WASHINGTON -- The individual health insurance mandate is constitutional, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday, upholding the central provision of President Barack Obama's signature Affordable Care Act.
The 5-4 majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld the mandate as a tax, although concluded it was not valid as an exercise of Congress' commerce clause power. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined in the majority.
The decision in Florida v. Department of Health and Human Services comes as something of a surprise after the generally hostile reception the law received during the six hours of oral arguments held over three days in March. But by siding with the court's four Democratic appointees, Chief Justice Roberts avoided the delegitimizing taint of politics that surrounds a party-line vote while passing Obamacare's fate back to the elected branches. GOP candidates and incumbents will surely spend the rest of the 2012 campaign season running against the Supreme Court and for repeal of the law.
The decision looks like a political compromise among the justices, letting the mandate stand without wading into the contentious question of whether the provision is a valid exercise of Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce. The majority concluded that the mandate, which requires virtually all Americans to obtain minimum health insurance coverage or pay a penalty, falls within Congress' power under the Constitution to "lay and collect taxes."
On the parental notification, it's clear that your state needs to work out some kinks but even if it's routine and fairly safe, an abortion is still a medical procedure and as the numerous cases wrongly attributed to "coat hanger" abortions shows, it's possible for a doctor to make horrible medical errors that require hospitalization. Unless a parent is irresponsible and/or criminal (which is the purpose of going to a judge for an exception to the requirement), the legal guardians of under-18 kids should at least have some notice when their child is undergoing medical treatment above getting an aspirin from the school nurse.
All that said, if a state feels that parental notification laws are proper, why should the federal government have a say? It's not their business and doesn't fall under any enumerated power. So, too, is the case with gay marriage: states have always had slightly different standards and with the highly unusual exceptions of polygamy (in the 1800s, although the merits of federal intervention are debatable) and and laws barring mixed-race marriages (1960s), the federal government has properly shut up and gone away. It's true that some states are run by Bible-thumpers but then again, most states were run by Bible-thumpers when the Constitutional Convention was meeting and deciding how much freedom the states should have to make state-level decisions.