Climate change data “fiddling”?

The New Neo Posted on by

Christopher Booker wrote a piece in the Telegraph that claims that climate scientists have fiddled with temperature data, and calls it “the biggest science scandal ever.”

Here’s a quote:

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world ”“ one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Booker goes on to describe multiple instances of similar practices, and adds that “this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record ”“ for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained ”“ has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known.”

Blogger Ace of Spades writes, “I have some reservations, because it looks like so much something that it feels like this almost can’t be right.”

I’m with Ace on the reservations. This argument has been going on in one way or another for quite some time, and although Booker claims that the explanations offered by the scientists and their defenders aren’t “plausible” to him, they certainly have many explanations for what they do (here’s a sample).

The gist of the back-and-forth, as best I can tell, is that the scientists’ explanations offer the sort of justification that makes me think “garbage in, garbage out.” In other words, there’s so much trouble getting accurate measurements, and so much need to adjust them, that they end up being less than persuasive.

That’s if you accept the explanations at face value. But there have been other, more pointed, critiques (see this and this, for example). I have no way to evaluate the strength of the scientific arguments either pro or con, but I invite the scientists among you to wade in.

Let the vetoes begin!

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama is preparing to veto the Keystone pipeline bill, issuing the first of what promises to be a blizzard of vetoes of legislation due to be passed by the current Congress.

Never mind that the Keystone bill was bipartisan, passed in the Senate 62-36 (nine Democrats joined) and previously in the House 266-153 (28 Democrats joined; although there will have to be another vote in the House within the next few days to align the two bills, it is expected to go similarly).

I love the way the article puts it:

Still, if Obama vetoes too many bills, especially ones with Democratic support, Republicans could have success portraying him as partisan and unwilling to negotiate.

“One veto doesn’t make him obstructionist,” said James Thurber, a professor of government at American University. “Now maybe after 3, 4, 5 vetoes, then they could start painting him that way.”

Portraying him. Painting him. Not, of course, that he is that way.

Here’s a statistic: since the beginning of this Congress in January, Obama has issued eight veto threats. That’s “the most ever for the start of a new Congress.”

Obama thinks this projects strength, and to his supporters it most definitely does. When the Republicans—even if in the majority in one house of Congress, and even with Democratic support—tried to block something Obama was attempting, that was unreasonable and stubborn obstructionism. When Obama blocks what a Republican majority Congress has done, even when those Republicans have a significant amount of support from moderate Democrats, it’s a show of strength and resolve.

At the moment, Republicans don’t appear to have the votes to override Obama’s veto of Keystone, although it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility that they might obtain them. But it’s not easy to get to a two-thirds majority, and if a president is bound and determined to veto a bill it often dies.

Historically, most presidents have saved their vetoes for the issues that matter most to them, because they have been afraid to challenge what appears to be the will of the majority of the people too many times. But Obama has no such hesitations. The last time he cared about the will of the people was on November 6, 2012.

[ADDENDUM: I noticed a number of people in the comments section pointing out that many presidents have used the veto a great deal. I responded in the comments, but I thought I’d highlight my response here, too.

First of all, note the actual quote, “most presidents have saved their vetoes for the issues that matter most to them, because they have been afraid to challenge what appears to be the will of the majority of the people too many times.” That sentence doesn’t reflect on sheer number totals of vetoes.

By saying “most presidents save their vetoes for the issues that matter most to them,” I didn’t mean to imply that some presidents haven’t vetoed a great deal of legislation. Often those vetoes have been pocket vetoes, and some have been vetoes of legislation on fairly small matters, but it is certainly not the case that previous presidents have all been reluctant to use their veto power, and even to sometimes use it on larger issues. It’s the second half of the sentence, about challenging the will of the people, that is the point and connects up to the first half. Never has a president come out of the box and immediately threatened a new Congress with this many vetoes on significant legislation that the public favors, and in many cases strongly favors. That is what is happening here. Keystone, for example, has bipartisan support, and has been consistently popular with voters (see this).

Another point, although a tangential one, in terms of sheer numbers of vetoes: the longer a president is in office with a Congress controlled by the opposite party, the more vetoes you would expect him/her to use. President Obama has issued (as I quoted) “the most ever for the start of a new Congress.” This Congress has been in session only a little more than a month, and this is the first Republican-controlled Congress Obama has faced, one with the numbers to pass bills he doesn’t like (although he had a Republican House since 2010, the Democratic Senate was able to block almost everything the Republican House tried to do).

