SCOTUS health care reform ruling imminent

June 28, 2012 by Donny Shaw

In advance of the un-publicly-accountable U.S. Supreme Court ruling on health care reform (#hcr on micropublishing), links below. Nothing less than President Obama’s main domestic legislative achievement, here.

I enthusiastically recommend you stream WNYC’s the Brian Lehrer Show during the 10am ruling. (Listen now link is buried on the right-hand side for some reason.) Will be informed & reality-based & clutch. Big-ups public radio. 

Some handy links ::

• H.R. 3590 (111th Congress) – the major “Patient Protection & Affordable Care” bill – official text, money trail of interests supporting & opposing, roll call votes, House vote on passage (concurring w/ Senate). 

• Health care coverage & access issue area on OC, including top Congressional recipients from related industries. Keep in mind, as always, the unaddressed & endemic systemic corruption of the federal legislative process – one that requires, at minimum, full public financing of elections, strong ethics regulations, and comprehensive electoral reform (such as universal voter registration & right-to-vote laws) to mitigate. Just to begin raising public trust in government to levels comparable with other supposedly advanced democracies. 

• OC Blog Coverage of health care, hr3590, and accessible background on Wonkblog (shouts E-Klein et al). Also Slate & Dahlia Lithwick & TPM & Jill Lepore & Physicians for a National Health Program & New Yorker #hcr coverage, why not. 

• Not #hcr, but don’t miss Profs. Krugman & Wells on #finreg in NYRoB. 

• SCOTUS interlocks on the terrific LittleSis research site on corruption. E.g. Chief Justice Roberts, swing vote Justice Kennedy.

• More interesting & well-documented & well-related Ezra Klein observations on how the individual mandate morphed from a Republican proposal to centerpiece of a Democratic #hcr effort (as opposed to single-payer, never on the legislative table). 

Keep in mind James Fallows’ points above:

Pick a country and describe a sequence in which:

• First, the presidential election is decided by five people, who don’t even try to explain their choice in normal legal terms.
• Then the beneficiary of that decision appoints the next two members of the court, who present themselves for consideration as restrained, humble figures who care only about law rather than ideology.
• Once on the bench, for life, those two actively second-guess and re-do existing law, to advance the interests of the party that appointed them.
• Meanwhile their party’s representatives in the Senate abuse procedural rules to an extent never previously seen to block legislation — and appointments, especially to the courts.
• And, when a major piece of legislation gets through, the party’s majority on the Supreme Court prepares to negate it — even though the details of the plan were originally Republican proposals and even though the party’s presidential nominee endorsed these concepts only a few years ago.

How would you describe a democracy where power was being shifted that way? 

(i.e.) 

But when you look at the sequence from Bush v. Gore, through Citizens United, to what seems to be coming on the health-care front; and you combine it with ongoing efforts in Florida and elsewhere to prevent voting from presumably Democratic blocs; and add that to the simply unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the years since the Democrats won control of the Senate and then took the White House, you have what we’d identify as a kind of long-term coup if we saw it happening anywhere else.