 The Supreme Court upholds Obamacare in 7-2 ruling. We all know that if Donald Trump was still president, he would be tweeting about this, lambasting the conservative justices who sided with the liberals here, but let's look at this here. So this is from John Cruisel of the Hill. The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Obamacare against the latest Republican challenge, preserving the landmark law and its key protections for millions of people with pre-existing health conditions. This is really good news. Unexpected, I kind of expected them to do the wrong thing here since they do have a solid 6-3 majority. I was pleasantly surprised, but the justices ruled 7-2 that the GOP challengers lacked standing to sue in a decision that marks the third major challenge to Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act to be rebuffed by the Supreme Court in roughly a decade. The case arose after 18 Republican states brought a legal challenge in 2018 aimed at striking down the ACA. This is kind of a long story. I don't know how concise they're going to be here, but basically long story short. Republican states, they try to zero out the individual mandate tax because in the last case where they upheld the ACA, they said the individual mandate, it actually, we can't strike that down because it's essentially a tax and Congress does have the capability of administering new taxes. So what the Republicans did here was super sleazy. They tried to zero out the tax or they did zero out the tax in an attempt to make that invalid, make it so that way, well, okay, if we zeroed out the tax, then it looks like it's no longer a tax checkmate, but they didn't go by that. And this was like such an obvious attempt to get it struck down, led by Texas, of course, because everything that's terrible in this country is led by Texas. Well, I shouldn't say that because Florida has been like batting pretty terribly lately too. In Texas, in this case, the GOP challenges focused on the Obamacare tax penalty meant to induce the purchase of health insurance by most Americans. They argued that former President Trump's 2017 tax cut, which zeroed out the penalty, made that provision unconstitutional. Without the tax penalty, they argued Obamacare effectively lost its constitutional footing, requiring its invalidation by the court. Okay, so they already kind of covered what I talked about. But the justices did not even address those issues in their decision. Oof, they're going to be mad about that. We do not reach these questions of the acts validity, however, for Texas and the other plaintiffs in the suit, lack the standing necessary to raise them. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the majority, Breyer was joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, as well as four of the court's more conservative members, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice's Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, interesting. Two of the court's staunchest conservatives, Alito and Gorsuch, wrote in dissent. Alito accused the court of continuing a trend of fashioning novel rationales to preserve Obamacare and criticized the majority for preventing the plaintiffs from even getting a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. Dude, let it go. Like, we're so beyond this idea that these are non-political, non-partisan actors. These are just as hacky as any Republican. I love this so much. Alito was pissed. Trump's Supreme Court breaks down along surprising lines. The key fault line in the Supreme Court that Donald Trump built is not the ideological clash between right and left, it's the increasingly acrimonious conflict within the court's now dominant conservative wing. Those riffs burst wide open on Thursday with two of the highest profile decisions of the court's current term. In both the big cases involving Obamacare and a Catholic group refusing to vet same-sex couples as foster parents in Philadelphia, conservative justices unleashed sharp attacks that seemed aimed at their fellow GOP appointees for failing to grapple with the core issues the case has presented. Now, the reason why I want to read this article is because I don't want to go through the actual case itself, but they talk about the shots that were fired in these cases. Like, this is conservative on conservative violence, folks. Some liberal legal commentators noted that the most carefully dissected rhetorical sparring is now taking place among members of the new six justice conservative majority with the three remaining liberal justices often left as mere spectators. That's accurate. We're arguing about the battles among the conservatives and when that coalition breaks and where it goes, lamented Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge. It's a dramatic difference from only two or three years ago. I hope that they get to the actual dissenting opinions. Leading the charge from the right in both cases Thursday was Justice Samuel Alito. OK, so here we go. Who panned caustic opinions, taking his colleagues to task for issuing narrow rulings that seem to him to be aimed at defusing political tensions rather than interpreting the law. That's exactly what he's doing. Like, this is pure projection right here. And I don't want to, like, suggest that them taking shots at each other in these opinions and dissenting opinions is something that's new. It's not new at all, but when they're fighting, because it's very clear they're butthurt that, you know, they're not able to do the conservative agenda, like, to the most extreme extent, because some conservatives are actually trying to do a good job sometimes at interpreting the Constitution. He doesn't like that. He wants them to be ideologues. Yeah, I agree with you Winston. He's not qualified. Clarence Thomas, even though on this on this one, he, I believe, made the correct decision. He's still not qualified. Like, these folks are ideologues. Even if they don't want to make it seem as if that's the case. But anyway, after receiving more than 2,500 pages of briefing and after more than a half year of post-argument cogitation, the court has admitted a wisp of a decision that leaves religious liberty in a confused, vulnerable state. So I don't want to get too much in here since we already talked about that. But in the Obamacare dispute, Alito sarcastically accused the majority of repeatedly indulging in fights of legal sophistry to avoid the politically unpalatable step of striking down the landmark healthcare law. Oh, those tears are just delicious, folks. No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats Alito wrote. A penalty is a tax. The United States is a state, and 18 states who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again, but I must respectfully dissent. Dude, get fucked. You can, like, the butt hurt is palpable. Oh, and I love it. These tears are salty. They are so delicious. While Alito observed the court's traditional decorum by railing at the majority, there was little doubt his criticism was aimed primarily at Chief Justice John Roberts, who provided the pivotal role to uphold Obamacare nine years ago and voted Thursday to lead the law intact by concluding that the Republican-led states seeking to overturn it lacked legal standing to sue. So this is good news. It's frustrating that this shitty law, the Affordable Care Act, which is a for-profit-based healthcare law, is what we have to fight for when in actuality we should have Medicare for All. But I mean, of course, don't undo what little progress we've made. Of course, that's bad. But the fact that we can't even have some shitty law like Obamacare, that these reactionaries are mad at for-profit neoliberal healthcare reform, healthcare laws, now I should say, is so, it just speaks to the extremism of the GOP. Like, can you imagine if we ever actually get Medicare for All? If I'm a lawmaker, I am absolutely, positively making sure that any Medicare for All legislation has been vetted by legal experts and that it is constitutionally sound. So it can't be struck down. That doesn't necessarily mean that it won't be struck down. But they need to absolutely do their homework. And this is if we even get to the point where we're voting on Medicare for All, right? But that is going to be the subject of so many attacks. And immediately, if we ever pass Medicare for All, the fight to protect it will be immediate. Like, we will have to mobilize to protect that. But we just need people to have it for like a couple of years. So that way it will be too unpopular to take it away. Like, it's inconceivable that any conservative justice would vote to take away Social Security. Like, that's not the greatest example. But if it came up, because they know that that would be deeply unpopular. So I mean, yeah, fuck this guy right here. And I am very, very glad that he's mad. Stay mad. Stay mad, bitch.