Freedom Line Blog

If the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision hasn’t made you so despondent as to write off the topic of health care altogether, then you owe yourself a stop by the American Enterprise Institute’s online magazine, The American, where Cliff Asness has managed the near-impossible: writing a comprehensive overview of the defects of the American system that is breezy, informative, and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.

Asness has as his goal debunking four common myths about American health care:

1. Health care prices have soared in the recent past
2. The pre-ObamaCare system was ‘insurance’
3. Stopping insurance companies from charging based on pre-existing conditions is the one good part of ObamaCare
4. Healthcare costs are very high in the United States compared to socialist countries

Asness’ deconstruction of every point is thorough, illuminating, and crystal clear. In fact, it’s safe to say that — if you haven’t been introduced to these arguments before — you’ll never think about health care the same way again. Here’s one example, hailing from section two, on ‘insurance’:

Due primarily to the tax subsidy given to employer-provided healthcare (a bipartisan, so-far-untouchable disaster), catastrophic health insurance is not Americans’ norm. Rather, employers provide essentially all healthcare from basic health maintenance and symptom relief to the most expensive life-saving procedures, and they do it because the government massively subsidizes this approach.

This is odd. You don’t go to your car insurer to fill your car with gas or to your homeowner’s insurance company to change a light bulb. Why do you go to your health insurance company for everyday medical services? That is not insurance, it is tax-subsidized provision of all your healthcare needs, and it causes two of our system’s biggest problems. 1) Health coverage is not portable, as it’s employer-provided, and 2) consumers are insulated from the cost of basic healthcare because they don’t pay directly for services. Educated consumers spending their own money would be far better shoppers for healthcare. Also, I wish I wasn’t asked for a $5 co-pay after a doctor’s appointment. Ask me to pay at least $200 or nothing. Paying $5 for a prostate exam is demeaning to both parties.

The conservative/libertarian intelligentsia has plenty of deeply-schooled policy wonks and plenty of engaging writers. But very rarely to both skill sets belong to the same author. Cliff Asness is the rare exception. Read it and grow wise.

As the pessimist-in-residency at CFIF, I have to unhappily report that I find it virtually impossible to muster an interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision as optimistic as the one that Tim notes below from George Will.

My thoughts track most closely with those of my friend and podcast partner John Yoo (you can hear me lead John and Richard Epstein in a discussion of the ObamaCare decision here). Here’s John, writing over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal:

Conservatives are scrambling to salvage something from the decision of their once-great judicial hero [Chief Justice Roberts]. Some hope [The ObamaCare ruling] covertly represents a “substantial victory,” in the words of conservative columnist George Will.

After all, the reasoning goes, Justice Roberts’s opinion declared that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause does not authorize Congress to regulate inactivity, which would have given the federal government a blank check to regulate any and all private conduct. The court also decided that Congress unconstitutionally coerced the states by threatening to cut off all Medicaid funds if they did not expand this program as far as President Obama wants.

All this is a hollow hope. The outer limit on the Commerce Clause in Sebelius does not put any other federal law in jeopardy and is undermined by its ruling on the tax power … The limits on congressional coercion in the case of Medicaid may apply only because the amount of federal funds at risk in that program’s expansion—more than 20% of most state budgets—was so great. If Congress threatens to cut off 5%-10% to force states to obey future federal mandates, will the court strike that down too? Doubtful.

Worse still, Justice Roberts’s opinion provides a constitutional road map for architects of the next great expansion of the welfare state. Congress may not be able to directly force us to buy electric cars, eat organic kale, or replace oil heaters with solar panels. But if it enforces the mandates with a financial penalty then suddenly, thanks to Justice Roberts’s tortured reasoning in Sebelius, the mandate is transformed into a constitutional exercise of Congress’s power to tax.

John, I fear, is right. Finding conservative principles in the constitution has zero cash value when they don’t effect the ultimate outcome (though they admittedly did, in limited fashion, with the Medicaid expansion). As for banking on them paying dividends in the future? That depends on the deference that future incarnations of the Court are willing to give to the Roberts decision. And that’s a reed too thin to bear the weight that conservatives are attempting to load upon it.

