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As the Supreme Court considers the health care law -- and in so doing, possibly dominates a national election for the third time since since 2000 -- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) warns that a wave of corruption and scandal will result from the earlier high court decision in Citizens United.

As judicial precedent was abandoned in the Bush v. Gore and Citizens United cases, which transformed the Supreme Court into a protagonist in partisan and ideological wars, it is time to consider the dangers to the republic of a court whose majority -- which could be on the brink of another election-changing party-line vote -- increasingly acts as a partisan faction rather than a disinterested adjudicator of the law.

I supported the final health care bill, though I never compared it to landmark achievements such as Medicare and Social Security. It made the world a little bit better, but not as much as it should have, after the money-dominated meat grinder that destroyed the more profound reforms that I (and a majority of voters) supported, such as Medicare-for-all and the public option.

I believe the entire health care negotiation, the Supreme Court arguments in the Citizens United and health care cases and the ex parte speeches to interested parties by Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia before they voted on Citizens United should all have been open to C-SPAN cameras and public review in real time.

McCain is right that money is the great corruption, and Brandeis was right that sunlight is the great disinfectant. Sadly for America, there is far too much money, and far too little sunlight, in a government that most voters believe, correctly, is corrupted by money that buys democracy in the dark.

I have no love for the mandate, a Republican idea that profits insurers. It was the price of extortion to finance the nobler parts of the law, but:

If the Supreme Court throws out the mandate and upholds the remainder of the law, it could politically benefit President Obama, who will obliterate Mitt Romney in a presidential debate about the mandate, will no longer have to defend the least popular provision of the law and will fairly claim credit for the popular elements thereof.

But if the court throws out the entire bill, there will be bonfires around the justices as voters learn what benefits are taken away by a court run amok.

Prior to 2000, no court had ever overruled the majority vote of the American people in a presidential election by a party-line vote of the justices, led by self-styled "conservatives" who claim to favor "federalism" but ordered a state, against its will, to stop counting votes.

Prior to 2010, no court had ever so corrupted American democracy by allowing unlimited, unregulated, undisclosed campaign spending by the factions that the Founding Fathers warned us against in the Federalist Papers.

On the great matter of American elections, the work of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Hamilton is under attack by Chief Justice John Roberts, Thomas, Scalia and Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy, who wear the life-tenured robes of judicial impartiality, but act with the aggression of partisans and ideologues.

McCain's warning of a wave of corruption and scandals created by the Citizens United majority is rooted in every lesson of history, experience, common sense and observation as the evils of money corrupting freedom, with a political discourse that is dirty and deformed in the eyes of our people, unfolding before the nation and the court.

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The mandate got added by conservative , pro-business elements in Congress, and the public option killed by the same folks. I'da voted for no mandate and the public option.

I think those elements were changed by conservatives as "poison pills", to make sure nobody supported the finished product.

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As the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on President Barack Obama's signature health-care law, there is a curious twist: The case largely rests on the constitutionality of a provision that originated deep in Republican circles.

The "individual mandate," which requires virtually all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a fine, was the brainchild of conservative economists and embraced by some of the nation's most prominent Republicans for nearly two decades. Yet today, many of those champions -- including presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich -- are among the mandate's most vocal critics.

Meanwhile, even as Democratic stalwarts warmed to the idea in recent years, one of the last holdouts was the man whose political fate is now most closely intertwined with the mandate: Obama.

The tale begins in the late 1980s, when conservative economists such as Mark Pauly, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, were searching for ways to counter liberal calls for government-sponsored universal health coverage.

"We wanted to find an alternative that was more consistent with market-oriented economic ideas and would involve less government intervention," Pauly said.

His solution: a system of tax credits to ensure that all Americans could purchase at least bare-bones "catastrophic" coverage.

Pauly then proposed a mandate requiring everyone to obtain this minimum coverage, thus guarding against "free riders": people who refuse to buy insurance and then, in a crisis, receive care whose costs are absorbed by hospitals, the government and other consumers.

Heath-policy analysts at the conservative Heritage Foundation, led by Stuart Butler, picked up the idea and began developing it for lawmakers in Congress.

By 1993, when President Bill Clinton was readying his major health-care overhaul bill, the Heritage approach -- subsidizing and facilitating the purchase of private health plans, while using the individual mandate to maximize participation -- had gelled as the natural Republican alternative.

Then-Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I., formally proposed it in a bill that attracted 19 other Republican co-sponsors. The bill foundered once Clinton's effort unraveled. But the idea of the mandate gained currency in the ensuing years as Democrats chastened by the failure of the Clinton plan began considering new solutions more likely to attract bipartisan support.

