MOTHER JONES: …Orin Kerr says that, in the two years since he gave the individual mandate only a one-percent chance of being overturned, three key things have happened. First, congressional Republicans made the argument against the mandate a Republican position. Then it became a standard conservative-media position. “That legitimized the argument in a way we haven’t really seen before,” Kerr said. “We haven’t seen the media pick up a legal argument and make the argument mainstream by virtue of media coverage.” Finally, he says, “there were two conservative district judges who agreed with the argument, largely echoing the Republican position and the media coverage. And, once you had all that, it really became a ballgame.”
This is, needless to say, a powerfully depressing analysis. For all practical purposes, Kerr is agreeing that conservative judges don’t even bother pretending to be neutral anymore. They listen to Fox News, and if something becomes a conservative talking point then they’re on board. And that goes all the way up to the Supreme Court…
Maybe. The Supremes haven’t handed down their ruling yet, and they could still surprise us. Because the truth is still the same as it was two years ago: the distinction between activity and inactivity—i.e., whether the federal government can mandate specific activity in addition to prohibiting it—has no historical basis at all. It was invented out of whole cloth. There’s no precedent, no language in the Constitution, and for the most part, not even any discussion about it in the legal literature prior to 2009. It’s simply not something that anyone ever took seriously until it became the only plausible attack line against a piece of liberal legislation that conservatives wanted to overturn… (more)
