Pblished: March 28, 2012
WASHINGTON — The law professor side of President Obama is highly intrigued by the Supreme Court hearings over the constitutionality of his health care law. He studied a summary of the arguments aboard Air Force One as he flew back from a nuclear summit meeting in South Korea.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
With puppets and banners, opponents of the health care overhaul continued their protest outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The political side of the president may need to draw upon his judicial
patience as he awaits a ruling that will help shape the final stages of
the presidential race.
For all of the fretting by liberals and the tea-leaf reading by legal
analysts about the pointed questioning from the justices about the
health law, there is but one certainty: There will be substantial
political fallout no matter how the court rules.
Successful political races, particularly presidential campaigns, are built on planning for every likely outcome. Mitt Romney,
should he secure the Republican nomination, would confront tricky
political calculations regardless of the ruling, given his role in
enacting a health care law in Massachusetts built around the same type
of mandate at the heart of the Supreme Court case.
But for the White House and the president’s re-election team, the
challenge begins immediately. They must publicly defend the law’s
constitutionality and push back against suggestions that the battle is
already lost, even as they privately piece together a contingency plan
if the law — or part of it — is overturned.
The early outlines of the plan came into view on Wednesday as the
administration aggressively promoted the more popular provisions of the
health care law. That offered a glimpse of the next three months, as the
court wrestles with its ruling on the most sweeping piece of domestic
legislation since Medicare was created in 1965.
“It’s foolhardy to try to predict the outcome of this decision based
solely on the questions of the judges,” said Josh Earnest, a White House
spokesman. He added, “If there is a reason or a need for us to consider
some contingencies down the line, then we’ll do it then.”
It was two years ago that Mr. Obama stood in the East Room of the White
House and signed the health care bill, pausing as his supporters in the
crowd sounded the old rallying cry of his presidential race: “Fired up!
Ready to go!” Health care had been an important issue in his campaign,
but hardly the central thrust.
If the Supreme Court strikes down the health care law, Republicans hope
to make it a prominent element of their effort to deny him a second
term.
“It would be a tremendous validation,” Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, a
Republican, said in an interview. “A victory in court would say that a
trend toward big government solutions out of Washington has a limit and
the biggest accomplishment of the Obama administration is
unconstitutional.”
If the administration loses its argument, one early strategy is to run
squarely against the Supreme Court. Democrats believe that Mr. Obama
could fashion himself as a modern-day Franklin D. Roosevelt, trying to
convince voters that a majority of the justices are in the pocket of the
Republicans. A Democratic senator on Wednesday referred to that as the
“martyr strategy.”
That approach, while galvanizing for Democrats, could also unify
conservatives who have been slow to embrace Mr. Romney, in part because
of his record on health care.
If he becomes the nominee, Mr. Romney would confront an uncertain
dynamic with any of the potential outcomes from the Supreme Court. He
told Wisconsin voters on Wednesday that he was closely following the
legal arguments.
“If they find it unconstitutional and strike down the legislation, why,
they would have done us all a great service,” Mr. Romney said, speaking
on a conference call from Texas, where he was attending fund-raisers.
“If for some reason it survives the Supreme Court or if it’s only struck
down in certain provisions and not very broadly, we’ll have to deal
with Obamacare in the other branches of the government.”
For the last year, Mr. Romney has spoken out against the Obama
administration’s health care overhaul and has pledged to repeal it. But
Mr. Romney continues to face skepticism among conservatives over the
Massachusetts law that he championed, which, like its federal
counterpart, is built around a requirement that everyone purchase health
insurance.
But both sides, even as they quietly make contingency plans in their
respective campaign headquarters, in Chicago and Boston, acknowledge
that they must wait until the court rules, most likely at the end of
June, to grasp fully the way forward.
Despite suggestions from some Democratic activists that a ruling against
the administration could energize the party and place the burden of
finding a national health care solution on the Republicans, a loss at
the Supreme Court would undoubtedly be significant for Mr. Obama. A
decision to strike down the mandate or the entire bill would give
greater legitimacy to the broader conservative argument that Mr. Obama
has been expanding the size and reach of the federal government beyond
what the Constitution allows.
One Democratic adviser compared it to “a bad bloody nose” that would
bleed for days or weeks. The television advertising, particularly in an
era of unlimited donations to “super PACs”
lining up against Mr. Obama, would be “a disaster,” another Democratic
aide said, with an endless loop of headlines about the president’s
signature accomplishment being rejected.
Yet several other Democrats, even as they maintained their belief that
the law would be found constitutional, said the Supreme Court could
become a central issue in the fall campaign.
“If this court overturns the individual mandate, it will galvanize
Democrats to use the courts as a campaign issue,” said Neera Tanden,
president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal research
organization. “The idea that we would have gone through Bush v. Gore,
Citizens United and now this.”
Mr. Obama, who has signaled his intention to run against Congress in the
mold of Harry S. Truman, could add the Supreme Court to his list of
antagonists. It remains an open question whether the argument will
resonate as it did in 1936 for Roosevelt.
No comments:
Post a Comment