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Wow, Supreme Court — what a week.
“The Supreme Court just upheld Obamacare yet again,” Jeb Bush said in a fundraising shout-out. “This is the direct result of President Obama. He deliberately forced Obamacare on the American people in a partisan and toxic way.”
Whoever actually wrote Bush’s email did a brilliant job since it a) manages to blame President Barack Obama for a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees, and b) does sort of sound like the way Bush talks.
The ever-growing throng of Republican candidates for president were all in a fury over the Obamacare decision, but they divided a bit on gay marriage. Bush took the more moderate road, which involved trying to sound sad and then change the subject.
Once again, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee led the field in howling, demanding that the people “resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat.” Once again we will contemplate the fact that Huckabee used to be known as the tenderhearted Republican.
Donald Trump blamed Bush for the court’s gay rights decision, which is even more creative than Bush blaming Obama for the one on health care. I believe Trump’s early line of reasoning goes like this: Jeb Bush as Florida governor helped get his brother the presidency during the Bush-Gore recounts; George Bush then nominated John Roberts to head the Supreme Court, and even though Roberts was on the dissenting side of the gay marriage decision, still.
Or it could have been something completely different. Really, it’s beside the point. Forget I ever brought it up.
“The only alternative left for the American people is to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to reaffirm the ability of the states to continue to define marriage,” said Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. There were a lot of calls for a constitutional amendment, which will happen at approximately the same time hell freezes over. The last time the nation managed to rally together and change the Constitution was in 1992, when the people looked deep into their hearts and decided to join hands and prohibit a Congress from raising its own salary.
The Roberts Supreme Court is on a roll. Gay marriage, national health care and a surprising vote of support for the Fair Housing Act, all in a couple of days. Great job, guys! We are totally over the fact that you destroyed the nation’s campaign finance laws, limited workers’ rights to challenge wage discrimination and interfered with women’s rights to control their bodies. And basically disemboweled a 50-year-old Voting Rights Act that Congress had renewed by increasingly large margins on four occasions.
Stop. Trying to be nothing but positive today.
Everybody will remember last week for the gay marriage decision, but let’s talk about the Obamacare ruling. The court decided — in what opponents decried as a wild leap of judgment — that it was not going to strip millions of people of their health coverage and upend one of the most important pieces of legislation in modern history because of a four-word drafting error.
The Affordable Care Act now has been upheld twice by the Supreme Court. The American people, for their part, voted in 2008 to elect a president who promised to create a national right to health insurance coverage and voted in 2012 to re-elect him over a candidate who promised to undo it.
After all that, not to mention about 60 failed attempts to repeal the act in Congress, Obamacare, for the first time, looks safe. “This is reality,” the president said Thursday.
Ever since Theodore Roosevelt, our decisionmakers have pushed for a national health insurance program. Stuff always happened. Back in the 1970s, Rep. Wilbur Mills, the super-powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, thought he had President Gerald Ford “convinced on national health.” But Mills failed to get the bill out of committee due, he said much later, to the fact that he was drinking a half-gallon of vodka a day and had hallucinations about buzzards chasing him.
Anyone who watched the disaster that health care created for the Clinton administration might have had reason to dodge the subject for another century. But Obama pushed the bill through, even when a great many members of his party were begging him to drop the whole thing and do something easier, about jobs or taxes, that would get more traction in the next election.
Also, give some credit to Nancy Pelosi. When things looked bleakest — after Ted Kennedy had died and Republicans won his seat — Democrats started to backtrack, but Pelosi stood firm. “We’ll go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in,” she said. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”
And darned if they didn’t.
Gail Collins is a columnist for The New York Times.
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