The court in due course upheld the bill and the president signed it, but in late October Defense Minister Patrick S. Donegan called him "a thundering disgrace" for his having failed to do so immediately.
"The scriptures and Christian tradition call for people to be treated decently and mercifully, but there's also the distinction between the obligations of the civil state, which is of course to uphold order and law, and the church, which is of course to extend mercy and compassion to all people".
The safest bet is still that it won't come to this – that the high court (or at least Kennedy, our current swing vote-cum-philosopher king) will take the most politically cautious, precedent-conscious course, and uphold the health care bill in its current form.
Of course, Xi upholds the primacy of the party.
Six months after joining the court, Justice Stevens wrote one of a trio of opinions by which the court changed course and upheld a new generation of state death-penalty laws.
The worst, of course, was upholding the executive order Roosevelt signed in February 1942, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbour and not long after the justices began their bickering.
That's the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there's no reason to change it now.
Look-and-feel property rights should not, of course, be upheld willy-nilly.
Even though the judicial process ran its course, and upheld the present meaning of the black letter law, something feels wrong about the outcome.
In the end, of course, Roberts did uphold the A.C.A. as an exercise of the constitutional power to tax.
