Five Reactionary GOP Apparatchiks on U.S. Supreme Court Sharpening Knives For Another Attack on Obamacare

What Republicans in Congress have been unable to do, Republicans on the Supreme Court are doing. They are carving chunks out of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. They already hacked out a key slab of the law by ruling that states didn't have to take more Federal funds to expand Medicaid to more poor people (a long-existing government health insurance program).

Now they're preparing to block the Federal subsidies for low-income people that Obama's law forces to buy health insurance. The GOP operatives in robes on the high court have accepted an appeal of a case that lower courts already found meritless. It's obviously their intention to reverse the lower courts that have unanimously rejected the frivolous challenge to the law and void yet another key part of the law. This will force poor people who don't qualify for Medicaid or can't get it in their reactionary GOP-controlled states and who don't have employer health insurance to either impoverish themselves further to pay a fine to the IRS, a cute whip Obama installed in his law to force compliance. The fine escalates over the years and becomes quite onerous.

There are 9 judges, called “Justices,” on the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest Federal government court which can also overrule the judicial systems of the 50 individual states, as indeed can the two levels of the Federal judiciary below it, the District Courts, of which there are 94, each with several judges, and the next higher level, the Appeals Courts, of which there are 12, against with several judges apiece. The District Courts are organized in Circuits, with an Appeals Court for each Circuit. (There are also separate specialized Federal courts to hear certain kinds of civil cases. There is also a fake “court,” the so-called FISA court, for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which consists of a few right-wing judges personally selected by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who has been a reactionary starting with Warren Burger, Earl Warren's successor, in 1969. This “court” until recently actually sat in a windowless room inside the Department of “Justice,” not even in an actual court building. Its job is to rubber-stamp warrant requests from U.S. secret police agencies for surreptitious burglaries, wiretaps, bugs, etc. It has approved over 40,000 such warrants and rejected 11 in its history, since 1978 when it was established. The 11 had paperwork mistakes.)

The Supreme Court refuses to even hear about 90% of appeals directed to it. The lucky 10% are granted “certiorari,” a Latin word which they use as part of their arcane legal jargon. It takes 4 “Justices” to grant certiorari, that is, to agree to hear an appeal. The Justices only work 8 months out of the year, by the way, for which they are paid fat six-figure salaries and all kinds of lush benefits most American workers can only dream of.