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She looks dangerous, doesn't she?

I hope the Supreme Court declines this case, because if they do accept it, I expect it means they want to rubberstamp police insanity of this sort. (After all, this dangerous woman might have been a terrorist.) Many cops, I suspect, are terrified of car stops. You never do know what the person behind the wheel may do; it's a dangerous moment. But once cops feel they have the upper hand, it becomes a matter of power, and being cops, they always have to win.

TASERs were introduced as a non-lethal form of police protection. Now they're used to intimidate and subjugate people for things like "talking back" and other harmless forms of non-compliance.

Only citizens can stop this kind of thing, because the elected officials who control our police departments will only respond to our united voices. As a citizen, you have a right to know: What are the policies and accepted procedures for the use of TASERs? How often are officers trained—and re-trained? How frequently are the guns tested and calibrated? How much have related lawsuits cost your municipality? How many claims were settled by the town's insurance carrier? (These should all be public record.)

Over 500 people have died in TASER-related deaths. Only our silence allows it to go on:

WASHINGTON — There have been many hundreds of varied rulings in the lower courts on when the use of TASER stun guns by the police amounts to excessive force, and sooner or later the Supreme Court will have to bring order to this area of the law. Next week, the justices are scheduled to decide whether to hear an appeal from three Seattle police officers who say they are worried about the future of what they call “a useful pain technique.”

The case involves Malaika Brooks, who was seven months pregnant and driving her 11-year-old son to school in Seattle when she was pulled over for speeding. The police say she was going 32 miles per hour in a school zone; the speed limit was 20.

Ms. Brooks said she would accept a ticket but drew the line at signing it, which state law required at the time. Ms. Brooks thought, wrongly, that signing was an acknowledgment of guilt.

Refusing to sign was a crime, and the two officers on the scene summoned a sergeant, who instructed them to arrest Ms. Brooks. She would not get out of her car.

The situation plainly called for bold action, and Officer Juan M. Ornelas met the challenge by brandishing a TASER and asking Ms. Brooks if she knew what it was.

She did not, but she told Officer Ornelas what she did know. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “I am pregnant. I’m less than 60 days from having my baby.”

The three men assessed the situation and conferred. “Well, don’t do it in her stomach,” one said. “Do it in her thigh.”

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(Clips of Tom Delay and John Cornyn quoted below start after the 1:00 mark.)

On Monday, President Obama unsurprisingly expressed confidence that the Supreme Court would uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even less remarkable, Obama rightly reminded Americans that "conservative commentators" have for years said "the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law." Nevertheless, Republicans quickly accused the President of "unprecedented" effort to "intimidate the Supreme Court."

Of course, this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black (to put it mildly). After all, denouncing "judicial activism" has been a GOP talking point for years. Not content to rest there, the party's members of Congress and presidential candidates have pushed to limit the federal judiciary's jurisdiction on a range of issues, abortion not least among them. And as their incendiary rhetoric during the Terri Schiavo saga and other episodes reveals, Republican leaders didn't hesitate to issue none-too-thinly veiled threats of violence against the nation's judges.

Following the President's statement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell led the GOP charge:

"This president's attempt to intimidate the Supreme Court falls well beyond distasteful politics. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for our system of checks and balances."

While Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Karl Rove all called the President a "thug," McConnell doubled-down on Thursday, insisting Obama should "back off" because "the independence of the court must be defended."

Of course, back in 2005, McConnell played a pivotal role in the GOP effort to disregard the 19 rulings by Florida and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, in the case of Terri Schiavo. As he explained to an incredulous Brit Hume of Fox News:

What we simply did was grant to the courts an opportunity to review the case, something they do in habeas corpus petitions in death penalty cases all the time. It's not unusual for a death decision. And in effect, that's what's happening here.

A decision to let Ms. Schiavo die would be reviewed in the courts. That's all Congress did. The courts took a look at it, decided not to review it. And this tragic matter obviously is soon going to come to an end.

