The Supreme Court Protected Obamacare. So Why Aren’t Conservatives in a Rage?
Hint: They didn’t really want the law overturned
Something interesting happened last week. On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act against a lawsuit brought by 18 Republican state attorneys general. But that wasn’t what was interesting. What was interesting was that conservatives seemed to barely notice.
You might have thought, after all, that having the Supreme Court — including three conservative justices — refuse to strike down Obamacare would have inspired wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News and fulminations from right-wing pundits. Instead, we heard mostly crickets. There was cursory coverage of the decision, and Indiana’s attorney general, Todd Rokita, blasted the Court for refusing to stop what he called an “insidious government takeover of healthcare.” But the contrast between conservatives’ muted reaction to this decision and their vitriolic response to the Court’s 2011 decision upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare — — which the National Review called “Chief Justice Roberts’ Folly” — was striking and undeniable.
In part, this had something to do with the fact that the case was a long shot to begin with. The Court denied the lawsuit on the grounds that the states (and two individuals who also…
