Health Care Suits: Separating Law From Spin

[BridgeTheGap]

If a public figure walks on water at noon, by 3 p.m. a dozen talking heads will be explaining that he can't swim.

That's politics. But we can hope that federal judges won't think in sound bites.

The current lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act raise this question insistently. I return to this lawsuit in yet another column because I believe this case will dominate both constitutional law and political discourse over at least the next 12 months--and because I believe its stakes far transcend its immediate consequences, important though they will be. I think that if our federal courts are willing to sign on to the challengers' jejune theory of this case, not only we but our children will spend years dealing the malign consequences of the mistake. Nothing less than the ability of the United States to function as a modern nation may be at stake.

(Okay, I also return because I enjoy the comments that will shortly appear below accusing me of being Kim Jong Il, but that's a secondary reason.)

So far, in two of the pending lawsuits, opponents of the law have succeeded in spinning the judges, framing the lawsuits as posing the question whether (as Virginia argued) the federal government can "impose a penalty for what amounts to passive inactivity."

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/12/health-care-suits-separating-law-from-spin/68675/