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Courtroom spin

The average American is not a constitutional-law expert. That hasn’t stopped many from weighing in on how and why the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court should rule on the fate of the 2010 health-care overhaul commonly referred to as Obamacare.

Recent polls show that a majority of Americans think the law will be repealed or personally favor its repeal. This isn’t a big surprise since, despite the hopes and beliefs of its backers, the law has remained unpopular since being passed in a hyper-partisan push two years ago.

The start of oral arguments last week fired up the armchair pundits — especially those true believers in the law who reacted, in the words of one observer, with “shock and awe” at the tough and skeptical questions posed by several of the justices. Opponents became cautiously hopeful that the law would be overturned; Obama’s defenders quickly went through several stages of grief, alternately trying to dismiss, shame and sweet-talk those justices who seemed to be leaning toward striking down the law.

Those complaining of a “conservative bias” on the Supreme Court focus on a few cases that didn’t go their way over the past decade or so. Meanwhile, they tend to ignore previous decades of activist decisions by judges who championed the idea of the “living Constitution” which holds that a very broad view of the Constitution should be used to justify a progressive agenda. Meanwhile, Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, all presumed from the outset to be supporters of the health-care law, almost never are accused of having a “liberal bias.”

It would be a mistake to accuse justices of being partisan simply on the basis of them questioning, or ultimately ruling unconstitutional, central parts of what most recognize as the president’s signature domestic achievement. To suggest that partisanship is the only reason one would do this shows how divisive and partisan the health-care law itself is. There is a legitimate question to be decided here: Does this law seek to establish an entirely new relationship between Americans and their national government, one in which the government has far more power to dictate the activities of individuals?

On the other hand, it also would be unwise to insist that the law be struck down because it was Obama’s biggest legislative victory. As many Democrats are quick to point out in their worried blame game, leading Republican lawmakers over the years also have made attempts at creating some sort of national health-care system, so it’s not as if the Democrats and Obama pulled the idea out of thin air.

Now is a time for both sides to respect the fact that the justices of the Supreme Court are doing their jobs, using their years of accumulated experience and knowledge of the Constitution to soberly weigh the issue. To suggest that the nation’s highest court would take the case in order to score political points on either side is an example of critics projecting their own hyper-partisan worldview onto the justices.

Read this and other articles at the Columbus Dispatch


 
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