I doubt that, even given this, Obama will end up with a large total number of vetoes. For one thing, he doesn’t have that much time. But I predict that his vetoes will be of legislation that is more significant and more popular than the bills his predecessors in office vetoed.

In addition, there is no question that Obama has the power, and the right, to veto every single piece of legislation handed to him, should he desire to do so. Every president has that same right. That doesn’t make it a good idea, although it may seem that way to those who support him.]

The NY Times has trouble…

The New Neo Posted on by

…with the concept of first name versus surname.

It’s hard, hard I tell you (hint to Times: “Scott” is the first name, “Walker” is the surname):

MrScott

This was not an ordinary article, either, that just lacked an editor’s eye. It was an editorial, a type of article which, when last I checked, is written by the editors.

It’s been corrected now, without any acknowledgement or admission of the mistake. But I think it’s especially funny that the piece involves mockery of Walker’s claim of a drafting error (in fact, the title is “Governor Scott Walker’s ‘Drafting Error'”):

His [Walker’s] office attempted the ridiculous excuse that the pernicious editing of the university’s mission was simply a “drafting error” in the budget text…

Editors who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw rhetorical stones.

Of course we all make mistakes, particularly if we have to churn it out day after day (don’t I know it!). But the odd thing about the Times’ error in this case is that it’s about a well-known politician. Scott Walker is not some obscure figure new on the scene. How could the editors not have realized that his last name is not “Scott”? Where on earth have they been?

[ADDENDUM: Ann Althouse eviscerates the Times both on substance and style.]

Charity nagging

The New Neo Posted on by

I gave a modest amount of money to a few charities at Christmastime this year, as I sometimes do. I got the next solicitations from them in the mail around the first week of January, and several have sent me subsequent requests as well.

They are relentless.

They often enclose something for me to prime the guilt pump. It used to be address labels, but that’s gone somewhat out of vogue lately. Now I get greeting cards (uniformly ugly ones that I would never choose myself). Notepads (I actually use those). A nickel scotchtaped to the request card. A forever stamp, likewise paper-clipped.

Why not just save the money and refrain from nagging people? Have they researched it and found they get a better return by making recent donors feel guilt through hounding, and by giving them some freebie so they feel they owe them something in return? For me, even if the charity’s a good one, I find it very off-putting.

While I’m complaining, let me take up a slightly related subject: those long voice ads you are subjected to when you call a drugstore for a prescription renewal, or your cable company for some help, or really just about any business these days. You sit there gnashing your teeth and waiting through the chirpy voice that says how wonderful they are and how much they value you and your own wonderfulness as a customer in general. Then the person transfers you to another person, but not before going through another lengthy spiel about how great it is to do business with you and are you happy with things and can they do anything else for you until you want to start shrieking “just transfer me already and shut up!”

And the awful music, and the constant messages while you’re waiting, that play over and over and over.

There. Now let me go duke it out with Comcast.

Which reminds me:

The vacuum left by America’s abdication of power

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a quote I came across recently in The Rule of the Clan by Mark S. Weiner (it begins with a quote from Robert Kagan’s The World America Made):

“There is a general sense that the end of the era of American preeminence need not mean the end of the present liberal international order” he writes. “The expectation, if not assumption, is that the good qualities of that order—the democracy, the prosperity, the peace among great powers—can transcend the decline of American power and influence.”

Such expectations are in Kagan’s view fundamentally flawed. The modern international order is an American one, he argues. It has been predicated on the projection of American power abroad.

In the absence of American national will, or in the face of American decline, the liberal institutions and norms of this order are likely to disappear. The conditions that have been so favorable to democratic development over the past sixty years will vanish.

There is nothing natural about our current liberal international climate and its values, Kagan asserts. It will survive “only as long as those who imposed it retain the capacity to defend it.”

The alternative to American global power is not “peace and harmony but chaos and catastrophe.”

Most liberals and leftists—including our current president—feel quite the opposite, and would dismiss Kagan as a crazy neocon. But I believe Kagan is correct, and I fear we are about to find out just how correct he is (we’re already starting to, but we’ve only just began) unless other nations take up the slack or America re-commits. But I doubt other countries have either the capacity or the will.

The US still has the military capacity. But for quite some time (it began during Vietnam, I think) we’ve lacked the requisite amount of will. We need both, and the wisdom to know which battles should fight.