Not if Texas Senator John Cornyn had his way. Cornyn, himself a former chief judge of the Texas Supreme Court and author in 2010 of an attack on Obama nominee Elena Kagan titled, "I Sense a Judicial Activist," took the Republican assault on the judiciary to a new and frightening level. Cornyn was one of the GOP standard bearers in the conservative fight against so-called "judicial activism" in the wake of the Republicans' disastrous intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair. On April 4th, Cornyn took to the Senate floor to issue a dark warning to judges opposing his reactionary agenda. Just days after the murders of judge in Atlanta and another's family members in Chicago, Cornyn offered his endorsement of judicial intimidation:

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country...And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence."

Facing criticism for his remarks seemingly endorsing right-wing retribution against judges, Cornyn held his ground. "I didn't make the link," he said on Fox News Sunday, adding with a note of sarcasm:

"It was taken out of context. I regret it was taken out of context and misinterpreted."

As it turns out, Cornyn was merely echoing the words of the soon-to-be indicted House Majority Leader Tom Delay. On March 31st, Delay issued a statement regarding the consistent rulings in favor of Michael Schiavo by all federal and state court judges involved:

"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today."

As the New York Times reported:

Saying that the courts ''thumbed their nose at Congress and the president,'' Mr. DeLay, of Texas, suggested Congress was exploring responses and declined to rule out the possibility of Congressional impeachment of the judges involved.

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Let's see. No matter that you're not actually guilty of anything, or that you haven't even been charged. All they need to do is hold you. It doesn't even matter that blanket strip-search policies are considered human rights violations in other, more civilized countries. No, to the extremely permeable Supreme Court weathersock Anthony Kennedy, all that matters is which direction the hot air of Tony "The Honey Badger" Scalia blows him, and that's where he goes:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, joined by the court’s conservative wing, wrote that courts are in no position to second-guess the judgments of correctional officials who must consider not only the possibility of smuggled weapons and drugs, but also public health and information about gang affiliations.

“Every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed,” Justice Kennedy wrote, adding that about 13 million people are admitted each year to the nation’s jails.

Dear God, I just want to say it would be kind of neat if You managed to get Justice Kennedy singled out for personal attention by the TSA the next time he take a plane. Just for empathy purposes, of course!

The procedures endorsed by the majority are forbidden by statute in at least 10 states and are at odds with the policies of federal authorities. According to a supporting brief filed by the American Bar Association, international human rights treaties also ban the procedures.

The federal appeals courts had been split on the question, though most of them prohibited strip-searches unless they were based on a reasonable suspicion that contraband was present. The Supreme Court did not say that strip-searches of every new arrestee were required; it ruled, rather, that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches did not forbid them.

Just like the right-wing attempts to force drug tests on people collecting unemployment benefits, Justice Kennedy's fantasies aren't grounded in actual reality:

Justice Breyer wrote that there was very little empirical support for the idea that strip-searches detect contraband that would not have been found had jail officials used less intrusive means, particularly if strip-searches were allowed when officials had a reasonable suspicion that they would find something.

For instance, in a study of 23,000 people admitted to a correctional facility in Orange County, N.Y., using that standard, there was at most one instance of contraband detected that would not otherwise have been found, Judge Breyer wrote.

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Sounds like Obama's itching for a showdown with the Roberts court if they decide to overturn the healthcare act, either in part or in whole. It's about time he stood up to these SCOTUS clowns, the conservative majority of which has never seen a judicial overreach they didn't like. In addition to that, I can't think of one good reason why citizens shouldn't be mobilizing to impeach Clarence Thomas and Tony Scalia:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Monday issued a rare, direct challenge to the Supreme Court to uphold his historic health care overhaul, weighing in with a vigorous political appeal for judicial restraint. He warned that overturning the law would hurt millions of Americans and amount to overreach by the "unelected" court.

Obama predicted that a majority of justices would uphold the law when the ruling is announced in June. But the president, himself a former law professor, seemed intent on swaying uncertain views in the meantime, both in the court of public opinion and in the minds of the justices about not overstepping the high court's bounds.

"Ultimately, I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," Obama said at a Rose Garden news conference.

