A legal case that affects us all

The U.S. Supreme Court is deliberating over what must be considered, on many levels, the most momentous case in decades or possibly the history of the country.

For starters, the federal Affordable Care Act is the first to be challenged by 26 states that maintain it is unconstitutional, and according to a recent Gallup poll, it is a law that is viewed unfavorably by 72 percent of Americans. We can’t recall a case in recent memory where the court listened to oral arguments for three days, as it has done with this case.

The court is expected to rule sometime in June, with huge implications for President Barack Obama’s re-election bid. It could be a heavy political liability if the court overturns “Obamacare,” his centerpiece legislative accomplishment.

And after three days of questions and comments from the nine justices this week, the consensus among court watchers was that the court is prepared to strike the law down, largely because of the individual mandate that requires citizens to purchase health insurance.

The justices pointed out that if the federal government can compel a person to buy insurance, then why wouldn’t it be able to require people to purchase cell phones or brocolli.

As key swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy put it, the law would fundamentally change the relationship between the federal government and American citizens.

And it would fundamentally change the nature of the federal  government, which is already bloated with vast and expensive bureaucracies. The Washington Examiner reported this week that the IRS alone — never mind the Department of Health and Human Services — is seeking 4,000 agents to enforce the law and it plans to spend $300 billion to build a system to oversee It.

That’s what can happen with a 2,700-page law that no member of Congress or the administration bothered to read, a law so huge that Justice Anthonin Scalia said it would be cruel and unusual punishment for the Supreme Court to attempt to read it.

“Is this not totally unrealistic?” he asked. “That we are going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?”

As former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said, the bill needed to be passed in order for people to find out what is in it.

The American people were bound to encounter surprise after surprise as the law was implemented, and because of that, it may benefit Democrats in the long run if it is overturned. Because no Republicans supported the law, the most burdensome and unpopular aspects of the law would forever be a heavy yoke on the Democratic Party that did pass it.

But we’ll have to wait to see how the Supreme Court decides the case in June before we really understand the political repercussions. At the very least, it should fire up the base on both sides during this presidential election year.