Yesterday.....

"" In a 6-3 decision , the Supreme Court saved
the controversial health care law that will
define President Barack Obama's
administration for generations to come.
The ruling holds that the Affordable Care Act
authorized federal tax credits for eligible
Americans living not only in states with their
own exchanges but also in the 34 states with
federal marketplaces. It staved off a major
political showdown and a mad scramble in
states that would have needed to act to
prevent millions from losing health care
coverage.
"Five years ago, after nearly a century of talk,
decades of trying, a year of bipartisan debate,
we finally declared that in America, health
care is not a privilege for a few but a right
for all," Obama said from the White House.
"The Affordable Care Act is here to stay"
In a moment of high drama, Chief Justice
John Roberts sent a bolt of tension through
the Court when he soberly announced that he
would issue the majority opinion in the case.
About two-thirds of the way through his
reading, it became clear that he again would
be responsible for rescuing Obamacare.

Scalia: The law should be called SCOTUScare""
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/25/politics/supreme-court-ruling-obamacare/index.html


Today....

"" WASHINGTON — In a long-sought
victory for the gay rights
movement, the Supreme Court
ruled on Friday that the
Constitution guarantees a right to
same-sex marriage.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote
the majority opinion in the 5 to 4
decision. He was joined by the
court’s four more liberal justices.
The decision, the culmination of
decades of litigation and activism,
came against the backdrop of fast-
moving changes in public opinion,
with polls indicating that most
Americans now approve of same-
sex marriage.
Justice Kennedy said gay and
lesbian couples had a fundamental
right to marry.
“No union is more profound than
marriage, for it embodies the
highest ideals of love, fidelity,
devotion, sacrifice, and family,” he
wrote. “In forming a marital
union, two people become
something greater than once they
were.”"
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html?_r=0&referrer=

This is what we get for not having congressional and judicial term limits. Without it, we are doomed.

Goodo..2 perfect results :-)

Highlights of the dissent opinion on the ACA ruling....


"" (CNN)— Justice Antonin Scalia wasn't going
to go down without a fight -- a colorful one
at that.
Scalia, joined by conservative Justices
Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito,
lambasted the majority decision with a series
of literary quips and flourishes in a scathing
dissent that may have buoyed the spirits of
conservatives crushed by the Court's ruling.
And in a rare move signaling his intense
opposition to the majority ruling -- written by
fellow conservative and Chief Justice John
Roberts -- Scalia voiced his dissent aloud
from the bench for the Court to hear.
Here are the most quotable lines from his
written dissent:
1. "This Court, however, concludes that this
limitation would prevent the rest of the Act
from working as well as hoped. So it re-
writes the law to make tax credits available
everywhere. We should start calling this law
SCOTUScare."
2. "The Court's next bit of interpretive
jiggery-pokery involves other parts of the Act
that purportedly presuppose the availability
of tax credits on both federal and state
Exchanges."
3. "Pure applesauce. Imagine that a
university sends around a bulletin reminding
every professor to take the "interests of
graduate students" into account when setting
office hours, but that some professors teach
only undergraduates. Would anybody reason
that the bulletin implicitly presupposes that
every professor has "graduate students," so
that "graduate students" must really mean
"graduate or undergraduate students"? Surely
not."
4. "The somersaults of statutory
interpretation they have performed ... will be
cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion
of honest jurisprudence."
5. "It is bad enough for a court to cross out
"by the State" once. But seven times?"
6. "The Court's decision reflects the
philosophy that judges should endure
whatever interpretive distortions it takes in
order to correct a supposed flaw in the
statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores
the American people's decision to give
Congress "[a]ll legislative Powers"
enumerated in the Constitution."
And from Scalia's oral dissent from the
bench:
7. "The Court solves that problem (believe it
or not) by simply saying that federal
exchanges count as state exchanges only
(and this is a quotation from the opinion)
"for purposes of the tax credits." How
wonderfully convenient and how utterly
contrary to normal principles of
interpretation."""
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/25/politics/supreme-court-scalia-obamacare-roberts/


Dissent on Gay Marriage ruling.....