The majority he referenced was not quite that strong; Congress approved the law two years ago in hard-fought party-line votes after a divisive national debate. Republican presidential contenders say they will make sure it is repealed if the Supreme Court doesn't throw it out first.

For a president to weigh in so forcefully about a case currently under deliberation by the Supreme Court is unusual, and it speaks to the stakes at hand.

The law is the signature domestic achievement of Obama's term and already a prominent source of debate in the presidential campaign. The Supreme Court will decide whether to strike down part or all of the law, including its centerpiece requirement that nearly all Americans carry insurance or pay a penalty.

Obama essentially sought to reset the public view of the case to where the White House thought the baseline lay before the attention-grabbing court arguments and the commentary that followed — that striking down the law would be a surprising reach for the court, and that the heart of the law is likely to be upheld.

As The New York Times suggested last week, the fate of President Obama's Affordable Care Act in general, and its mandate that Americans obtain health insurance in particular, may hinge on Justice Anthony Kennedy's notion of "liberty." While Solicitor General Donald Verilli posited "a profound connection" between health care and liberty, his opponent Paul Clement argued, "that it's a very funny conception of liberty that forces somebody to purchase an insurance policy whether they want it or not."

Of course, that very conception of liberty has been the law of the land for decades. Today, tens of millions of Americans must purchase health insurance and a pension plan for their golden years. And as it turns out, the Medicare and Social Security mandates for individuals and employers dwarf anything required by the dreaded Obamacare.

As we learned during the recent debate over the extension of the payroll tax cut, 160 million Americans pay taxes to fund the Medicare and Social Security trusts for today and tomorrow's retirees. Since 1935, workers and their employers have each paid into the Social Security trust fund, a figure which next year will return to its 6.2 percent rate on the first $106,000 of income. In addition, employer and employee alike are on the hook for another 1.45 percent for Medicare, the insurance program for the elderly established in 1965.

In comparison, the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate impacts just a small fraction of Americans. For starters, over 80 percent already have health insurance, compared to roughly 17 percent who do not. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 59 percent of those under age 65 receive employer-sponsored insurance, while another 22 percent are covered by public programs including Medicaid and SCHIP. Of the 50 million people who are currently uninsured, about 20 million (including undocumented immigrants and those with religious objections or claiming economic hardship), are not covered or are otherwise exempt from the health insurance mandate. As a recent Urban Institute analysis concluded:

What may be surprising, however, is that if the ACA were in effect today, 94 percent of the total population (93 percent of the nonelderly population) or 250.3 million people out of 268.8 million nonelderly people would not face a requirement to newly purchase insurance or pay a fine.

As Ryan Grim noted, that's because "98 percent of Americans would either be exempt from the mandate — because of employer coverage, public health insurance or low income — or given subsidies to comply." The Urban Institute estimated that 8.1 million Americans would have their insurance paid for by the expansion of Medicaid to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Another 10.9 million people would receive subsidies to buy private insurance in the new state exchanges, while only 7.3 million (2 percent of the total U.S. population) would be required to purchase a health plan using their own resources alone. As for those Americans choosing to instead to pay the penalty for failing to obtain insurance at all, the CBO estimated that number at 4 million. (That forecast is almost double the rate in Massachusetts, where only 48,000 in a state of 6.6 million people opted to pay the penalty rather than acquire health insurance under Mitt Romney's version of the individual mandate.)

But if far more Americans pay the Social Security and Medicare mandates, the number of direct beneficiaries of "Obamacare" is much lower.

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Remember back in 2010 when the Republican mantra on Obamacare was "repeal and replace"? Well, if the SCOTUS does strike down the law, the GOP will have nothing left to say on the matter.

WALLACE: If the whole bill is struck down, Republicans talk about 'repeal and replace,' -- what are you going to replace that with?

BARBOUR: I think it will be pretty interesting if former constitutional law professor President Obama's signature law gets kicked out because it's unconstitutional...The fact of the matter is that the law is very unpopular. Unlike most entitlements, it has continued to stay unpopular after it was enacted.