On the heels of Homer’s nod to Quin below, George Will chimes in on yesterday’s Supreme Court ObamaCare decision with a nod to my broader point.  Namely, that the Court’s commerce clause ruling constitutes a significant new precedent in constitutional jurisprudence.  Entitled “Conservatives’ Long-Term Victory,” Will laments that ObamaCare’s individual mandate managed to survive, but asserts that conservatives won a “substantial victory”:

By persuading the court to reject a Commerce Clause rationale for a president’s signature act, the conservative legal insurgency against Obamacare has won a huge victory for the long haul.  This victory will help revive a venerable tradition of America’s political culture, that of viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint, searching for congruence with the Constitution’s architecture of enumerated powers.  By rejecting the Commerce Clause rationale, Thursday’s decision reaffirmed the Constitution’s foundational premise:  Enumerated powers are necessarily limited because, as Chief Justice John Marshall said, ‘the enumeration presupposes something not enumerated.'”

Ultimately, Will notes, ObamaCare’s fate “rests on public opinion.”  Nevertheless, we are in agreement that yesterday’s lasting achievements should not be overlooked or minimized by understandably disappointed conservatives and libertarians.

“Homer Nods” is the heading under which James Taranto, one of the commentators whom I most admire, acknowledges an error in a preceding “Best of the Web Today.”

In that spirit, my commentary regarding the ObamaCare decision yesterday included the following paragraph:

It is beyond significant dispute that Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Congress could have passed ObamaCare and its individual mandate as a “tax.”  The text of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution explicitly provides that “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.”  Thus, the federal government can tax and spend on behalf of almost anything it considers to advance the nation’s general welfare, even if its power to more crudely compel or prohibit actual behavior beyond that spending carrot is more limited.”

Below, Quin correctly notes an error in the first sentence.  Namely, his point that “taxing authority has never stretched so far.”

My initial sentence should have omitted the words “and its individual mandate,” and simply read, “It is beyond significant dispute that Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Congress could have passed ObamaCare as a ‘tax.'”  Although some libertarians and conservatives such as Walter Williams claim that Article I, Section 8’s authority to tax and spend for the general welfare are limited by the powers subsequently enumerated in that Section, that argument does not possess textual support.

Nevertheless, Quin is correct that taxing mere existence and inactivity as ObamaCare’s individual mandate does is unprecedented and unjust.  While Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Congress could have simply attempted to raise taxes more generally as a means to fund their monstrosity, yesterday’s decision pioneered new and unfortunate ground in allowing their particular individual mandate mechanism to survive.  I maintain that yesterday’s ruling with regard to the commerce clause limitation, not to mention the “Necessary and Proper Clause” and Medicaid rulings, make it a net win as a Constitutional matter.  Those were critical, groundbreaking limitations on federal power.   Quin’s observation, however, is quite correct.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

I discuss this bizarre decision here.

I further note that I was almost right in my final prediction, below.

Especially: “ I think this is going to be one of those horribly fractured decisions where observers have trouble making heads or tails of everything. I think there may even be concurrent pluralities rather than a simple majority on at least a couple of the questions presented to the court. In the end, though, I do — yes, I do — expect the mandate in this particular form, applied in this particular way, to be adjudged at least partially unconstitutional.”

Indeed, the MANDATE was found unconstitutional, but the penalty it carried, treated as a tax, was not. And on the Medicaid issue, there were indeed shifting pluralities rather than a single majority. So I was right on the style of the opinion — although not on the substance of just how the court would find a way to muck it up beyond ordinary understanding.

There’s a lot to say about Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion rewriting ObamaCare’s individual mandate as a tax in order to save the law from being ruled unconstitutional.  One of the best – and most succinct – analyses comes from the CATO Institute’s Michael F. Cannon:

The Supreme Court ruled that ObamaCare’s individual mandate is not constitutional under the Commerce Power, which was how Congress framed the mandate to avoid a political backlash from calling it a tax. Congress and the president swore up and down that the mandate was not a tax. Yet the Court upheld the mandate as a valid use of that disavowed taxing power. What Congress said the individual mandate is, the Court said is not constitutional. What Congress said the mandate is not, the Court ruled is constitutional. Everybody got that?

Where does that leave us?

The Supreme Court just enacted a law that Congress never would have passed.

The Court just told Congress it is okay to lie to the people to avoid political accountability.

In a disappointing decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld ObamaCare’s individual mandate forcing all Americans to buy health insurance as constitutional.  Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberal justices on the Court to rule that the mandate stands under Congress’ taxing authority.

Okay, it’s time for me to weigh in, now that everybody else has so thoughtfully risen to my challenge to put their predictive skills on the line. I see we run the gamut from total victory against the whole law to a doleful prediction that the mandate will stand.

