The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
It’s Always in the Last Place You Look
“Giant Gorilla Stolen From Car Dealer Lot May Have Been Found”–headline, Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller Times, May 21
News of the Tautological
“Police Complaint Case Summaries Provide Scant Detail”–headline, Lawrence (Kan.) Journal World, May 21
Bottom Stories of the Day
“Powell Not Ready to Endorse Obama for Re-Election”–headline, Associated Press, May 22
ObamaCare vs. the First Amendment
Maybe the president can recast ObamaCare as a jobs program. So lengthy, complex and intrusive a law cannot help but create massive amounts of work for lawyers.
Catholic institutions filed a series of lawsuits yesterday seeking to vindicate their rights under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. At issue is the regulation mandating that all employer-provided insurance policies cover birth control, including sterilization procedures and abortifacient drugs, in violation of church teachings.
In a March interview for The Wall Street Journal, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told this columnist that President Obama had reneged on assurances to “take the protection of the rights of conscience with the utmost seriousness,” in Dolan’s words. By refusing to grant a conscience exemption for religious employers, the administration set up a high-profile political clash over what its partisans term the Republican “war on women,” though it would be more accurately described as a Democratic act of aggression against faithful Catholics.
“The lawsuits have been filed in eight states and the District of Columbia by the Archdioceses of Washington and New York, the Michigan Catholic Conference, Catholic Charities in Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri and Indiana, health care agencies in New York and two dioceses in Texas,” the Associated Press reports. Another plaintiff is Notre Dame, “which in February had praised President Barack Obama for pledging to accommodate religious groups and find a way to soften the rule.”
The New York Sun observes in an editorial that the controversy “has the potential to emerge as one of the great civil rights lawsuits of our time” and that “a much wider population than the millions of Catholics in this country has a stake in the outcome.”
It also has the potential to be rendered moot, in any one of three ways. First, if Republicans do well this November, Congress could repeal ObamaCare next year. Second, short of full repeal, a Romney administration could rescind the mandate or offer an exemption sufficient to satisfy the plaintiffs–though that might leave open the possibility of lawsuits from left-wing groups arguing that the ObamaCare statute, or some equal-protection theory, requires the imposition of the mandate.
The third possibility is a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down ObamaCare in its totality (the individual mandate as exceeding Congress’s authority under the Constitution, the rest of the law as unworkable absent the mandate). As we noted in March, at oral arguments Justice Antonin Scalia seemed clearly sympathetic to this approach, and Justice Anthony Kennedy to be taking it seriously.
Those arguments left the left in a state of high anxiety, and The Wall Street Journal notes in an editorial today that Democratic politicians and liberal journalists are “making one last attempt to intimidate the Justices,” especially Chief Justice John Roberts:
Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy recently took the extraordinary step of publicly lobbying the Chief Justice after oral argument but before its ruling. “I trust that he will be a Chief Justice for all of us and that he has a strong institutional sense of the proper role of the judicial branch,” the Democrat declared on the Senate floor. “The conservative activism of recent years has not been good for the Court.”
He added that, “Given the ideological challenge to the Affordable Care Act and the extensive, supportive precedent, it would be extraordinary for the Supreme Court not to defer to Congress in this matter that so clearly affects interstate commerce.”
To summarize Leahy’s message: If you don’t uphold this law, passed on a party-line vote, my party will accuse you of partisanship. The intent is so transparent, and the argument so ridiculous, one is half-tempted to admire its sheer brazenness.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