Barbour then goes on to babble about how 35 states already have risk pools, and so the Affordable Care Act was really unnecessary, blah blah blah.

In other words: Republicans will replace Obamacare with nothing. Zip. Zero. So the 50M people in this country who don't have health insurance can pretty much suck it.

Thanks for clarifying that, Haley!

(h/t David)

Wow. A Republican Attorney General, talking common sense? I may faint from the shock. I mean, I thought some of the politicians opposing the Affordable Care Act might have legitimate concerns and not just a political agenda, but I certainly didn't think any of them would say it out loud:

ThinkProgress spoke with Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Caldwell opposes Obamacare and the individual mandate, but for a different reason than most of his fellow litigants: it props up the private health insurance industry.

“Insurance companies are the absolute worst people to handle this kind of business,” he declared. “I trust the government more than insurance companies.” Caldwell went on to endorse the idea of a single-payer health care system, saying it’d “be a whole lot better” than Obamacare:

KEYES: You don’t think the subsidies for low-income people are going to be helpful?

CALDWELL: No, no. The worst thing you can do is give it to an insurance company. I want to make my point. All insurance companies are controlled in their particular state. If you have a hurricane come up the east coast, the first one that’s going to leave you when they gotta pay too many claims is an insurance company. Insurance companies are the absolute worst people to handle this kind of business. I trust the government more than insurance companies. If the government wants to put forth a policy where they will pay for everything and you won’t have to go through an insurance policy, that’d be a whole lot better.

I guess someone from Louisiana would know. There were numerous cases of insurance companies stiffing customers after Hurricane Katrina.

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Yes, because if John Roberts, Scalia, Alito and Thomas say a Democratic bill is unconstitutional, then it must be so. I mean, those guys aren't the least bit partisan -- just "umpires" calling "balls and strikes."

This is a little like saying that because Republicans refused to vote for a bill that looked exactly like the one they proposed in the 1990s — that it wasn't "bipartisan."

Nice trick, eh?

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When I heard the initial reports on today's Supreme Court arguments, my heart sank. For ill or for good, the individual mandate is an integral part of the machinery that allows health insurance to be affordable for people with pre-existing conditions, who would otherwise be excluded, and the pundits were saying Solicitor General Verrilli had blown it. But then I listened and read the transcript and I came away with an entirely different impression.

The first impression is this: If they kill the Affordable Care Act, that would be the only time we could actually find the political will to get Medicare for All passed, particularly after Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor elicited agreement from counsel representing the states and the NFIB that Medicare for All would be perfectly constitutional, in their esteemed opinions.

Arguments today ranged from the need for telephones to the requirement that cars have anti-emissions devices, from wheat to milk to marijuana, all related to the commerce powers granted to Congress under the Constitution.

I am not going to try and describe all of the legal arguments. If you want those, I would recommend reading this analyis at SCOTUSblog or Brian Beutler's more optimistic view. I'm also not going to try and figure out which way the Justices are leaning on this. I have no idea, though it's safe to say that Alito and Scalia along with Clarence Thomas are not going to uphold it. Kennedy and Roberts would be the two to watch.

There were, however, some moments that are worth highlighting because they do summarize the conflict so well.

First, this from Solicitor General Verrilli, in response to Justice Roberts' questioning about covering services some people will not use and others will, like maternity or pediatric services:

And the problem here in this market is that for -- you may think you're perfectly healthy and you may think that you're not -- that you're being forced to subsidize somebody else, but this is not a market in which you can say that there is a immutable class of healthy people who are being forced to subsidize the unhealthy. This is a market in which you may be healthy one day and you may be a very unhealthy participant in that market the next day and that is a fundamental difference...

That's a key point, and one that differentiates the health care "market" from others. Later on, Justice Kagan put the exclamation point on it when she asked whether the "subsidizers eventually become the subsidized."

That led to this exchange with Justice Scalia, which drove this listener to despair:

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It's so comforting knowing there are patriots like Larry Kudlow out there defending my right to die of a pre-existing condition.

But anyway, I guess the Heritage Foundation and the 2012 Republican Presidential nominee both hate freedom and liberty.