"" June 26, 2015 Same-sex marriage is now a
right in every state in the country, following a
historic 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court
Friday. The four justices who disagreed with
the Court's opinion, authored by Justice
Anthony Kennedy, each wrote their own
dissent laying out just why they believed the
majority to be wrong.

Roberts's argument centered around the need
to preserve states' rights over what he viewed
as following the turn of public opinion. In
ruling in favor of gay marriage, he said, "Five
lawyers have closed the debate and enacted
their own vision of marriage as a matter of
constitutional law."
Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas joined him
in his dissent.
While Roberts said he did not "begrudge" any
of the celebrations that would follow the Court
ruling, he had serious concerns that the Court
had extended its role from constitutional
enforcer to activist.

According to Justice Antonin Scalia, today's
majority ruling represents a "judicial Putsch."
Scalia wrote that while he has no personal
opinions on whether the law should allow
same-sex marriage, he feels very strongly that
it is not the place of the Supreme Court to
decide.
"Until the courts put a stop to it, public
debate over same-sex marriage displayed
American democracy at its best," Scalia wrote.
"But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion
lacking even a thin veneer of law."
Scalia stated he wanted to write a separate
dissent "to call attention to this Court's threat
to American democracy." Justice Clarence
Thomas joined Scalia in this dissent.
Scalia attacked his colleagues' opinion with
his signature flourish. "The opinion is couched
in a style that is as pretentious as its content
is egotistic," he wrote.

In his own separate dissent, which Scalia also
joined, Justice Clarence Thomas pilloried the
majority opinion as "at odds not only with the
Constitution, but with the principles upon
which our nation were built."
Kennedy and the Court's liberal wing are
invoking a definition of "liberty" that the
Constitution's framers "would not have
recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they
sought to protect."
"Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in
our Declaration of Independence—that human
dignity is innate and suggests instead that it
comes from the Government," Thomas said.
"This distortion of our Constitution not only
ignores the text, it inverts the relationship
between the individual and the state in our
Republic. I cannot agree with it."

In his dissent, Alito argues that gay marriage
is not protected in the Constitution under the
Due Process Clause because "liberty" only
applies to those principles that are rooted in
U.S. tradition. His argument is that the
concept of gay marriage is new and therefore
not included.
"For today's majority, it does not matter that
the right to same-sex marriage lacks deep
roots or even that it is contrary to long-
established tradition. The Justices in the
majority claim the authority to confer
constitutional protection upon that right
simply because they believe that it is
fundamental," Alito writes.
Alito also reaffirms his position that there is
no way to confirm what the outcome of gay
marriage may be on the institution of
traditional marriage and therefore the Court is
and should not be in a position to take on the
topic.""

More on each justice's dissent here:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticpolicy/marriage-same-sex-gay-supreme-court-dissent-20150626

And you're surprised?

I thought everyone knew that the "letter" of the law, the "will" or "good" of the people, have no place under a socialist, liberal, leadership.

Couldn't be more PLEASED ~~~



And while I'm rather screwed by our states moron Governor Brownbeck ad his utter buffoonery about 'WAVING' our state from the ACA
Not only has he seriously put so many humans into more bankruptcy for their medical needs/expenses - he's pushed this state over the edge for debt and school funding that he was already being SUED FOR!!!

Please quote me anywhere I said I was surprised....but I get your point. In the ACA ruling, the justices for it seem to have assumed "state" meant the whole nation. As far as Roberts part in it, pretty sure Obama has incriminating pics of him with a goat.

You mean against the man that did a 180 on his opinion of gay marriage halfway through his presidency? Gotsta keep that base happy happy happy!

You mean against the man who, at this very moment, when he is supposed to be eulogizing a preacher, is ranting about gun control instead?

He's a hack.

FIFY.....

No, It's a sheep.

Whats next MAMBLA rights?

i will be so glad when Texas secedes...

Yay! Scrotus is helpin' impotus, stick it to the taxpayers.

Pretty much.....

Edited for insults of members.

soufie
Site Moderator

If Scalia was so opposed to the very idea that the Supreme Court even has the power to judge homosexual marriage, then why didn't he just abstain? Why vote against it? It's rare, but the Supreme Justices do have the ability to abstain. That would seem to make the strongest case for the opinion Scalia wrote. By voting against homosexual marriage, he's still delivering judgment.

