> This Supreme Court decision says nothing about the extent of the penalties; simply that it is within the government's rights to enforce health mandates.
You are misrepresenting the case. The extent of the penalties was implied here, because the case was about upholding or rejecting particular state law, which listed the specific penalties involved.
> This decision is a referenced legal precedent cited for masking mandates, stay at home mandates, etc etc. The case -stemmed- from someone protesting being fined, but both the decision, and the ramifications, intentionally, are far further reaching than that.
> There's a couple centuries of common law precedent that the government can compel behavior for public health crises.
The issue that was cobtrolling here was compliance with proper administative procedure, not the authority of state government to compel behavior. So precedent on the latter is immaterial.
> The state supreme court here grossly violated legal precedent, and will have its ass overturned in a heartbeat if anyone has the time, resources, and will to escalate.
It's a state law claim that has been adjudicated by the highest state court, there is no place for the case to be escalated to.
> None of which clearly protect GH or SO, the subjects of this thread branch.
I disagree, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35310413 (especially considering that because this law creates a penalty, and because it restricts speech, its definitions of the covered parties and conduct must be read narrowly – and its exceptions read broadly [0] – per the rule of lenity in statutory construction.)
[0] if, in the first instance, it is Constitutional at all.
> This feels like a pretty weird ruling that is all about the details of how the federal law was enacted, rather than the intent,
Intent may be a factor in resolving ambiguities in the text of the law, but the perceived goal of a law does not substitute for the text of the law in determining what the law is. For a law to be valid, it must be within the Constitutional power of government as written, not just serving an apparent purpose that some other formulation might validly address.
Aside from the problem of transferring legislative power to the judiciary, your apparent preference here would not give citizens subject to the law notice of its actual parameters, since the “real” law restricting their behavior might be something unrecognizable in detail from the text of the adopted law that happens to serve what some court sees as the same purpose the legislature sought with the text they adopted.
> Also, the decision is based on a single-paragraph long part of the constitution.
I mean, if you read the ruling, it’s based on a bunch of stuff. Your comment seems to me like a case in point—correct me if I’m misunderstanding your point.
>The judicial must not and cannot write their own laws, no matter how much another branch might plead with them to do so in order to get them off the hook of actually doing their job.
This is a mischaracterization of the action the court took on this case. The court did not 'write their own law' -- they forced the legislature to follow what was obviously the intent of the law despite "inartful wording."
"John McDonough, who worked on the Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee during the health reform debate, wrote in an email. 'There is not a scintilla of evidence that the Democratic lawmakers who designed the law intended to deny subsidies to any state, regardless of exchange status.'" [0]
Your solution -- forcing Congress to "do their job" and fix this typo of a mistake -- would come at the cost of the system itself as well as the healthcare of more than 8m people. Such pedantry is not only unwarranted, but cruel.
> All we are saying is that in the United States, what the Supreme Court says on this issue _categorically_ makes it constitutional
This is a political assertion you are making. It prevents invoking the intent of the constitution without some contextual disclaimer, thus hindering critiques of whether the current government has run aground of its charter.
> There are groups that think all of those decisions were bad and unconstitutional -- but the Supreme Court has the final say
The final say over whether the government considers an action constitutional! While the Supreme Court interprets the law for the government, it does not have a monopoly on the definition of the word "constitutional".
Please note that my original comment even used the term "anticonstitutional", because I did somewhat anticipate this authoritarian fallacy that courts define truth. Regardless of arguing the semantics of whether "constitutional" and "unconstitutional" are constrained to only referencing the legal scope, the argument I'm making is that the practice of stopping and harassing every traveler runs directly contrary to what the founders intended as well as the values our society purports to hold.
> The federal government imposing nationwide lockdowns on each and every state is a gross overreach and completely unconstitutional.
AFAIK, it did no such thing. The federal government advised certain measures, and state and local governments (inconsistently) implemented stay at home orders, etc. based on their own authority.
> This is the kind of action this ruling sanctions, entirely.
Given the extraordinary claim you're making, I'm doubtful that you have the qualifications to support the absolute statement being made pretending to be fact. This is especially true given how little this new ruling has been covered by the very people that are charged with deciding how it will work in practice.
