Supreme Court bores into health care law's mandate
WASHINGTON -- The nine justices of the Supreme Court sent an unmistakable reminder to President Obama and Congress from a packed, hushed courtroom Tuesday: When it comes to landmark statutes that must stand the test of time, such as the 2010 health care law, they will have the last word.
Questioning whether the law's central requirement that Americans buy health insurance fundamentally alters the government's relationship with its citizens, the high court's conservative justices suggested they might be willing to send lawmakers back to the drawing board just months before a presidential election — particularly if they can't find a way to uphold the law without significantly expanding the power of the federal government.
With the court's four liberal justices seemingly aligned in favor of the law, two others — Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts— demonstrated by their questions that their votes will be pivotal when the case is decided in June. Without support from at least one of them, the law is unlikely to survive.
Inside the courtroom, Washington's movers and shakers — including Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, top White House officials and some two dozen members of Congress — watched in silence as the most significant law signed by Obama came under sharp attack by justices appointed by his Republican predecessors. Outside, hundreds of demonstrators packed onto the sidewalk in front of the marble courthouse, shouting over each other.
"It was a historic day. You could just feel it in the air," said Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, an orthopedic trauma surgeon and one of several physicians in Congress.
The court's historic three-day, six-hour review of the issue ends today, when the justices will consider its Medicare expansion and whether the rest of the law can survive if the insurance mandate doesn't.
Tuesday's give-and-take lasted two hours, but within minutes the court's conservative wing lit into a law that was narrowly passed by Democrats in Congress using special procedures and signed by a Democratic president, some 60 years after Harry Truman had begun the effort to extend health care to all.
At issue was the law's "individual mandate," which will require most Americans to buy health insurance or pay a penalty when the law is fully implemented in 2014. The conservative justices quickly questioned whether it was an unprecedented power grab.
"Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?" asked Kennedy, most often the swing vote on the panel.
"Can the government require you to buy a cellphone because that would facilitate responding when you need emergency services?" asked Roberts.
"Do you think there is a market for burial services?" asked Justice Samuel Alito, comparing the inevitability of death with the inevitability of medical care.
And so it continued until the stroke of noon, when the black-robed justices turned and left about 400 silent onlookers to decipher their every raised eyebrow and intonation.