I was curious about that too.

But then I realized I doubt this topic can go on for all that long without a great polarized battle.

I think some people were avoiding starting the thread because they were so mad they couldn't type anything that would make it past the moderators.

And others were so happy they went out and got gay married and bought cheap high deductible insurance and therefore didn't have time to start a thread.


Other than that:
As to the ACA - "It's not a tax, it's not a tax! I am not raising taxes! The ACA isn't a tax!...Oh, it's okay if it's a tax?
Uh...it's a tax...but not really."
"Create a state exchange or no expanded medicaid! You must create a state exchange or no subsidies!...Oh, we can't blatantly blackmail medicaid expansion? And if people don't get their subsidies the whole thing falls apart? Uh...by state exchange we mean federal too. Don't question it! Law stuff isn't supposed to precisely enumerate anything!"

As to gay marriage - "States have the right to define privileges and immunities that are different than what is federally recognized...except those we don't want them to.
Those are covered by the constitution.
Because 'No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family.' And that's straight from the constitution. I swear. It's in the corinthians part I think.

So...you can't define marriage.
We can for you, but you can't.

And speaking of the 14th amendment, that whole civil asset forfeiture thing? Yeah...I guess that's okay. We don't really want to deal with that. We just want states to recognize two dudes getting married. That's what's important."


Anymore federal government is just a joke. A special ed kid with a big army.

The onus is on Scalia and Roberts to prove that the right of consenting, adult same-sex couples to legally marry is not an individual right. I have not yet heard an argument to prove or even support their claim that no such right exists.

What I have heard, over and over, is an assertion that, marriage is between a man and a woman. This is certainly what a lot of people believe, and it's entirely their political right to believe it, and to act on that belief. For example, they should not be required, under the law, to provide wedding cakes or other products or services to gay persons, or to anybody else, of whom they do not approve. At the same time, this does not give them a right to prevent gay people from engaging in a legally binding contract.

The morality, or lack thereof, in the concept of gay marital unions should not be an issue for the law. The law is supposed to define rights, not determine what's morally correct or not. In upholding the right to marriage for same-sex couples, the Court is not making up a right as it does, for instance, when it makes up a right to free medical care, or free education, or free housing. These made-up, false rights actually violate rights, because some are forced to pay for the goods and services of others. A right to a private contract, as in a marriage, is not a violation of anyone's right. It's simply a recognition of a legal right that always existed, only it didn't come to the forefront because most people did not wish to face the fact that same-sex relationships exist.

Chief Justice Roberts, unlike his more typically conservative colleagues such as Scalia, is at least consistent in the wrong direction. On both Obamacare/socialized medicine and gay marriage, he's defiantly and predictably against individual rights. By the standards of adherence to the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, whose philosophy of individual rights was the explicit basis for the Constitution, Roberts is arguably the worst Supreme Court Chief Justice ever. [Complete article is below.]


http://drhurd.com/john-roberts-the-worst-supreme-court-justice-ever/

This one is all over my facebook page. I have a lot of conservative christians in the family...
this one is difficult for many to separate morality from the law.

What I have heard, over and over, is an assertion that, marriage is between a man and a woman. This is certainly what a lot of people believe, and it's entirely their political right to believe it, and to act on that belief. For example, they should not be required, under the law, to provide wedding cakes or other products or services to gay persons, or to anybody else, of whom they do not approve. At the same time, this does not give them a right to prevent gay people from engaging in a legally binding contract.


I totally agree with this, if they want a 'contract' that the government uses to document their relationship and give them 'special' rights,, its no problem

if government wants to recognize the marriage in issues involving goverment, its not problem

if an ultra minority group wants to FORCE citizens to accomodate their choices and behaviors and SERVICE events set apart for them to display such behavior,,,,thats a problem


many heterosexuals go to a justice of the peace and get married,, churches should not be forced to do the same and I am fearing that we are headed that direction...

I heard a great suggestion, that Churches get out of the 'marriage' (contractual part) and have government take it over

while churches can still perform WEDDINGS along the guidelines that are consistent with their religious values,,,