By all indications, conservatives on the United States Supreme Court are preparing give the Voting Rights Act (VRA) thumbs down. Echoing his question four years ago in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder, lifelong VRA foe turned Chief Justice John Roberts asked again on Wednesday whether people in the South are more racist than […]

As the Obama administration and Congress ponder their responses to the slaughter in Newtown, Connecticut, one of the central tensions in the American system of government is once again coming to the fore. That is, the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution's Bill of Rights are neither absolute nor in harmony with each other. For example, […]

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, the greatest threat to enabling health insurance for 30 million uninsured Americans may come not from Republicans in Congress, but in the states. With the Court's ruling that the federal government cannot penalize states who refuse to accept the expansion of Medicaid, Republican […]

In February 2009, President Obama delivered what Steve Benen rightly described as the largest two-year tax cut in American history. Nevertheless, the New York Times asked in the run-up to the 2010 midterms, "What if a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?" What happened, of course, was the Democrats' drubbing […]

Within days of the passage of President Obama's signature Affordable Care Act in March 2010, Senate Minority Mitch McConnell declared, "I think [our] slogan will be 'repeal and replace', 'repeal and replace.'" But now that the Supreme Court has largely upheld the dreaded Obamacare, Republicans have yet to decide what to replace it with. While […]

Despite the overwhelming consensus of legal scholars regarding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the United States Supreme Court seems poised to strike down all or part of President Obama's signature health care reform law. If so, that would be the culmination of a decades-long conservative campaign to stop universal coverage at all costs. […]

As the Supreme Court prepares to decide the fate of the 2010 Affordable Care, recent polling from Reuters and the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that Americans support its major provisions except for one. The individual mandate to purchase private health insurance beginning in 2014, the part of the ACA most likely to be struck down […]

Whatever ruling the nation's highest court hands down on President Obama's Affordable Care Act, Republican challenger Mitt Romney's prescription for health care is unchanged. "Now if I'm able to repeal it--or if the Supreme Court is able to get that job done for us," he announced last week, "We want to replace it." But what […]

"Conservative commentators." "Commerce." "New Deal." Only if you pretend Barack Obama never uttered those three phases this week can you manufacture a controversy in which the President supposedly questioned the authority of the Supreme Court to overturn the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). But in the hands of his Republican opponents and a lazy and […]

On Monday, President Obama unsurprisingly expressed confidence that the Supreme Court would uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even less remarkable, Obama rightly reminded Americans that "conservative commentators" have for year said "the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would […]