Well, count me in the mushy middle. After going back and forth and around and around on this subject for months, I just can’t tell where my own analysis — and my own wish for a defeat of ObamaCare — ends and my assessment of each of the justices’ proclivities begins.

But here’s what I have come up with: I think this is going to be one of those horribly fractured decisions where observers have trouble making heads or tails of everything. I think there may even be concurrent pluralities rather than a simple majority on at least a couple of the questions presented to the court. In the end, though, I do — yes, I do — expect the mandate in this particular form, applied in this particular way, to be adjudged at least partially unconstitutional. In other words, the court will leave open the possibility that such a mandate in theory could be within the federal government’s powers, but just not THIS mandate in this form. But I think a majority may not agree on what the remedy for this abuse is, and will come up with some Rube Goldberg way of punting the ultimate decision back to lower courts or to Congress.

Meanwhile, the challenge to the Medicaid provision will fail, 6-3.

If I am right, perhaps we should be thankful for even tiny victories. But I say: “Ugh!”

With an overabundance of subtle and contradictory points of evidence rendering a cold, rational prediction nearly impossible, mine is entirely intuitive.  Unfortunately, I have been disappointed too many times already in my lifetime to expect a good result.  Twenty years ago, for example, I was a college student disgusted by the Court’s refusal to overturn Roe v. Wade (regardless of one’s view of abortion specifically, Roe is a judicial monstrosity) while it had the perfect opportunity and basis for doing so.  In subsequent years, I’ve endured such indefensible decisions as Kelo, with the seemingly more rare positive decision like Heller, the monumentally important Second Amendment case.

To me, anything less than an unequivocal, categorical rejection of ObamaCare’s individual mandate on the basis of the Constitution’s commerce clause is a loss.  To allow the federal government to coerce activity, in order to in turn rationalize regulating behavior not only eviscerates the concept of limited federal powers, renders the text of the Constitution meaningless.  From that point forward, it’s simply a matter of arguing degree, not kind.  We become a nation of men, not of laws.  Of judges arbitrarily deciding from that point forward which governmental intrusions get a pass and which don’t.  Honestly, I will be satisfied so long as the Court rules the individual mandate unconstitutional, even if the remainder of the law stands.  As economists say, what cannot continue will not continue.  And without the individual mandate, ObamaCare cannot and will not continue, at great (and justified) political cost to Obama himself and those who support the law.

At any rate, my bottom line is that I intuitively do not trust enough justices to make the correct decision.  I predict that a majority will concoct some way to allow the individual mandate to survive on the absurd “logic” that healthcare is a “special” category of commerce.  And even if they overturn the individual mandate, I suspect that they’ll do so on an “as applied” basis, meaning that the seal is broken.

Congressional staffers are buzzing about a terrifically insightful National Journal piece from a week ago that has still attracted too little mainstream notice, explaining how if any part of ObamaCare is thrown out by the Supreme Court, the budgetary “scoring” problems that would be caused (for the Congressional Budget Office) are so complicated that they could hamstring implementation of what’s left of the law — but also hamstring efforts to fix any holes caused by the law’s unraveling. Basically, CBO could be looking at a law whose budgetary effects are essentially “unestimatable.”

My sources say the administration’s own argument — that if the mandate is struck down, so should the rest of Title 1 of the Affordable Care Act, but none of the rest of it — could effectively put itself (the administration itself) into a box, paint it into a corner, or whatever other cliche you want to use. As Margot Sanger-Katz and Meghan McCarthy of National Journal reported:

Washington’s top health economists, including those at the Congressional Budget Office, say that position could lead to an even more complex breakdown of the law’s interlocking provisions than just losing the mandate. CBO declined to comment for this story, and the White House also declined to comment on whether it is worried about complications that might result from its position.

But several congressional staffers said that CBO has been asked to score the scenario, and the office demurred, saying it’s too difficult to game out the consequences. According to economists, the scenario is not just complicated, but also potentially expensive—and could lead the estimated $461 billion in insurance tax credits through 2021 to balloon.

This all gets very complicated, and it goes even  beyond what National Journal so well described, but this bears serious watching. Stay tuned. The administration really could be in for “heap big trouble.”

I’ll join the scrum on this one, though in a much less organized fashion than either Ashton or Quin. Insulated as it is from direct political pressure, the Supreme Court’s actions are always much harder to predict than those of the other two branches, so I’ll offer a few thoughts rather than predictions:

• The now widely-held belief that Chief Justice Roberts is writing the majority opinion makes me nervous. The positive interpretation is that some or all of Obamacare is going to be struck down and that Roberts — ever-mindful of public perception of the Court’s legitimacy — is writing it to ensure the widest possible acceptance of the ruling. On the other hand, if Justice Kennedy drifted over to the left on this decision, this could be a 6-3 ruling upholding Obamacare, with Roberts switching only so he could write the opinion and blunt the damage done by the majority.