The continuing argument between the pro- and anti-Vietnam War groups was mostly over whether Vietnam was the right battle to fight and whether it was possible to win, but it was also over whether we had the will to use our capacity, and if so how much of that capacity should have been unleashed. In recent years those who are against the Iraq War have made similar arguments—the wrong war, for the wrong reasons. The think they have won that argument, but I’m not completely sure of that—which is why they must fight back so hard against the popularity of movies like “American Sniper” that threaten their narrative.

But I don’t think there could be a right war for the right reasons for them any more, unless it’s some small and completely humanitarian action in a third-world country (and not fought against any Muslims, either).

[NOTE: Some years ago I wrote a lengthy post on the topic “War is not the answer.” You might want to take a look at it.]

Jews who are not Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “DNW” asked yesterday:

…[C]an anyone…tell me why an even moderately religious or observant Jew, would continue to speak of left-wing atheist progressives, as “Jews”?

Not that you would necessarily know. I just have no one else to ask.

I’ll take a stab at it.

Jewishness is an odd thing. It’s a religion in the usual sense, which means that someone not born Jewish can become a Jew by conversion. Conversion is considered to make someone fully Jewish, by the way, and Jews around the world are of every ethnicity possible.

However, it’s also a “people.” That can mean a number of things (one definition, for example, is “a group of people with a shared history and a sense of a group identity rather than a territorial and political entity”). But one thing it has tended to mean historically—especially to the Jews’ enemies—is a membership conveyed through birth.

So birth mattered—and still matters—to some people as much as belief or religion. To the Nazis, it mattered a lot. But not just to the Nazis; they just were one group that used the definition in exceedingly pernicious and destructive ways.

At any rate, Jews who have no religion at all but who were born to two Jewish (or even one Jewish) parents are still often considered ethnic Jews, or Jews of some sort, both by enemies and by friends. Call them cultural Jews, call them secular Jews, but they often not only are called “Jews” by others but consider themselves Jewish despite that lack of religion.

At what point does Jewish identity end? For example, you often read that Karl Marx, the father of Communism, was a Jew, right? Here are the facts, however:

Marx wasn’t even a lapsed Jew. He was a lapsed Christian. His father converted to Christianity to advance his career. Young Karl disavowed all religions and would later rant against them, especially Judaism. In fact, he is better remembered as one of the world’s most accomplished anti-semites. His famous “On the Jewish Question” called for an end to the emancipation of the Jews because they were enslaved by a harsher taskmaster than the German state: their own religion. He referred to money as the real God of the Old Testament. And, probably not coincidentally, he was frequently in debt to Jewish moneylenders.

Therefore, Karl Marx only counts as a Jew on the slimmest of halachic opinions. And if there was an expulsion process for the Tribe, he would probably be first on the list. His hatred of Jews arose more from his own confusion about his heritage, and his inability to repay his debts, than from a legitimate concern for the human race.

This isn’t meant to be a “Who Is a Jew” exercise, though. Something more important is at stake. Right-wingers throughout the world often equate Marx’ supposed Judaism with a solid link between the religion and communism. There isn’t. Marx borrowed nothing from the Jewish tradition to formulate his ideals.

If you want to delve even deeper into Marx’s twisted history, we have this, which mentions that Marx’s father’s conversion occurred when Karl was a child, and that for some reason although Catholicism was the dominant religion in his part of Germany he converted to Protestantism. No one mentions the mother. Did she remain Jewish? I have no idea.

The plot thickens when you read this, which states that Marx Sr. converted before Karl’s birth and that Lutheranism (the Christian religion to which he converted) was the dominant religion in his part of the world. So you have a singular lack of clarity.

This is typical, I’m afraid. I would not call Marx any sort of Jew, although his heritage was indeed Jewish in the sense of parents who at least at some point in time had been Jewish. It certainly doesn’t sound as though he considered himself a Jew. But the society in which he moved may have considered him one. Perhaps his hatred of Jews was partly an effort to make it clear that he wasn’t one of those awful Jews; how could he be, when he disliked them so?

At any rate, for most people today Marx’s protests, his atheism, and the fact that he was not raised Jewish mean nothing—he is still identified in people’s minds as a Jew.

