High-court decision
Commentator Mark Levin has said that the actions by President Obama have left us in a post-constitutional America. I now ponder if Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., with his opinions on the Affordable Care Act, has had the same effect.
With his first ruling in 2012, he established that the federal government may tax us for not purchasing a good or service, ignoring the specific wording of the law that it was a penalty. The government may now take the fruits of your labor for not purchasing a product that it wishes for you to have. With his second and most recent opinion upholding the legality of federally run state exchanges, he argued that the clear and specific language of the law — that the exchanges were to be run by the states — did not mean what it said.
Justice Antonin Scalia was justifiably outraged in his dissent. If specific language means whatever Roberts deems it to mean, the Constitution has died.
“Words no longer have any meaning,” Scalia was quoted as saying in his dissent. He also accused the majority of doing “interpretive somersaults.”
Where was this deference to plain language when he wrote the majority decision in the 2nd Amendment dispute District of Columbia vs. Heller, ignoring the part of the amendment about militias being the reason we have a right to own guns?
Talk about “interpretive somersaults” in defending the 2nd Amendment.
Vince De Vita
Northridge