SCOTUS' Look at ObozoCare

Followup material from SCOTUSblog.

...how to divide up power between national and state governments.   The health care cases the Court promised to review involve nothing less than a choice between an ever-expanding social safety net, spreading out in federal law, and a multitude of more localized decisions by state government and the private economy.

How so?

...What Congress intended in this new law was a fundamental alteration of the way America pays for health care, and a marked expansion of eligibility for insurance so that one does not have to pay medical bills out of pocket, or have them covered by someone else’s charity.   The core issue the Justices will decide is whether Congress had authority to do that, under three clauses in the Constitution’s Article I: the Commerce Clause, the General Welfare Clause, and the Spending Power Clause.

Under Commerce and GW, the question of "the mandate."

Next:  severability.

...If the insurance mandate and its attached penalty are nullified by the Court, the Justices would then be faced with the next most important question they granted: is the mandate so vital to the rest of the law that none of it — or some parts of it, at least — cannot survive constitutionally?

...But whether the Court actually will decide the constitutionality of the mandate, and the allied question of what happens if the mandate is nullified, depends upon whether the courts — including the Supreme Court — have the authority to decide those issues.  That will turn on the answer the Court provides to another vital question it accepted for review: were the states that challenged the mandate barred from filing their court challenge by the federal Anti-Injunction Act?

Under which act, one may object to a tax, but only AFTER paying it.

...the Court’s order on the Anti-Injunction Act appeared to embrace the somewhat separate questions of whether that Act applies only to private challengers, or also to states as challengers.

Kinda smells 10th-y, doesn't it?  More of the same odor here:

...Also potentially lurking in the Court’s review is the question of whether it or any court had jurisdiction to hear the states’ challenge to the mandate, because it could be argued that the states lacked “standing” to contest the insurance mandate.

As to the "Spending" controversy:

...In their petition, the states put the question this way: “Does Congress exceed its enumerated powers and violate basic principles of federalism when it coerces states into accepting onerous conditions that it could not impose directly by threatening to withhold all federal funding under the single largest grant-in-aid program, or does the limitation on Congress’s spending power that this Court recognized in South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987), no longer apply?”

It's still NOT 'more important' than Roe.  But it's very important.

HT:  McCain