Exactly How Terrible is the Roberts Court?
By How will the horrible consequences of a Supreme Court ruling that the Moops invaded Spain affect Kennedy and Roberts? Beats me:
Saying that judges are pragmatists in practice, however, doesn’t necessarily get us very far. The swing votes on the court could evaluate the consequences of destroying the federally established state exchanges very differently. Perhaps Roberts and Kennedy will be dismayed at the prospect of millions of people losing their insurance. But perhaps they will be more concerned with teaching congressional Democrats a lesson. After all, congressional Republicans have never found large numbers of people lacking health insurance a particularly pressing issue — why should conservative Republicans on the Supreme Court be any different? The pragmatism of the justices can cut both ways.
We will have a better insight into what the justices think after oral arguments in March. But I remain pessimistic for one overriding reason: it’s not clear why the court would have taken the case in the first place if it didn’t want to throw a monkey wrench into the exchanges.