Linda Greenhouse teaches at Yale Law and has been, for years, a Pulitzer winner as an acute observer of the Supreme Court for the New York Times -- and an admitted partisan to the extent that it's partisan in 2012 to be pro-education, pro-evolution, pro-bipartisanship. Nonetheless, she writes today, "Court cases are trickier. It’s one thing to engage in prediction that flows from analysis: which side is most likely to win? It’s quite another to let readers in on the fact that one side’s argument is so manifestly weak that it doesn’t deserve to win."
So it’s perhaps not surprising that just about half the public apparently believes that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is unconstitutional.
Free of convention, and fresh from reading the main briefs in the case to be argued before the Supreme Court next week, I’m here to tell you: that belief is simply wrong. The constitutional challenge to the law’s requirement for people to buy health insurance — specifically, the argument that the mandate exceeds Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause — is rhetorically powerful but analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection. There’s just no there there. ...NYT
But that's no guarantee, she admits, that the Supreme Court will do what's right. She recognizes that this is a political issue, not a legal one. She recognizes that using the argument that the law is "unprecedented" is purely frivolous and backs it up. So we have to deal with the unhappy truth that this edition of the Court is believed by 75% of Americans to base its decisions on politics.
Now it’s up to the court to prove them wrong. ...NYT
So, if 75% of Americans are right in the their belief about a politicized Court, we're back to the coin toss.
