Today, President Obama announced sweeping set of policies, including 23 executive orders, aimed at reducing gun violence. The unveiling was the result of the Joe Biden-led task force Obama formed last month in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, and proposed policies include an assault weapons ban, universal background checks, and improved access to mental health care. The Washington Post calls it “the most expansive gun-control policies in a generation,” and the fact that the president issued no less than 23 executive orders suggests that he wants to avoid congress as much as possible with this (which, given his first term, is understandable). Here’s the flashy White House document outlining the proposals, here’s a list of the executive orders (one of which, somewhat amusingly, is “Nominate an ATF director”), and here’s audio of the event (courtesy of Matt Keys). Photo credit: AP source
“Papa” John Schnatter, Papa John’s founder and CEO, is back in the headlines once more for his assertion that there’s no way on God’s green Earth he can afford to provide health care for a portion of his employees, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act. Now, Schnatter hasn’t been hurting for…
On the Papa John’s tip, Meg sends along 15 cents in a letter to the man himself. Be sure to click for more.
Yeah, he’s getting investigated for ethics violations. Apparently, doctors aren’t allowed to sleep with their patients (original story here).
The above Romney campaign mailer has been releasedin Virginia, bearing this rather counter-intuitive slogan on the front – as CNN’s Peter Hamby observes, the language is straight out of what you might find on, say, a flier in support of abortion rights. The Romney campaign is anything but supportive of those rights, however. As the inside of the mailer reveals, the slogan seems to serve as a politically clever appropriation of left-wing rhetoric on women’s health, applied to the right’s battle to repeal the Affordable Care Act. source
We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.Mitt Romney today. Actually, about 26,000 Americans die every year because they don’t have health insurance, so Romney is flatly wrong (and, in our eyes, being a bit disrespectful to about 26,000 American families). He also said that “we don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack.’” source
Bill O’Reilly on health insurance: “It has to be run by insurance companies, not the government.” He drew a bunch of boos for that, but he explained that it’s important to regulate them heavily. Jon Stewart, meanwhile, supports a single-payer system: “I would decouple it from work.”
6M Americans per year will pay a penalty under the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, according to a new CBO estimate
$8B in additional revenue per year will be collected via these penalties source
Get rid of ObamaCare! Now! It’s a really good idea … if your plan is to do the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve on controlling the deficit. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday said ObamaCare will actually work to shrink, not enlarge, our fiscal budget headache.More details from the CBO here. Important story for truth. (via hypervocal)
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![Supreme Court flip-flops: Health care wasn’t the first. It won’t be the last.
Here’s the first entry in our weekly post series, “The Pitch.” This post, written by our very own Seth Millstein, analyzes the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the Affordable Care Act in wider historical context. Find him on Twitter over here.
Stepping back and looking in wider context: Conservatives were very upset with Chief Justice John Roberts last month when he provided the tie-breaking vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act. That anger grew exponentially when reports surfaced that Roberts had originally voted to overturn the law, but then switched his vote to side with the court’s liberals. Why did Roberts flip-flop? How common is vote switching on the Supreme Court? And how often has a single justice’s indecisiveness significantly affected the law of the land? ShortFormBlog reports. (Read more after the jump.)
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Preface: How justices think
These are not nine all-wise people who retire to a secret room and come up with the answer that nobody else can figure out. They’re nine human beings who are trying to wrestle with the problem the way the rest of us do.
Former SCOTUS clerk Bill McDaniel • Discussing the nature of Supreme Court justices changing their minds. The Court has a very heavy case-load in a given year, and the June period is especially heavy. WIth much wheeling and dealing taking place behind the scene, especially among moderates, it’s very likely that nobody’s mind is made up on any individual case immediately.
Some notable historical swaps
11 decision-changing swaps made between 1991 and 1994 alone
Abortion rights In 1992, a last-minute vote switch prevented the overturning of Roe v. Wade. A case involving a highly-restrictive Pennsylvania abortion law made its way to the Supreme Court. Advocates of the legislation argued that, while the law did indeed violate Roe, Roe itselfwas unconstitutional, and should thus be overturned. During the first vote, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of overturning Roe …but then, at the last minute, Justice Kennedy changed his mind, voting with the liberal wing of the court instead.
