Friday, June 29, 2012

A Meta Comment on Health Care

I've been traveling and so not in the thick of the health care aftershocks (though they certainly seem strong enough to register on the seismograph at Caltech), but I want to add a meta-comment or two, chiefly about pattern of the followup.  Specifically, I'm fascinated to see how quickly and completely the blogosphere back-engineered the Scalia "dissent" to show that he thought he was writing (perhaps better, "taking a victory lap") for the majority: for a good selection of evidentiary exhibits, search here.  I'm also intrigued by the suggestion that it was intentional--that Scalia dropped those Easter eggs precisely so the world would know utterly he had been betrayed.  Could be, but his seems a bit of a stretch to me, more than a little like suggesting you look for the acrostic to show that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. 

I'm more intrigued--but would still count it as speculation--that the victor/villain in the case is Justice Ginsberg, who seems to have trolled "tax" past Justice Robert's nose in a way that induced him to take the bait.  That is: could be, but we would need a bit more compelling evidence (which, God wot, we will never get, or perhaps not for another 50 years).

I confess I have spent a few minutes with the shrieking hyperbole of the right-wing noise machine and I have to ask--isn't there some point, somewhere, at which all this becomes self-defeating?    At the very least, you would think folks would catch on that what these guys are really fighting is each other as they scratch claw for dominance before the (admittedly very profitable) public megaphone.

I'd also give the last word to Orin Kerr,  pointing out that the case was decided on the barest of technicalities and that there are any number of other legislative routes under which health care (aka,  the end of western civilization as we know it) might have emerged without any doubts as to its constitutionality.

1 comment:

Ebenezer Scrooge said...

We'll get the evidence as soon as a current Supreme Court clerk gets tenure.