Guest authors

 Scott Pilutik received his J.D. from Brooklyn Law.  His legal analyses have appeared in and been cited by numerous outlets, including The Village Voice.  Today he breaks down the legal intricacies and political ironies that shaped the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to uphold the ACA, popularly known as ObamaCare.   Prior to yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the ‘ACA’), a consistent legal narrative had dominated discussions.  On the Left, the law was deemed constitutional because it falls well within Congress’s authority under the commerce clause to regulate interstate commerce.  That argument is best summarized by Andrew Koppelman, here.  On the Right, it’s unconstitutional because Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce does not include the power to compel, best summarized here by the argument’s intellectual author, Professor Randy Barnett. So when Chief Justice John Roberts began the day by announcing that Barnett’s argument had prevailed, you could almost forgive CNN and Fox for tripping over themselves to mistakenly report that the ACA’s individual mandate had been struck down.  But it didn’t work out that way.  As Barnett put it: “Who would have thought that we could win while losing?” John Roberts and John Roberts alone, apparently. Four justices (Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan) found the individual mandate permissible via the commerce clause, while four other  justices (Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy) emphatically did not, writing: “we would find the Act invalid in its entirety.”  In fact, they were more than emphatic.  Their dissent was fully joined, thorough, and strident.  It reads as if it were originally the majority opinion, a majority opinion that Roberts abandoned at some point.

By Guest Blogger Kimberly Katz subcommittee, the latter as the ranking member on the Armed Services committee.  Accordingly, Americans should be astounded that only now do these senators publicly recognize the repressive nature of the Mubarak regime, which has benefitted tremendously from $1.3 billion in annual military aid as a result of its 1979 peace treaty with Israel. The Kerry-McCain resolution should give pause to Americans as the history of U.S. foreign policy has been ugly across the globe, from Cuba to the Philippines, from Honduras to Guatemala, from Iran to Iraq to Tunisia to Egypt and elsewhere, from the end of the 19th century to the present.  U.S. foreign policy has actively supported known dictators, providing them with the funding and military aid that they need to brutally repress their populations at home, with commercial and strategic benefits accruing to the United States in return.

degree should that even matter? And then there are the third party financial intermediaries: Visa, Mastercard and Paypal have practically tripped over each other accommodating government requests to prevent their customers from donating to WikiLeaks. And finally there are WikiLeaks’ vigilantes, collectively known to the media as Anonymous, some of whom have taken down, by denial-of-service attacks, the websites of Wikileaks’ adversaries, including the aforementioned financial groups, Joe Lieberman, Swiss bank Post Finance, and Assange’s Swedish prosecutors.