Victor Davis Hanson

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Health law will only get worse


Among our elites -- journalists, pundits and academics -- liberal Supreme Court justices are always deemed "open-minded," even as they are expected to vote in absolute lockstep liberal fashion. In contrast, a conservative justice is written off as reactionary or blatantly partisan when he likewise predictably follows his own orthodoxy -- pressures that may well have affected Roberts if reports of an 11th-hour switch in his vote are true.


Democrats like activist federal courts to overturn -- in matters of gay marriage, abortion, affirmative action and illegal immigration -- ballot propositions and majority votes of legislatures fostered by supposedly illiberal and unsophisticated voters. But on health care, liberals -- led by the president -- made the argument that a wrongly activist Supreme Court should not dare to tamper with what an elected Congress had wrought.

President Obama was incoherent in his commentary on the Supreme Court. Before the Roberts ruling, when most were betting that the president's health-care plan would be overturned -- especially given the poor performance of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in arguing the government's case before the court -- Obama was angry at the thought of such judicial activism. In a manner that did not reflect much knowledge of either the Constitution or the history of the republic, he thundered, "Ultimately, I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."



But then, the Obama administration flipped again at the thought of raising taxes on the middle class, and is now calling the mandate/tax a "penalty" -- thanking the court for its wisdom while rebuking the means by which it came to it.

Conservatives have come to distrust federal courts that overturn legislative majorities. But this time, conservatives hoped that the Roberts Supreme Court would overturn Obamacare, rather than the less- likely scenario of a Republican president and a congressional majority in both houses doing it sometime in the future.





Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. You can reach him by visiting His column appears Sundays.