• If the individual mandate is struck down but found to be severable from the broader law, the health insurance market is going to be thrown into absolute chaos. There’s a reason that insurers themselves were lobbying so hard for the mandate — it’s the only thing that backfills the tremendous costs being imposed on them by the rest of the legislation. The combination of an explosion in costs with likely attempts by HHS to enact price controls will put American health care in a death spiral — itself a good reason to find the provision severable.

• I’m of the opinion that, as a political calculation, having only the mandate struck down is the worst possible outcome for Republicans. If the entire law is upheld, then the GOP and the Romney camp get to run the fall campaign on the message that only electing a Republican president and Republican majorities capacious enough to achieve repeal will be sufficient to get rid of Obamacare. If the entire thing is struck down, then the work is done. But the mandate is the most unpopular portion of the law and if the Court strikes it down while leaving all of the popular components (read: the benefits — like prohibiting insurance denials based on pre-existing condtions or guaranteeing eligibility to be on your parents’ health insurance until the age of 26), it’s entirely possible — and perhaps likely — that the public opposition will be defanged while many of the most pernicious effects of the law remain.

• One final thought: Regardless of whether he’s part of the majority opinion or the dissent, I sincerely hope that Justice Thomas uses this historic opportunity to write a separate opinion on Commerce Clause jurisprudence that can be called on by his proteges in years to come.

Though we learned with the Arizona illegal immigration decision that tough questioning from justices does not mean a Supreme Court slap-down – indeed, Justice Sotomayor was particularly hard on the feds’ position but ultimately upheld its arguments, as did Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice Roberts – I’m betting (with Quin’s money, of course) that Justice Scalia’s quip about the page length of ObamaCare provides a window into tomorrow’s outcome.

During oral argument Scalia brushed aside the suggestion that should the Court rule the individual mandate unconstitutional it would need to reconstruct the law by piecing together the parts that are still valid.  Scalia’s response was, “You want us to go through 2,700 pages?  Is this not totally unrealistic… to go through one by one and decide each one?”

I think the Court will strike down the individual mandate because it forces Americans to participate in commerce, an unprecedented power grab by the federal government.  (Ironically, had the Obama Administration framed the penalty for not buying insurance as a tax, most constitutional scholars on the right and left agree the mandate would survive.  However, the reason government lawyers haven’t framed it that way is because Obama and the Democrats in Congress repeatedly and explicitly said no one’s taxes would go up if ObamaCare passed, meaning that calling the mandate a tax during litigation would likely make the entire law even less popular with the public.)

Because of all this, I think the Court will do everyone a favor by holding the individual mandate unconstitutional and finding that the rest of the law is not severable from it.  (Which is easy to do since in the rush of ramming the bill around the normal legislative process Congressional Democrats forgot to put in a simple severance clause that would let the rest of the law stand if the mandate falls.)

Thus, everyone gets a blank slate and the Court is not patching together a form of the health reform law that no one voted on or signed.

For what it’s worth, there’s my (or rather Quin’s) two cents.

Tom Goldstein, who has argued 25 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, bucks conventional wisdom with his latest prediction regarding the High Court’s ObamaCare ruling tomorrow. 

Over at SCOTUSblog, a site he co-founded, Goldstein writes:

[I]n the end, based on the entire mix of information I have, I think the mandate will not be struck down tomorrow.  (Neither I, nor anyone else, has any inside information.)  My prediction includes the possibility that there will not be a single majority opinion for the theory on which the mandate is upheld, and even the thin possibility that the Court will not have a majority to find the mandate constitutional.

As to the other major ObamaCare questions before the Court, Goldstein predicts:

Far less important, I expect the principal opinion will be written by the Chief Justice; a majority of the Court will find it has jurisdiction; and the challenge to the Medicaid expansion will be rejected.

Goldstein does acknowledge that most Supreme Court observers disagree with his prediction and that his own confidence in it “isn’t overwhelming.”  Coming from such a well-respected and brilliant legal mind, Goldstein’s prediction isn’t reassuring either. 

Here’s to hoping that Goldstein is misreading this one.

C’mon, my Fellows: Weigh in! Which way will the high court go tomorrow?

The always astute Ed Whelan weighs in here.

