Supreme Court Pleases Democrats, Protects Republicans

Republicans wanted to commit political suicide.

The Supreme Court saved them from themselves. 

Democrats are happy. The signature achievement of the Obama administration survives.  

Republicans may not be happy, but should be. They dodged a bullet and improved their chances of winning back the House and Senate.

The Supreme Court just announced a 7-2 decision to preserve the Affordable Care Act--"Obamacare"--by deciding that Texas and 17 other states, plus two other state officials, lacked standing to object to the law. The premise of the lawsuit was that by having made the tax payment zero for failing to purchase individually mandated health insurance, there was no tax. Therefore the ACA, authorized under Congress' taxing power, was now unconstitutional. The lawsuit argued that this section was intrinsic to the operation of the ACA and therefore the entire act must be thrown out. 

We see a number of things taking place.

1. The Supreme Court can find whatever justification it wants for deciding any way it wants. There is always an arguable justification for anything. The Supreme Court--Justice Roberts in particular--did not want to kill the ACA, so in a 5-4 decision in 2012 he voted with liberals to say the Congressional taxing power made the law Constitutional. This year the Supreme Court majority did not want to kill the ACA, so it used "standing" as the excuse for deciding against the Texas suit. We have confirmed something we learned back in the Bush v. Gore decision after the 2000 election. Any illusion the public may have that the Supreme Court is bound by the written word is shown to be naive. The Supreme Court can make political decisions whenever it wants to, and it just did.

2. Republicans in red states do what is necessary and popular to satisfy Republican voters in a Republican primary. Texas, which led this lawsuit, demonstrates this. The Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, led an improbable lawsuit last December. It was beloved by Trump but widely considered outlandish. The lawsuit demanded that electoral votes in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania be thrown out because pandemic-related changes in voting rules were not specifically authorized by the state legislatures in those states. Those states objected, and the Supreme Court declined to hear it. The Republican primary nomination for Attorney General of Texas is sharply contested by the son of Jeb Bush, George P. Bush, who is doubling down by attempting to be even more Trump-positive than Paxton. The politics in Republican primaries are a push to the Trump-populist right. GOP orthodoxy requires adamant opposition to the ACA, as well as to a demand that Congress, the Vice President, the Supreme Court--someone--reverse the results of the 2020 election. Both positions are minority positions, seen from a national context, but it is essential policy to survive within red states' GOP primaries. 

3. Democrats got what they needed: The ACA is preserved, for now at least. Thirty million people continue to have health insurance because of it. The working poor, previously uninsured and vulnerable, will stay covered. Rural hospitals stopped bleeding money and closing because the health care they had provided to people who were without any ability to pay was now, under the ACA, reimbursed. 

4. Republicans got what they needed, but not what they wanted. The ACA is complicated and incomplete. It is not wildly popular but it gives two groups of people what they desperately need. It gives people who work in jobs without health insurance--primarily the working poor--access to it. It also gives middle and upper-middle-income people who are uninsurable because of a pre-existing condition access to affordable health insurance. This includes people in "the donor class," who may well be personally acquainted with office-holders. Some people in their fifties and early sixties in age are ready to retire early, but do not dare to, because they need to continue health insurance attached to a job. It includes small business owners who, because of a pre-existing condition, cannot get insurance. Both these groups are sympathetic victims to Republican officeholders. Political doctrine had gotten disconnected from political interest. 

5. The Supreme Court saved Republicans from electoral disaster in 2022. GOP fingerprints would have been all over the death of the ACA. Fox would have called it a victory. Texas would have crowed that you now have the glorious freedom not to have health insurance. GOP officeholders are stuck with their words of opposition. Death of the ACA would have thrown the health care industry into chaos. It would have given Democrats a perfect issue going into the mid-term elections: Look what the GOP did to take away something you need.

The Rolling Stones understood today's news perfectly: 

You can't always get what you want,

But if you try sometimes you might just find

You get what you need.