That process came to a head in 2005, when Mitt Romney, then governor of Massachusetts, turned to then-Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., for help adopting a health-care overhaul for the state that was largely based on providing residents with government subsidies to buy private insurance.

The plan regulated insurance companies to a degree beyond anything Pauly had envisioned: For instance, they were barred from excluding or charging higher premiums to people with pre-existing health conditions.

But this only heightened the conviction of the health-care plan's Republican backers that an individual mandate was needed.

Without it, they argued, people could wait until they were sick to buy insurance, forcing insurers to cover the extra cost by massively increasing rates or to pull out of the market altogether.

Harvard's McDonough said it is hard to overstate the significance of Kennedy agreeing to take on the free-market ideas advanced by Romney.

"The alliance between Romney and Kennedy was of fundamental importance in terms of creating a level of confidence going into (the) 2008 (presidential elections) that this could actually be the bipartisan path to achieve universal health care in the United States," he said. http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/03/26/20120326health-manda
te-originally-republican-idea.html

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A majority feel gay marriage should be illegal and we are split right down the middle on abortion.

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On May 20, 2011, Gallup reported majority support for gay marriage by a margin that exceeded the poll's margin of error. In June 2011, two prominent polling organizations released an analysis of the changing trend in public opinion about same-sex marriage in the United States, concluding that "public support for the freedom to marry has increased, at an accelerating rate, with most polls showing that a majority of Americans now support full marriage rights for all Americans." Wiki

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Twenty-eight years after the U.S. Supreme Court made abortion legal, nearly six in 10 Americans say it should stay that way.

Generally, 59 percent say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a number that's held fairly steady the last several years. These views have been generally stable over time, although support for legal abortion in all or most cases is up six points from last summer. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=120953&page=1 to Obamacare:

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Polling shows that 58 percent of Americans dislike Obamacare when it is packaged together and called Obamacare. This could be due to actual dislike of the law, or to Republican politicians crafting a narrative about the largest health care change since the institution of Medicare.

It appears to be tied to the narrative, more than the facts when looking at the numbers when aspects of Obamacare are broken down. Note: All poll data is from Real Clear Politics

Over 50 percent of Americans polled over a three year period agree with the following statements:
• Insurance companies should spend more money on health care than on administrative costs.
• People should not be denied health insurance because of an illness.
• The government should lower health care costs to participants.
• The government should help lower class people obtain health care.
• Everyone should have access to health care.
• The government should not force people to buy health insurance.

Take a look at that list. The first five all are favorable towards Obamacare. The last refers to the individual mandates requiring people to purchase private health insurance. This was the solution once debate removed the single-payer option from the law. It is the same mandate required in Massachusetts, where health care costs have grown much slower than the national rate. Massachusetts was leading the nation in growing health care costs. Now, they are middle of the pack thanks to Romneycare.

When people criticize Obamacare, they appear to be in favor of the vast majority of the law. The only point of contention is the individual mandates, which the Supreme Court will decide in the near future. The federal government requiring individuals to purchase a private product is an interesting debate. States have already seen their power to require individuals to purchase insurance products upheld in the courts. http://doubledippolitics.com/2012/03/25/polling-shows-people-support-m
ajority-of-obamacare-parts-oppose-law/ to drilling, it's only natural that Americans, addicted to oil and facing high gasoline prices, would buy into the immense propaganda that increased oil production is good for us. A majority are in favor of the Keystone pipeline, too, because they are ignorant and fearful. And addicted.

If you had an EDUCATED public, Keystone would die in a minute and people would realize alternative energy is the only way, not to mention becoming aware of what fracking, drilling, etc., are doing to their lives. If you had an educated public, they'd be clamoring for a public option. When the public buys what's spoon-fed them, the result is obvious, and that's the problem. How you get an educated public is beyond me, and the only alternative is educated legislators to represent the people. First you have to find educated legislators who WANT to represent the people...good luck with that!

Oh, and a majority of Americans DID favor the stimulus, just to remind you:

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New Gallup polling shows that 53% of Americans favor and 36% oppose Congress' passing a new $775 billion stimulus package of the type President-elect Barack Obama described in his Thursday speech on the economy. There is even higher support for specific elements it could include, such as major new government spending for infrastructure, income tax cuts, and tax incentives for businesses. http://www.gallup.com/poll/113701/majority-americans-favor-775-billion
-economic-stimulus.aspx, by the way and despite Republican propaganda to the opposite, DID work. The evidence shows the stimulus (and other stimulative measures, including those of the Fed) worked, but ended too soon, before the private sector was ready to walk on its own.


Unemployment is at a four-year low of 8.3%; we know all the talking points, but anyone who figured Obama was some kind of miracle worker who could fix everything in a year or two--or four!--was either stupid or had partisan blinders on.