Specifically, the fact that Justice Scalia read his dissent from the bench in the Arizona immigration case leads me to believe that the Court will invalidate the individual mandate by a 5-4 vote……

There was a time when Jeffrey Rosen was a thoughtful center-left court analyst, with a constitutional interpretive philosophy clearly to the left of Madisonian/conservative textualists but nonetheless willing to give credit where due to conservative jurists and to recognize their arguments and their consistency even when he disagreed with them. Well, for years it has been clear that those days are long gone, and that Rosen barely maintains the veneer of thoughtful and fair-minded analyst while actually going far down the road that columnist E.J. Dionne long ago traversed, into full-time partisan hackery.

Witness Rosen’s new analysis of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Arizona immigration case. It is couched throughout in terms of “giving credit where due” to conservative justices. But that stance is just a pose. Look more closely, and you’ll see that he gives credit only when the conservatives agree with him. If they agree with him, then they are showing an ability to be “modest and nuanced in tone and substance” while demonstrating a “vision of bipartisan nationalism.” But he warns that if they don’t agree that the ObamaCare individual mandate is perfectly constitutional, then they will suddenly appear “partisan and unrestrained” and will have violated their “previously expressed judicial philosophies.”

In other words: Agree with me, and you are wonderful. Disagree with me, and you have switched in three days from being wonderful to being a vicious, partisan, right-wing hypocrite.

This, and so much else that he writes in this piece, is pure and utter hogwash.

Rosen’s entire frame of reference is skewed, and give absolutely no credit to the actual interpretive philosophies in use on the right. There is no such thing as a “vision of bipartisan nationalism” in conservative jurisprudence. What is at play isn’t a results-oriented “nationalism” — which, of course, contradicts many other instance where Roberts and even Anthony Kennedy have stood firmly for state authority vis-a-vis the national government — but instead an honest attempt to apply the original public meaning of the Constitution’s or legislation’s words to the case before them.

How, pray tell, would it violate Roberts’ “previously expressed judicial philosophy” for him to rule the mandate unconstitutional? After all, it’s not as if Roberts hasn’t recognized limits on Congress’ interstate commerce powers before. Remember when he decided the Commerce Clause powers did not extend to protection of a “hapless toad (that), for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California”? And of course Kennedy has recognized Commerce Clause limits both in U.S. v. Lopez and U.S. v. Morrison. As this new question of a different type of extension of those powers presents an unprecedented question — because the federal power assertion is itself unprecedented — there is no reason at all to believe that it would violate these justices’ philosophies or to show an engagement in partisan shenanigans for Roberts and Kennedy to rule against the mandate. Likewise, although conservatives would be hugely (and rightfully) disappointed and even angry if Roberts and Kennedy go the other way, that doesn’t mean conservatives would be right in suddenly finding Roberts to be a sell-out; it would just mean that he applies the law to these particular facts differently than we do.

But for Rosen, who invents a jurisprudence of “bipartisan nationalism” that is alien in form and substance to everything conservative jurists believe, a judge’s motives or intellectual integrity can be credited or discredited, or both in the same week, completely dependent on whether or not they agree with his conclusions based on a jurisprudential approach that doesn’t even exist.

What a crock.

Okay, to all my fellow…er, my fellow Fellows of CFIF: Last chance to get in your updated predictions on how the Supreme Court will rule on ObamaCare.

I’ll see what you come up with before I reveal my hand (gee, isn’t that clever of me?) — but I WILL offer this outside-the-box scenario as a remote but not entirely-out-of-the-question possibility. To wit:

We could see a typical Kennedy “split the baby” sort of decision: the mandate unconstitutional, on narrow and tentative grounds, with a remand to lower courts to decipher some Delphic question from Kennedy about how best to separate the mandate from the rest of the law.

The good news — and this would be a stunner — is that I think there is a small chance that if Kennedy doesn’t just split the baby, but slices into about four pieces, then Justice Sotomayor might concur in part that “as applied,” the mandate is unconstitutional. If so, that would mean that while the end result could be quite a muddle and the size of the victory (in law, not politics) would be very small, the POLITICAL upshot would be huge in that even a small acknowledgement by an Obama appointee that the mandate went too far would take away some of the ability for Obama to bash the court as a campaign issue.