But to answer DNW’s question specifically regarding how it is that religious Jews can consider a secular Jew to still be a Jew, we have this stricter definition:

According to Jewish law, a child born to a Jewish mother or an adult who has converted to Judaism is considered a Jew; one does not have to reaffirm their Jewishness or practice any of the laws of the Torah to be Jewish. According to Reform Judaism, a person is a Jew if they were born to either a Jewish mother or a Jewish father. Also, Reform Judaism stresses the importance of being raised Jewish; if a child is born to Jewish parents and was not raised Jewish then the child is not considered Jewish. According to the Orthodox movement, the father’s religion and whether the person practices is immaterial. No affirmation or upbringing is needed, as long as the mother was Jewish.

By that strict definition under Jewish law, Marx would have been a Jew, and that it how it is that a “moderately religious or observant Jew, would continue to speak of left-wing atheist progressives, as ‘Jews.'”

[ADDENDUM: By the way, for what it’s worth, Engels was not Jewish in any sense of the word, nor was Lenin or Stalin. It has recently been revealed that Lenin may have had a maternal grandfather who was born Jewish but who converted; this does not a Jew make by any accepted definition, as you can see from the post. Trotsky, on the other hand, was born to a family of secular non-religious Jews. It would be interesting to look back and see how many generations back they had lost their religion; if it was more than one, is it correct to consider them Jewish at all?

Here’s an interesting discussion of Trotsky’s Jewishness:

There is no question that genetically speaking, Trotsky was a Jew. But personally and culturally, he emphatically denied any connection with the Jewish people. Quoting from my book Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime:

“Trotsky””the satanic ‘Bronstein of Russian anti-Semites’””was deeply offended whenever anyone presumed to call him a Jew. When a visiting Jewish delegation appealed to him to help fellow Jews, he flew into a rage: “I am not a Jew but an internationalist.”

As with Marx, a fat lot of good it did him—most people would consider Trotsky a Jew. I repeat, though: at what point, if a person’s ancestors and that person him/herself disavows Jewishness, do we take them at their word?]

Tom Cotton: quite a resume

The New Neo Posted on by

Newly-minted Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas got a lot of attention for this hard-hitting exchange yesterday:

I hadn’t seen Cotton in action before, and my first thought about him on seeing this (after noticing his laserlike intensity, which seemed to confuse his interrogatee) was, “That guy is very, very, very smart.” My second one was, “He must be a lawyer.”

So of course I had to look him up. A very interesting background indeed:

(1) At age 37 he’s presently the youngest US senator.

(2) He defeated his opponent, sitting Democrat Senator Mark Pryor, by a margin of over 16 points (in 2008, the GOP didn’t even field a candidate against Pryor).

(3) He is a lawyer, and a Harvard Law School lawyer at that (Liz Warren was one of his professors). Actually, he’s a Harvard guy all the way—got his BA there magna cum laude in government.

(4) He’s a combat veteran in both Iraq and Aghanistan:

As an infantry officer and platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division, he was deployed to Baghdad as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom on May 19, 2006. In Iraq, Cotton was responsible for a 41 man air assault infantry platoon in the 506th Infantry Regiment, and planned and led daily combat patrols. He completed his first combat tour in Iraq on November 20, 2006…

In June 2006, Cotton gained public attention after he wrote an open letter to The New York Times criticizing the paper’s publication of an article detailing a Bush administration secret program monitoring terrorists’ finances in which he called for three journalists, including the Times’ editor, Bill Keller, to be imprisoned for espionage…

Following his deployment in Iraq, Cotton was assigned as a platoon leader at The Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery,[10] where he was responsible for conducting military honor funerals for veterans. In 2008, he volunteered to return to combat duty, was promoted to captain on August 1, 2008, and deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom on October 15, 2008.

In Afghanistan, Cotton was assigned to Laghman Province, just north of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. He was assigned duty as the operations officer of a Provincial Reconstruction Team, where he planned and resourced daily counter-insurgency and reconstruction operations for an 83-member joint and interagency team. He returned from Afghanistan on July 20, 2009.

No wonder he’s intense.

(5) His father is a Vietnam vet.

(6) And although this last bit isn’t really relevant to my point, he got married last March, and his wife looks a little bit like a young Bonnie Raitt, only prettier.

Jordan fights back

The New Neo Posted on by

Jordan makes good on its threats to ISIS:

State TV showed footage of the attacks, including fighter jets taking off from an air base and bombs setting of large balls of fire and smoke after impact. It showed Jordanian troops scribble messages in chalk on the missiles. “For you, the enemies of Islam,” read one message.

