US Supreme Court Upholds Affordable Health Care Act

[Lissa]

I'm not sure why your comment is attached to my comment since mine was more about a role reversal that probably no one saw coming (except for Roberts himself and maybe other Justices privy to his decision).

Roberts may be trying to build his reputation as beyond the partisan Bush vs. Gore era, and returning to a more purely "judicial" role as arbiter of the constitution. I don't think he likes the perception that he's just a political tool, and that the court is just politics by other means.

That's the cool thing about appointments for life. Politics may make the selections, but they can't determine where the justices' opinions will drift to.

-Jester

Yes, this change, to me, reminded me very much of Judge Souter who G. H. W. Bush appointed thinking he was going to be a conservative force for the Bench and ended up being the exact opposite for most of his decisions.

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I'm no longer convinced that the House/Senate structure and methods of appointment are good. States are not as powerful as they used to be, I'm not sure they need to be, so I'm not sure we need two houses. Of course if the US could just fix the way we vote for the house and senate the design might start working more as it was intended/envision. I keep being told that many of the founders were against the idea of political parties. I'm not, but a voting system that doesn't drive everything to a two party state would be nice.

This is getting off topic, but the cause for this can squarely be pointed back to the Seventeenth Amendment when Senators were no longer appointed by the governing bodies of the States, but instead changed over to direct election by the Populous. The original intent of the House and Senate was the House was to be the chamber of the Populous and the Senate was to be the chamber of the States. As soon as the Seventeenth Amendment was established, this made both chambers of Congress now representations of the Populous and took away some of the power from the States.