NP - Philadelphia Daily News Editortial

[David Morris]

The present SCOTUS has gone rogue.  The conservative majority no
longer even pretends to respect anything but their own will.  Hence,
soon the mandate portion (if not all) of the ACA will soon be voided,
despite the vast majority of legal scholars who say this will
invalidate not only years of clear precedent, but even past rulings of
the chief justice himself.  Will, not reason, is the rule now.

Living Under an Autocracy (my title)
by Charles Pierce

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/supreme-court-decisions-2012-10031269

Okay, now they're just screwing with us, right?

They give themselves three more days in the spotlight, roasting the
nation's pundits over an open flame on the whole health-care business.
Instead, they hand down a decision in Arizona v. United States that
strikes down most of the law, but leaves in place the odious "Papers,
please" portion that led to the challenge in the first place. Of
course, they left that portion open to a constitutional challenge in
state court, in Arizona, so good luck with that. [...] The court left
enough of the law intact so that the habits of living under autocracy
will remain in place in the daily lives of millions of Arizonans. And
the habits of living under autocracy is what this court is all about.
When it decides, finally, on Thursday, to gut the Affordable Care Act,
it is on that basis that the decision will depend. Nothing will be
decided that inconveniences the corporate autocracy. The political
autocracy that corporate autocracy put in place will make sure of
that.

We live in the unreality of the moment now. We have tolerated — nay,
celebrated — nonsense in our public life for so many years that we are
now both its victims and its accomplices. We have detached ourselves
from the duties of self-government to the point where the government
itself has detached itself from our lives, partly because of the
deliberate acts of venal and corrupt men, and partly because we
listened to those venal and corrupt men and threw it away ourselves.
We think ourselves free when, actually, we have bound ourselves in
shackles of apathy and cynicism and childish fantasy. We have accepted
fiction as fact because it sells. We are accessorial to the murder of
truth.

[...]

There's a whole truckload of blame to go around here. Some is
certainly due the president — and the useful Serious Liberals — who
oversold upon its passage a jerry-rigged, corporate-friendly
compromise as "the greatest social program since the Great Society/New
Deal/Jesus Walked The Hills Around Galilee," and then undersold it to
the country after it passed. Has it dawned on any of them yet that
there isn't an ounce of good faith anywhere on the other side,
including in the Supreme Court justices that it let slide onto the
court during the Bush administration due to the "Gang of 14"
compromise that now looks like the work of addled schoolchildren? (The
Republicans have certainly stood by it over the past three years,
haven't they?) The conservative movement now can go forward secure in
the knowledge that there is no constitutional delirium too exotic to
be given a serious hearing. (Out in the states, there already are
conservative attorneys general lined up to protest the
"constitutionality" of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.) And so much
of it goes to the rest of us, for not paying attention, for being
scared stupid, or for becoming convinced that lassitude and
shallowness masquerading as cleverness and wisdom don't make us
willing marks to our own long cons.