I mentioned this briefly in yesterday’s Roundup, but I wanted to circle back to it, because it’s incredible. Despite the annoying way in which the President touts his policy preferences as previously “conservative ideas,” it actually is pretty incredible, just on an anthropological level, how conservatives can manage to turn on a dime on these [...]

Before Republicans get around to whining about what Obama said about their budget, they have to complete their whine about what Obama said yesterday about the Supreme Court. The President intimated that the Justices would be engaging in “judicial activism” if they overturned the individual mandate and other aspects of the Affordable Care Act. Two [...]

Do read Jeffrey Toobin on last week’s Affordable Care Act arguments. I care less about what the display last week means for the individual mandate or health-related laws in the particular – laws that I’m concerned won’t work anywhere nearly as well as advertising by some of the most ardent defenders – than I do [...]

Earlier this week I chronicled the backlash against Jim Yong Kim, President Obama’s nominee to run the World Bank. That has continued, including a critique from a close pal of Larry Summers: Larry Summers has been unnaturally silent on President Obama’s surprise decision to pass him over for the World Bank presidency in favor of [...]

Giving post-mortems on the question of health care at the Supreme Court is premature, and as law professor David Cole writes, you can find as much evidence for upholding Obamacare in the text of the arguments as you can evidence for tossing it out. However, as a political spectacle, with the eyes of the nation [...]

I never got around to summarizing the arguments from the fourth and last health care question at the Supreme Court, looking at whether or not the Medicaid expansion in the bill is unconstitutional. If the Court found this, it would unravel decades of federal-state partnerships in social policy and would create far more chaos than [...]

The Supreme Court heard arguments on the severability of the individual mandate from the Affordable Care Act today, and were introduced to three competing options, should they find the mandate unconstitutional. They could sever only the mandate and allow the rest of the law to stand; sever the mandate along with insurance regulations like guaranteed [...]

On the third and final day of the Supreme Court hearings on Obamacare, the Justices will hear arguments on two separate issues. One concerns severability.  If one portion of the law is found unconstitutional, such as the mandate, does that require the Court to strike down related provisions, or even the entire law? There’s is [...]

The House vote on the budget will not just include an up-or-down vote on the Paul Ryan version. As per custom, several budgets will get a vote that day. The Republican Study Group introduced their budget, which slashed spending even further and more quickly than Ryan’s and cut Medicaid more deeply, today. Hardline conservatives who [...]

The general take I’m hearing from people inside the courtroom today is that Solicitor General Donald Verrilli blew it during arguments on the health care law’s individual mandate. I wasn’t in the courtroom, so I can only go by other people’s takes: In the first hour of a two-hour hearing, the court’s liberal justices were [...]

Today’s Supreme Court arguments really get to the crux of the matter. They concern the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the part of the law that forces Americans in the individual marketplace with the ability to pay (there is a hardship exemption) to either purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. The mandate, according to [...]