VCRs (seriously) Do VHS machines violate copyright law? That was the question before the court in 1983, when the entertainment industry argued that, because the devices enable people to record and pirate copyrighted material, they should be outlawed. The initial vote was 5-4 against the video cassette recorder, but Justice Sandra Day O’Conner switched her vote after the majority opinion was written, thus protecting the rights of future nine-year-olds to tape The Mighty Ducks when it came on TV. A single tear for Emilio Estevez.
Homosexuality In 1986, the court debated whether or not anti-sodomy laws were constitutional. Justice Lewis Powell had originally agreed that “homosexual acts,” as they were ominously referred to back then, were permissible in the privacy of one’s home, but then changed his mind, keeping the ban on sodomy in place. This decision was ultimately less influential than Kennedy’s vote-switch, however: Three years later, the court overturned the ruling, and now gay sex is constitutionally-protected.
Reasons for vote swapping
To put it simply: It’s not always what you think it might be. There are several reasons a justice might change their vote midway through the process (although of course, plebes like us will never know for sure):
image Many people suspect that Roberts switched his vote to protect the court from being seen as an overly-partisan institution — an understandable fear, considering that the court had recently made high-profile decisions that proved very unpopular, such as Citizens United.
roots In the sodomy case, Powell’s decision was reportedly influenced by the fact that the plaintiff in the suit, a gay bartender who had been “caught” having sex with another man in his own bedroom, hadn’t actually been prosecuted, but rather filed a civil suit against the state.
effects The VHS case is an interesting one: While O’Connor agreed that VHS violated copyright law, the majority opinion also overturned a lower court’s ruling (on a different, but related question) that she agreed with. Apparently, it was more important to her to uphold that decision.
» Something to keep in mind: Finally, when discussing the ACA ruling, it’s important to keep some perspective. A lot has been made about how the amount of detail that leaked about the court’s internal deliberations was unprecedented — but that’s what they said in 1986 about the Powell case. (“Such information rarely reaches the public,” the LA Times wrote of the leak.) And the theory that Roberts switched his vote to preserve the integrity of the court as an institution? That’s what they said about Kennedy with regard to the abortion case. In short, while the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the various justices is no doubt fascinating, the process by which the court upheld the ACA wasn’t as anomalous as a lot of the reporting is suggesting.
Seth Millstein is a writer for ShortFormBlog and The Daily. Reach him at @SethMillstein.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6wkmmElpZ1qas8z9o1_500.jpg)
Here’s the first entry in our weekly post series, “The Pitch.” This post, written by our very own Seth Millstein, analyzes the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the Affordable Care Act in wider historical context. Find him on Twitter over here.
Stepping back and looking in wider context: Conservatives were very upset with Chief Justice John Roberts last month when he provided the tie-breaking vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act. That anger grew exponentially when reports surfaced that Roberts had originally voted to overturn the law, but then switched his vote to side with the court’s liberals. Why did Roberts flip-flop? How common is vote switching on the Supreme Court? And how often has a single justice’s indecisiveness significantly affected the law of the land? ShortFormBlog reports. (Read more after the jump.)
Into his conference call, the CNN producer says (correctly) that the Court has held that the individual mandate cannot be sustained under the Commerce Clause, and (incorrectly) that it therefore ‘looks like’ the mandate has been struck down. The control room asks whether they can ‘go with’ it, and after a pause, he says yes.SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein • Looking back at what caused the mistaken reporting of the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act decision, in a minute-by-minute breakdown. In case you need something very epic to read, here you go — Goldstein’s post, which he claims is his first effort at “real journalism,” is 7,000 freaking words long. Or, you know, longer than the usual article we link. (ht Dave Weigel)
DEVELOPING: GlaxoSmithKline Plc has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay $3 billion to settle the largest case of healthcare fraud in U.S. history, according to court filings and prosecutors.
The settlement includes $1 billion in criminal fines and $2 billion in civil fines in connection with the sale of the drug company’s Paxil, Wellbutrin and Avandia products.
READ MORE: GlaxoSmithKline settles fraud charges for $3 billion
Some more details, from Bloomberg:
In a charging document filed today, London-based Glaxo admits to illegally promoting Paxil for children and adolescents, wrongfully marketing Wellbutrin for weight loss and purposes other than those approved by U.S. regulators, and failing to report data regarding the safety of its Avandia diabetes drug to regulators. The company has agreed to admit to the charges, which are misdemeanors, according to the filings.
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