The Supreme Court rulings

Today’s Supreme Court ruling on gay marriages was more or less what I expected. Federal Appellate Courts had divided on this issue, but clearly one can’t have marriages recognized in one state but not another, so now that gay marriage is legal in a majority of the states the Supreme Court was bound to rule in favor of uniformity across the nation. And in fact I think it was the right thing to do morally, despite the howls of protest from the far right. But the dissents were interesting – Justice Roberts argued the Federalism case; that this was an issue that should be left to the states to decide. Justice Scalia was disturbed that such a large social issue was being decided by a group of unelected judges, rather than by the democratic process. Both are valid worries.

But yesterday’s Obamacare decision worries me. The ruling sets a bad precedent – that an agency can decide for itself what a law “is supposed to mean”, even if that isn’t what the wording of the law says. The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) was hastily written and not even read in its entirety by most of the Democrats who voted for it, and contains lots of inadvertent errors. By rights these should have been corrected by Congress as they were found, but of course politically this was not possible – not least because in ObamaCare the Democrats very unwisely forced through a major social and economic change with absolutely no bipartisan support – not a single Republican vote. But even so I don’t think it is proper to allow a government agency to unilaterally decide to interpret a law in a way other than the way it is written. This precedent will quite likely be abused in the future.

In the previous ObamaCare ruling I also think Justice Roberts was off base. He saved ObamaCare by ruling that the penalty for not buying insurance (the “individual mandate”) was not really a penalty, but rather a tax legal under the taxing power of Congress. That despite the vigorous arguments by the President during the pre-vote debates that this was not a tax. The Courts have a principle - correct I think - to defer to the wishes and intents of the legislature to the extent they can discern them, but I think this was stretching that principle a bit too far. In both these cases the Justices saved Congress from its own sloppy work, but I don’t think that is what the Supreme Court should be doing.