Granted, most people now think that Roberts, not Kennedy, will write the main decision, based on who has written what other decisions when, during this term. But it would be perfectly feasible for Roberts to write a plurality opinion rather than a majority one, while Kennedy wrote a concurrence with the narrow result of ruling this mandate unconstitutional (and Sotomayor joining in part) — so that the narrow result would have a majority, but the major reasoning would have only a plurality, with Kennedy’s concurrence actually being controlling in terms of what happens next (e.g. some sort of weird remand).

Of course, maybe somebody piped some bath salts into my room and I’m hallucinating. This is all too complicated by half. It’s probably just what happens when I/we have too much time to speculate.

On the other hand, the high court has done weird things like this before. With Kennedy in the mix, anything is possible.

Previously, I’ve agreed with Charles Krauthammer’s concerns about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) being allowed into domestic airspace because of the threat to privacy from so-called “eyes in the sky.”

Now, Todd Humphreys, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is showing how tech savvy terrorists can, and very likely will, exploit a “gaping hole” in the government’s flight security structure.

Last Tuesday, in the barren desert of the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, officials from the FAA and Department of Homeland Security watched as Humphrey’s team repeatedly took control of a drone from a remote hilltop. The results were every bit as dramatic as the test at the UT stadium a few days earlier.

DHS is attempting to identify and mitigate GPS interference through its new “Patriot Watch” and “Patriot Shield” programs, but the effort is poorly funded, still in its infancy, and is mostly geared toward finding people using jammers, not spoofers.

According to Humphreys, “Spoofing [a drone’s GPS receiver] is just another way of hijacking a plane.”

For about $1,000 and with a little bit of technical training a terrorist could take control of any civilian-operated drone and wreck havoc.  Without a human pilot at the controls, the drone’s onboard computer will simply follow whatever commands it is given, regardless of where they originate.

And while some terrorists may be interested in taking over surveillance drones for intelligence gathering purposes, the real danger is if a drone as large as a cargo plane – which FedEx plans to use when domestic drones are approved – is overtaken and flown into planes carrying people or into crowded buildings.

As Humphreys says, “In 5 or 10 years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace.  Each one of these would be a potential missile used against us.”

So not only would a terrorist hacker not need to buy a drone in order to fly one, he wouldn’t even need to go through an invasive TSA screening to reenact the 9/11 tragedy.

Because of pressure from the military and drone manufacturers, Congress is requiring the Federal Aviation Administration to fast-track regulations as part of the FAA’s reauthorization act.  Significant rules that will impact every American are to be conceived, written, and finalized within weeks of each other, and an entire regulatory scheme is mandated to be implemented in less than a year.

If you think that kind of statutory mandate translates into greater bureaucratic efficiency, think again.

The time-crunch – and the deliberate lack of oversight from Congress by pushing the rule writing onto an agency – means that everyday Americans will not be privy to the decision making process that will dramatically impact their safety in the air and on the ground.

Congress needs to rein itself and this process in.  With arguably illegal waivers being given to certain groups to avoid provisions of ObamaCare and No Child Left Behind, we’ve seen how arbitrary and capricious federal regulators can be when it comes to expedited rulemaking.  There’s no reason to expect a more coherent approach from an FAA trying to balance competing interests like privacy, profit, and public safety on an irrational deadline.

We need open debate and deliberation from our elected officials about the costs and benefits of domestic drones.  If Congress won’t engage the issue because it’s too politically painful, then the American people shouldn’t suffer a lapse in safety and privacy because their representatives would rather pass the buck than take responsibility.

God bless New Hampshire, an outpost of sanity in otherwise deep-blue New England. In keeping with the Granite State’s strongly libertarian political culture, New Hampshire’s legislative Republicans led a charge to prevent the state from implementing a health insurance exchange program under Obamacare. The result: the state’s Democratic governor buckled. From the state’s free-market think tank, the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy:

Governor John Lynch this morning signed legislation blocking implementation of a health insurance exchange in New Hampshire. The Obama Administration has been urging states to set up exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known as ObamaCare.

Lynch has supported setting up a New Hampshire exchange, including the proposal in his State of the State address in February. Senate legislation setting up an exchange, SB 163, won Committee approval in January before stalling on the Senate floor. Opponents argued that a state-run exchange would put New Hampshire taxpayers on the hook for the costs of administering much of the federal health care law, while giving the state little flexibility from federal mandates.

New Hampshire’s state motto — perhaps the nation’s most iconic — is “Live Free or Die.” It’s nice to know that those are more than just words on a license plate.

h/t: Adam Freedman at Ricochet

ABC News put together a helpful graphic showing different scenarios of how the Supreme Court might rule.

A decision is expected sometime in the next two weeks.