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."
And god knows what the victim's family is like, they might be Republicans, they might have been embarrassed that their son was gay/effeminate/bullied, whatever. Or they might value their privacy and simply not want to get involved in the whole demeaning, bloodthirsty, extremely public charade that is a presidential campaign, which I certainly wouldn't blame them for but which does not exonerate Romney. I don't care if the victim's family doesn't think Romney is a horrible person. I don't even care if the victim didn't think Romney was a horrible person (though I doubt very much that that was the case). Plenty of survivors of abuse and assault don't fully recognize how wrong it was for their attackers to attack them (and people like you, who make excuses for bullies and abusers, help reinforce the kind of culture that leads victims to believe their assault wasn't that bad). The fact remains that anyone who would physically assault someone and forcibly cut off their hair as the victim cried in terror, and then either lie about remembering it or actually care so little that they genuinely don't remember it, is a horrible person.
That's quite a list of rationalizations you have there; only the "want to avoid the vulture media" enjoys the credibility of simplicity. The fact remains that the only reason the story about Romney is credible is that people are desperate to find a skeleton in Romney's closet and this allegation by way of fuzzy secondhand memories is the best chance there is to create a narrative of Romney having serious moral flaws. If it happened, there's no excuse for it (your vivid imaginings of excuses being made for abuse notwithstanding) but the most likely scenario is that it didn't happen and Romney's critics desperately wish it did.