The military’s statement, read on state TV, was entitled, “This is the beginning and you will get to know the Jordanians” ”” an apparent warning to IS. It said the strikes will continue “until we eliminate them.”

Jordan’s King Abdullah II was paying a condolence visit to the family of the pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, in southern Jordan when the fighter jets roared overhead.

The king pointed upward, toward the planes, as he sat next to the pilot’s father, Safi al-Kaseasbeh.

Do you recall President Obama visiting the families of James Foley or Steven Sotloff or attending their memorial services? I don’t, nor can I find anything about any such visits when I Google the subject. But he had time for an audience with the family of Bowe Bergdahl, because he thought (wrongly) that it would gain him some political advantage.

It will be very interesting to see what else Jordan does now.

The banality of Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast

The New Neo Posted on by

I get weary when I read things like the text of President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast:

And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

As Charles Krauthammer so aptly said, that sentence was simultaneously both banal and offensive. That’s a neat trick, isn’t it?

But Krauthammer also said he was stunned. I might have been stunned at one point, but that point would have been a long, long time ago. Now, as I said, I’m weary, because I have come to expect this sort of kneejerk moral equivalence from Obama, this stretching way into the past in order to condemn Christianity and accomplish a neat balancing act.

It’s especially ironic when so very many of the current targets of ISIS jihadis are Arab Christians being persecuted—murdered, tortured, converted, raped—for nothing more or less than their Christian faith.

Rush Limbaugh offers a riff on why he thinks Obama did this:

We have a guy, we have a man who really has a problem with this country…

The US was founded as a racist, slave, bigoted nation, and we still haven’t paid the price for that as far as he’s concerned. Why on earth would you go to the National Prayer Breakfast with thousands of Christians from across the spectrum and insult them?

I agree with Limbaugh’s assertion that Obama has a big, big problem with this country. It’s not only apparent now, it was apparent even before he was elected the first time (this remark of Michelle’s was one of the tip-offs). Remember, also, good old Reverend Wright and his problem with America; it seems Obama may have listened to a few of those long-ago sermons after all.

But I have something to add to Limbaugh’s observation. Obama’s remarks were, as Krauthammer said, banal, and they are banal because they are absolutely commonplace in academia and non-academic liberal circles, boilerplate and kneejerk. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been among liberals and when anything remotely critical of modern-day Islamic terrorists comes up their response is, “Well, of course, all religions…” Or the crusades. Or some guy who’s killed an abortionist in the name of Christianity. Or Baruch Goldstein. Always the futile balancing attempt: the introduction of the ancient versus the present, the isolated incident versus the overwhelming numbers.

Many of the people speaking have themselves rejected their own religions of origin (I’ve observed that quite a few were brought up in fairly religious Catholic households, for what it’s worth). Some were not raised with any religion at all, but seem to hate all religions and consider religious people stupid and even evil. I once had a lengthy argument with a man who claimed that all the wars of the 20th century were religious wars. He is by no means an outlier, either; I’ve often heard that religions have been responsible for most of the evil in the world since time immemorial.

But some of those so eager to condemn Christianity vs. Islam are in fact religious Christians—of the leftist persuasion. There are plenty of such people. And I bet some of them were at that very Prayer Breakfast, nodding and clapping at President Obama’s remarks.

[NOTE: Much of the liberal coverage of the story is of the “conservatives attacked Obama for his remarks” variety. The reaction of the right becomes the story, and Obama becomes the persecuted one.]

[ADDENDUM: Bobby Jindal responds [emphasis mine]:

“It was nice of the President to give us a history lesson at the Prayer breakfast,” Jindal said. “Today, however, the issue right in front of his nose, in the here and now, is the terrorism of Radical Islam, the assassination of journalists, the beheading and burning alive of captives. We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

Hat tip: Ace.]

Sex and the Duggars: the fundamentalist Christian vs. the liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

You may or may not be familiar with the Duggar family of the reality TV show “19 Kids and Counting.”

I don’t watch the show often, but I’ve seen it now and then, and one theme that began a while ago—the courtship of two of the young adult daughters of the clan—fascinated me into watching quite a few episodes that dealt with it.

The Duggars are Christians of a strict sect practicing modesty and sexual abstinence before marriage, and who believe in giving birth to as many children as God sees fit to bless them with after marriage and not to use birth control. Thus, the 19 kids of the title.

