

Smith then became "very stern," the source said, suggesting it wasn't clear whether the president believes such a right exists. The other two judges on the panel, Emilio Garza and Leslie Southwick--both Republican appointees--remained silent, the source said.

Smith, a Reagan appointee, went on to say that comments from the president and others in the Executive Branch indicate they believe judges don't have the power to review laws and strike those that are unconstitutional, specifically referencing Mr. Obama's comments yesterday about judges being an "unelected group of people."

Not surprisingly, Smith's retort has been called into question by a number of judicial 'experts' who didn't see anything wrong with Obama's confrontational remarks on Monday.

The three page homework assignment report, given to DOJ counsel Dana Lydia Kaersvang, is due on Thursday.

Federal Appeals Court Rules Obamacare's Individual Mandate Unconstitutional

A provision in President Obama's healthcare bill mandating that all citicizens purchase health insurance was ruled unconstitutional by a US Appeals Court in Atlanta on Friday afternoon. The decison was a review of an earlier and much more sweeping ruling by a US District Judge in Florida.

The divided panel of three judges sided with 26 states that were filing suit against the Administration to block the implementation of Obamacare. Friday's decision will likely pave the way for the supreme court to hear arguments for and against HR 3590 [possibly in time for the 2012 Presidential campagin- NANESB!].

The panel said that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority by requiring Americans to buy insurance or face penalties.

"This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority," the panel said in the majority opinion.

The majority also said that a basic objective of the law is to "make health insurance coverage accessible and thereby to reduce the number of uninsured persons." Without the individual mandate, the majority said, the law "retains many other provisions that help to accomplish some of the same objectives as the individual mandate."

The states urged the 11th Circuit to uphold U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson's ruling, saying in a court filing that letting the law stand would set a troubling precedent that "would imperil individual liberty, render Congress's other enumerated powers superfluous, and allow Congress to usurp the general police power reserved to the states."

The Justice Department countered that Congress had the power to require most people to buy health insurance or face tax penalties because Congress has the authority to regulate interstate business. It said the legislative branch was exercising its "quintessential" rights when it adopted the new law.

During oral arguments in June, the three-judge panel repeatedly raised questions about the overhaul and expressed unease with the insurance requirement. Each of the three worried aloud if upholding the landmark law could open the door to Congress adopting other sweeping economic mandates.

The arguments unfolded in what's considered one of the nation's most conservative appeals courts. But the randomly selected panel represents different judicial perspectives. None of the three is considered either a stalwart conservative or an unfaltering liberal.

Friday's ruling could very well set the stage for a Supreme Court battle over Obamacare during the 2012 election cycle.

US Supreme Court Orders California to Release up to 38,0000 Convicts From State Prisons

The United States Supreme Court ordered that the state of California must release anywhere from 38,000 to 46,000 inmates in a 5-4 decision on Monday.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ordered California on Monday to release tens of thousands of its prisoners to relieve overcrowding, saying that "needless suffering and death" had resulted from putting too many inmates into facilities that cannot hold them in decent conditions.

It is one of the largest prison release orders in the nation's history, and it sharply split the high court.

Justices upheld an order from a three-judge panel in California that called for releasing 38,000 to 46,000 prisoners. Since then, the state has transferred about 9,000 state inmates to county jails. As a result, the total prison population is now about 32,000 more than the capacity limit set by the panel.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, speaking for the majority, said California's prisons had "fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements" because of overcrowding. As many as 200 prisoners may live in gymnasium, he said, and as many as 54 prisoners share a single toilet.

Kennedy insisted that the state had no choice but to release more prisoners. The justices, however, agreed that California officials should be given more time to make the needed reductions.

In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia called the ruling "staggering" and "absurd."

He said the high court had repeatedly overruled the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for ordering the release of individual prisoners. Now, he said, the majority were ordering the release of "46,000 happy-go-lucky felons." He added that "terrible things are sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order." Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with him.

In a separate dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the ruling conflicted with a federal law intended to limit the power of federal judges to order a release of prisoners.

I'm sorry- I was just thinking that if some of these convicts that the court is so willing to spring should have to bunk at Justice Sotomayor or Kagan's place, then some of the Supremes probably wouldn't be as eager to let them walk.

Even if I was to assume that all 38,000+ inmates wanted to go on the striaght and narrow, there's still the fact that they're being released into a state with 12% unemployment and an already scarce job market, which would mean that it would only be a matter of time before the newly-released cons would turn back to whatever criminal enterprise landed them in the clink to begin with. Couple that with budget and personnel cuts in police departments throughout California and you are almost begging for something bad to happen.....often.

As far back as 2009, Michigan's then-Gov Granholm had proposed in a letter to California's then-Gov. Schwarzenegger that California inmates could be housed in two Michigan prisons that were slated for closure that year. Although the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would take Granholm up on a similar offer, the deal with California ultimately fell through.

In advance of the Supreme Court Ruling, Gov. Brown had proposed transferring some 40,000 'low level' offenders to local or county jails as part an effort to meet an estimated $9.6 budget shortfall. [I can almost garuntee that most state and local politicians will stand firm on refusing to allow law-abiding Californians to obtain conceal-carry permits- NANESB!]

Exit question- what are the odds some Democrat-allied 'community organizers' are going to attempt to register as many of the newly released convicts to vote as possible?