I'm not sure that Roberts' siding with the constitutionality of ACA is a good thing. First and foremost, because I'm not sure there's much that's progressive about the ACA – it's always struck me as being so compromised with the insurance industry and the status quo that it wasn't likely to really offer much genuine reform. All Roberts has shown is that he will take the side of corporations – which we already knew from e.g. Citizens United. And as many commentators have already pointed out, he nevertheless managed to reject that the ACA was valid due to the Commerce Clause in the Constitution, calling the mandate fines a tax instead. As a result, he's provided ammunation to the Republicans who can attack Obama as "tax-and-spend" – thus doing Obama no favors while nevertheless avoiding besmirching the court's allegedly non-partisan reputation. He gets the best of both worlds, and plants the seeds for further erosion of the Commerce Clause.
One blog, Stop Me Before I Vote Again, had what I found to be a bitter, cynical, but largely accurate summary of what's going on with this. And one commentor on that blog post, going by the name "Picador," had a thought that I feel is worth quoting:
Roberts has actually done us a favour here: he's pulled back the curtain a bit on the whole "government of enumerated powers" illusion. His decision is perfectly in line with legal precedent: after all, the government essentially already has an individual mandate for every citizen to buy a predator drone or a cluster bomb from a defence contractor (stored and maintained by the CIA and US Army, of course), so why not health insurance too? Once the power to tax is unrestricted, do you really even need the commerce clause anymore?
Indeed. Via our taxes, we've been mandated to support a vast, planetary-scale war-machine for decades. How is mandating that people buy healthcare coverage that different?
On a lighter note, the humor/meme site, Buzzfeed, has a posting of people who have – no kidding – announced via Twitter that they're moving to Canada due to their disgust with the creeping socialism in the U.S. This is hilarious.
