Supreme Court Allows Obamacare to Metastasize

[Geee]

American Spectator:

The Supreme Court's decision to deny Virginia's request for expedited review of its Obamacare lawsuit was disappointing but not surprising. Even the Old Dominion's Attorney General, Kenneth Cuccinelli, has admitted all along that his chances of convincing the high court to grant his "petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment" were quite low. Nonetheless, the White House and its accomplices in the "news" media have greeted the decision with thinly disguised glee. And it is indeed a significant victory for the supporters of Obamacare. Despite the virtual certainty that the Supreme Court will eventually hear one of the myriad constitutional challenges to the unpopular "reform" law, today's decision dooms these cases to another year of wandering aimlessly in the appellate wilderness.

This protracted journey will allow Obamacare to embed itself in our health care system so deeply that, by the time the Court deigns to hear one of the challenges, it may be impossible to safely extract the tumor. As Sam Stein gloats in the Huffington Post, "The rejection of Cuccinelli's effort to short-circuit the process represents a small but welcomed victory for the law's defenders. There will be more time for the laws to be implemented before it comes before the court." This extra time is obviously what the Department of Justice (DOJ) hoped to gain when it opposed Virginia's petition. Considering its professed confidence in Obamacare's constitutionality, it's difficult to imagine any other reason for the DOJ's strenuous efforts to prevent the Court from "short-circuiting the normal course of appellate review."

What, you ask, happened to that expedited appeals process we've read so much about? Well, the word "expedite" has a different meaning for lawyers and judges than it does for the rest of us. While it is true that Virginia v. Sebelius and several other Obamacare challenges will be heard in various appeals courts during the next couple of months, the resultant rulings won't materialize until the end of the summer. Then, as legal scholar Brad Joondeph explains, "The losing side has 90 days to file a petition for a writ of certiorari, and the winner 30 days to respond, at which point the petition will be calendared at the Supreme Court." After all that, assuming the Court agrees to hear one of the cases, the justices will "hear argument in the spring of 2012, and issue a decision by the end of June 2012."