You're not issuing an opinion in what you said. You're claiming it's a matter of fact. Constitutional and executive branch experts with decades of experience will be debating what this means for a very long time to come, with far less certainty than what your comment contains.
> SCOTUS wrote words clearly indicating a ban would be illegal. By a technicality (expiration date), they didn't issue an explicit ruling. Biden did it anyway, while admitting he knew it was illegal.
SCOTUS said the moratorium exceeded the CDC's legal authority, but declined to strike it down given it was soon expiring [1]. (They also strongly suggested that if POTUS tried renewing, they would strike it down.) POTUS tried renewing. SCOTUS struck it down.
None of this is properly construed as POTUS ignoring SCOTUS. When SCOTUS struck down the law, POTUS obliged.
Well, sure, in that it allowed powerful private entities to engage in religious discrimination adversely affecting the practical religious freedom of less powerful entities and individuals, but in terms of government power, it limited government action more than it was prior to the law (which is why the right pushed it).
> It says that if you can prove a compelling interest, and can prove a law is the least restrictive way to do something, you can do it even though it steps on a person's constitutional right to free exercise
No, it didn't. It said that if you couldn't do that, you couldn't enforce a law affecting religious exercise; it didn't allow government anything that was previously prohibited. (This, in practice, tightened the standards on government from what had been established in case law.
> Medicaid and Obamacare are not legal programs to begin with in a strictly constitutional sense.
Ruling that either the ACA as a whole or Medicaid was unconstitutional would be, while both radically inconsistent with generations of case law and hard to justify textually, at least coherent. Ruling that it was constitutional for Congress to establish Medicaid, initially set standards for participation, fund it by annual appropriations, and set new standards and funding, but not apply the new standards to states that wanted to continue operating under the old standards and only take the share of funding that was attributed to the caseload which would be covered by the old standards was completely incoherent from any perspective related to applying any kind of Constitutional principal, and clear and unmistakeable arbitrary legislation from the bench.
>Criticizing government actors instead of blindly trusting every ruling without reading it is how democracy functions and grows.
I did read the ruling[1], and unless the ruling is straight up perjury the EPA dropped the ball.
Criticizing the court for not ruling the way you wanted, and presumably without reading the ruling because you're grossly disregarding their value, is unreasonable and erodes rule of law.
> I have recently been trying to bone up on the legal discussion surrounding the general welfare and commerce clauses
You will find that the jurisprudence surrounding those clauses bears no resemblance whatever to what the clauses actually say. For example, look up Wickard v. Filburn and see if you think that Supreme Court decision used a reasonable interpretation of what Congress can regulate under the guise of "interstate commerce".
Interestingly, though, the clause under which the individual mandate was found constitutional was actually the Taxing Clause--the Supreme Court said it was not constitutional under either the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause, which was how the government had argued the case. In other words, the Supreme Court said that, while it was not constitutional to require everyone to purchase health insurance, it was constitutional to tax people who didn't. Go figure.
> No precedent for it, and a lot of Supreme Court precedent against it
Could you cite some of that precedent? When I did my research around quarantines, the things I found said that precedent was very thin. What precedent there was typically was extremely deferential to government responses during emergencies and pandemic outbreaks.
I didn't find any SCOTUS cases myself, so I would be very curious to read the SCOTUS precedent against it.
The problem is leaders had insufficient authorised powers. The solution to that isn’t to ignore the law. It’s to change it. Have the debate about who can activate quarantine under what grounds and in which circumstances, pass the bill and enumerate those powers.
Playing devil’s advocate, the precedent of a single leader having the power to place millions under effective house arrest with limited checks or balances is ripe for abuse.
> No person without body autonomy can be considered 'secure in their person, houses, papers, or effects'.
It wasn’t the southern states that imposed vaccine mandates for dining in restaurants, either. (I know what you’re alluding to; suffice to say that I don’t find this legal theory particularly compelling.)
You are misrepresenting the case. The extent of the penalties was implied here, because the case was about upholding or rejecting particular state law, which listed the specific penalties involved.
> This decision is a referenced legal precedent cited for masking mandates, stay at home mandates, etc etc. The case -stemmed- from someone protesting being fined, but both the decision, and the ramifications, intentionally, are far further reaching than that.
Wrongly so. See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906452
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