“[The ACA is] a statute that was written three years ago, not by dead white men but by living white women and minorities.” - - Michael Carvin, plaintiffs' lawyer in
King v. Burwell.
http://www.wsj.com/...
Revealing quote, isn't it?
The barely sublimated racism, and misogyny, undergirding much of the fanatical Republican opposition to universal healthcare reform has been well noted. But David Leonhardt in the New York Times makes a very interesting point - a ruling by the Republican Supreme Court justices subverting the ACA arguably would be the most unprecedented decision since . . . Reconstruction:
There are few if any historical precedents for a rollback of the social safety net as large as this one would be. Social Security, Medicare and the minimum wage were never extended to millions of people and then withdrawn. This case, King v. Burwell, has the potential by next year to reduce the number of Americans with health insurance by eight million — the equivalent of the entire population of Virginia.
When I asked historians if they could think of any similar undoing of an existing part of the social safety net, several said they could not. . . . Julian Zelizer, a Princeton historian and the author of a new book on the 1960s expansion of the safety net, said the closest analogy might be Reconstruction and the reaction to it. An enormous federal effort initially succeeded in expanding civil rights in the South, only to be reversed in later years. The reversal lasted decades.
Reconstruction is obviously a charged, and imperfect, analogy. (For one thing, the people who would lose health insurance now would be predominantly white Southerners.) But the fact that no better precedent comes to mind underscores the highly unusual nature of what could happen at the Supreme Court. http://www.nytimes.com/...
It is an important (and sadly analogous) point, particularly in light of Mr. Carvin's revealing (yet absurd) admission and much of the similar under-the-radar, divisive propaganda circulating among anti-ACA groups.
As a lawyer, I don't believe that the King v. Burwell case is even close; it should be rejected on the merits and by a healthy Supreme Court majority. But even if you thought the Burwell case presented a closer question, the Supreme Court does not have any business opportunistically undermining a democratically enacted social welfare law and/or participating in the basest, partisan politics.
We have been hurtling towards a new Gilded Age . . . do we really need to descend to Reconstruction era politics on the Supreme Court?