http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/is-obama-trying-to-jawbone-the-supreme-court/395459/Is Obama Trying to Sway the Supreme Court?
The president lays out a passionate defense of the healthcare law just weeks before a major decision is expected.
Russell Berman Jun 10, 2015
As President Obama took the stage at a hotel ballroom on Tuesday to deliver his latest defense of the Affordable Care Act, you had to wonder who exactly he was trying to reach. Was it the members of the Catholic Health Association—the supportive audience in front of him? Republicans in Congress? The divided public at large?
Or perhaps, was it just the two particular Catholics—Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy—who at this moment hold the fate of Obama’s healthcare law in their hands?
In a 25-minute speech, the president never mentioned King v. Burwell, the case now before the Supreme Court in which the justices must decide the legality of federal insurance subsidies for millions of Americans. But his decision to champion his signature achievement in such pointed terms just weeks before the high court’s ruling is due raised the question of whether Obama was trying to jawbone the justices at the 11th hour.
As he has before, the president turned both to statistics (more than 16 million people covered; the lowest uninsured rate on record) and personal stories (a man whose cancer was caught and cured because of Obamacare insurance) to highlight the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. And with hundreds of Catholics in the audience, Obama made an explicitly moral argument for the law. “It seems so cynical,” he said, “to want to take coverage away from millions of people; to take care away from people who need it the most; to punish millions with higher costs of care and unravel what’s now been woven into the fabric of America.”
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