Not everyone would want this, nor could everyone handle the extremely major task of parenting that the Duggars have taken on, but I’ve been impressed by their intelligence and organizational skills. I’m no fundamentalist Christian, but what I perceive in this family is a grounded, loving, thoughtful, and respectful environment. Their courting rules seem extreme, and they are. Lots of people mock and revile them online for them, and consider their kids to be brainwashed and their methods repressive. But what they ignore is the context of love and the fact that these people are not at all anti-sex.

Au contraire. It’s because they have such great respect and awe for sex’s power and force that they want to harness it in the service of the spiritual and transcendent. Does the opposite—engaging in uncommitted sex with perfect “freedom”—invariably make people sexually happy? Of course not, although I suppose it does for some, especially for a while. But postponing all sex—including even kissing or frontal hugging, as the Duggars do, until marriage (their first kiss is on the altar after the ceremony)—while most definitely not for everyone, serves to build sexual desire to a peak most of us probably can hardly imagine. Then, after marriage, with the blessing of family, friends, and church, that desire can be fully indulged.

From what I see of the three young couples in the Duggar family so far (and the parents), they are very happy indeed within marriage, and sex is the least of their problems and constitutes a deep and lasting bond. It’s not their only bond, however. Their overtly-stated reason for sexual postponement while courting is the realization that sex is so powerful it can cloud the issue of whether two people are compatible enough in other ways to have a successful and lasting and happy marriage, and their abstinence gives them time and space to fully explore the extent of that mental, emotional, and spiritual compatibility. Watching the couples together, it is hard to avoid seeing their great love and attraction for each other (it doesn’t hurt that the Duggars are all very attractive physically, as well).

Which brings us to the need to tear down and mock them. I understand that their position is so extreme that few would embrace it or be able to go through with it even if they wanted to, and it invites satire. But I contend that much of the satire comes not only from a misunderstanding of the Duggars and why they take the stance they do, and/or a hatred of religion in general, but an envy for what is so obvious—their personal happiness in the sexual, emotional, and spiritual aspects of their lives.

[NOTE:Here’s an example of the sort of thing I mean, which appeared in The New Yorker.]

Liberals to SCOTUS: why, you can’t change Obamacare now!

The New Neo Posted on by

It was inevitable that this sort of pressure on the Supreme Court would increase as the Obamacare subsidy case draws near—the alarmist attempts to convince the Court that overturning Obamacare would be an unprecedented and catastrophic act on their part:

The court has permitted itself to be recruited into the front lines of a partisan war. Not only the Affordable Care Act but the court itself is in peril as a result.

Author Linda Greenhouse goes on to say that by now so many people are depending on Obamacare subsidies that removing them would be extremely disruptive. That’s not a reason to decide a case a certain way, of course, and it also assumes that Republicans don’t have their own ideas for remedying the situation (such as this, to take one example). But Greenhouse’s article is written to give heart to the liberal troops who are understandably upset that Obamacare is threatened still again, and to intimidate the swing members of the Court if possible (that would be Stevens and Roberts, I assume).

If you remember the unseemly haste with which Obamacare was passed, and then the arguments about how it’s now settled law and therefore cannot be changed, it’s obvious that this was always the plan: ram it through and then say it’s inviolate because so many people have become dependent on it.

Hard to believe it’s been almost five years since the thing was passed.

I don’t like to make predictions, but I’m going to make one, just as I did before the Sebelius ruling. Back then I wrote (and when reading the following and applying it to the currenct situation, just exchange the words “state subsidies” for “mandate”):

…[E]ven though I don’t usually make predictions I’ll go on record here as saying my gut feeling is that the Court will not strike down the mandate. Why? Because the Court is exceedingly reluctant to invalidate a major act of Congress, even one passed with such shenanigans and unsupported by the American people…

This case is a bit different. Striking down the subsidies wouldn’t be invalidating an act of Congress, it would be interpreting the words in that act as they were written. Of course, the people who passed it back then now say that those words didn’t actually mean what they seem to mean.

At any rate, my point is that I don’t think SCOTUS will rule against the subsidies, although I think by rights they should. I think the swing justice[s] will get cold feet because the repercussions of the decision frighten them, and I think the Democrats and Obama were always counting on that fact. Actually, they were surprised SCOTUS had the guts to take the case in the first place.

[NOTE: More from William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.]

[ADDENDUM: I see that this isn’t the first time I’ve made the prediction that SCOTUS will get cold feet on its decision about the state subsidies. I already said it last July, in a post that discusses some of the law on the subject.]