Jon Chait commends to us a short essay in the Yale Law Journal by Andrew Koppelman explaining (a) why the healthcare reform law is obviously constitutional but (b) why it might get struck down anyway:
The constitutional objections are silly…..[So] what will the Supreme Court do? There is no nice way to say this: the silliness of the constitutional objections may not be enough to stop [conservative] Justices from relying on them to strike down the law. The Republican Party, increasingly, is the party of urban legends: that tax cuts for the rich always pay for themselves, that government spending does not create jobs, that government overregulation of banks caused the crash of 2008, that global warming is not happening. The unconstitutionality of health care reform is another of those legends, legitimated in American culture by frequent repetition.
Read the whole thing for the details. However, since our political class seems to have an attention span no longer than a PowerPoint slide these days, I figured I’d condense Koppelman’s argument into a PowerPoint slide. Enjoy.
