Law

Spending power bargaining after Obamacare

By Erin Ryan
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) decision, it’s easy to get lost in debate over the various arguments about how the commerce and tax powers do or don’t vindicate the individual mandate. But the most immediately significant portion of the ruling — and one with far more significance for most actual governance — is the part of the decision limiting the federal spending power that authorizes Medicaid. It is the first time the Court has ever struck down congressional decision-making on this ground, and it has important implications for the way that many state-federal regulatory partnerships work.

The dawn of a new age of government?

By Elvin Lim
Senator Edward Kennedy called healthcare reform the “the great unfinished business of our time.” Now it is finished. Every branch of the US government has had its say. The Supreme Court decision also marks the end of the Rehnquist era. No longer can we reliably predict that it would always send powers back to the states. Indeed, it said “No” to 26 states which had challenged the Affordable Care Act.

The Likely Failure of Obamacare After ