SCOTUS

It's an even-to-good bet that when the Court's decision regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare) is (likely) announced this week that it will overturn at least the insurance mandate (a.k.a. "make us eat broccoli"). Many expect a 5-4 opinion that will break down as follows:

Uphold: Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Breyer, and possibly Kennedy
Overturn: Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and probably Kennedy

There's spirited debate over the extent to which the Court has become politicized. According to arguments cited in the Wikipedia article Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States our "preconceptions" concerning the Court may be wrong:

In an article in SCOTUSblog,[89] Tom Goldstein argues that the popular view of the Supreme Court as sharply divided along ideological lines and each side pushing an agenda at every turn is "in significant part a caricature designed to fit certain preconceptions." He points out that in the 2009 term, almost half the cases were decided unanimously, and only about 20% decided by a 5-to-4 vote; barely one in ten cases involved the narrow liberal/conservative divide (fewer if the cases where Sotomayor recused herself are not included). He also points to several cases that seem to fly against the popular conception of the ideological lines of the Court.[90][91] Goldstein argues that the large number of pro-criminal-defendant summary dismissals (usually cases where the justices decide that the lower courts significantly misapplied precedent and reverse the case without briefing or argument) are an illustration that the conservative justices have not been aggressively ideological. Likewise, Goldstein states that the critique that the liberal justices are more likely to invalidate acts of Congress, show inadequate deference to the political process, and be disrespectful of precedent, also lacks merit: Thomas has most often called for overruling prior precedent (even if long standing) that he views as having been wrongly decided, and during the 2009 term Scalia and Thomas voted most often to invalidate legislation.

On the other hand, Ezra Klein blogs Of course the Supreme Court is Political:

While I was reporting out my New Yorker piece, I spoke with Akhil Reid Amar, a leading constitutional law scholar at Yale, who thinks that a 5-4 party-line vote against the mandate would be shattering to the court’s reputation for being above politics. “I’ve only mispredicted one big Supreme Court case in the last 20 years,” he told me. “That was Bush v. Gore. And I was able to internalize that by saying they only had a few minutes to think about it and they leapt to the wrong conclusion. If they decide this by 5-4, then yes, it’s disheartening to me, because my life was a fraud. Here I was, in my silly little office, thinking law mattered, and it really didn’t. What mattered was politics, money, party, and party loyalty.”

In that New Yorker piece, Unpopular Mandate, Klein writes:

On March 23, 2010, the day that President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, fourteen state attorneys general filed suit against the law’s requirement that most Americans purchase health insurance, on the ground that it was unconstitutional. It was hard to find a law professor in the country who took them seriously. “The argument about constitutionality is, if not frivolous, close to it,” Sanford Levinson, a University of Texas law-school professor, told the McClatchy newspapers. Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine, told the Times, “There is no case law, post 1937, that would support an individual’s right not to buy health care if the government wants to mandate it.” Orin Kerr, a George Washington University professor who had clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, said, “There is a less than one-per-cent chance that the courts will invalidate the individual mandate.” Today, as the Supreme Court prepares to hand down its decision on the law, Kerr puts the chance that it will overturn the mandate—almost certainly on a party-line vote—at closer to “fifty-fifty.” The Republicans have made the individual mandate the element most likely to undo the President’s health-care law. The irony is that the Democrats adopted it in the first place because they thought that it would help them secure conservative support. It had, after all, been at the heart of Republican health-care reforms for two decades.

The mandate made its political début in a 1989 Heritage Foundation brief titled “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans,” as a counterpoint to the single-payer system and the employer mandate, which were favored in Democratic circles. In the brief, Stuart Butler, the foundation’s health-care expert, argued, “Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seat-belts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement.” The mandate made its first legislative appearance in 1993, in the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act—the Republicans’ alternative to President Clinton’s health-reform bill—which was sponsored by John Chafee, of Rhode Island, and co-sponsored by eighteen Republicans, including Bob Dole, who was then the Senate Minority Leader.

Klein goes on to discuss the health care policy flip-flop in the broader context of the psychological concept of motivated reasoning,

which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as “when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy”—an interest or goal such as remaining a well-regarded member of his political party, or winning the next election, or even just winning an argument.

In other words, as functioning human beings, most of us are using our intellect not in the pursuit of Truth, but rather to win arguments.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad