Jophiel wrote:
The idea that one case or another is "more important" is some delusion you've either convinced yourself of or else the man on the AM radio/Freeper blog told you and you were naive enough to believe them.
In the context of the whole of this legal question, some cases are more important than others. This case is basically arguing the far far right libertarian position. It's basically saying "government doesn't have the authority to make me do something which hurts me financially". It's right in there along with arguments that the income tax is unconstitutional. Surely you get this, right? This is by far the weakest of the arguments being brought in terms of the likelihood of the court ruling favorably.
It's in there because you want to examine every aspect, and you never know. Maybe they'll get a ruling which upholds some portion of that far right libertarian viewpoint. I doubt it, but it's worth trying.
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The reality is that the SCotUS will almost certainly bundle the appellate cases and rule on the constitutionality of the mandate based on all the lower court rulings since that's the grounds they're being contested on.
Yes. But you do understand that they'll lump all those questions into one case, but the case isn't "won" for the defense unless it wins every question. The court isn't going to decide that the "individual can't be inconvenienced by the government" isn't strong enough and rule the whole thing in favor of the government. What is going to happen is that on some questions in the case (like most likely this one) the court will rule that the government can do what it's doing, but on other questions (like states rights in general, or states rights in terms of a contradictory existing health care law), the federal law fails the constitutional test.
That's why this case really doesn't matter. Oh. It would matter if it went the other way, since it might indicate just how completely screwed the Health Care Reform law is. But this is basically the argument no one really expects to win, but you use it anyway just to see.
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Which is why this ruling is important, regardless of what you tell yourself; if the case is a 5-4 decision, the question will certainly be "What did Kennedy decide" and rulings in which constructionist judge(s) ruled in favor and wrote out reasoned pieces why the law is constitutional from that perspective may add weight to the defense's case.
It wont come down that way though. You're naive if you think it will. It'll be more like the Wal-Mart case, with a majority (or even unanimous) decision on the question of violation of states rights, and perhaps a 5-4 split on other aspects like individual protection from federal action.
The point you seem to keep missing is that no amount of a lower court ruling on the idea of individuals being constitutionally protected from the federal mandate on the grounds that it might hurt them financially has any bearing at all on the much much much stronger states rights aspect of this case. There is no precedent set. Despite what you seem to think, precedent isn't some simple "for or against" a given ideological position on an issue. It's about how the law interacts with specific elements of an issue.
This case asked the question: Does the health care reform mandate's potential to negatively impact people financially represent an unconstitutional infringement of their rights? That has absolutely nothing to do with the question: Does the health care reform mandate represent an unconstitutional infringement of the federal government into an aspect of governance reserved for the states?
You're making the mistake of looking at this as a blanket "is the law ok, or not?". That's not how the courts rule these cases. They look at each specific argument being made against the law. In this case, that argument is a relatively weak one. I wouldn't put too much weight on it.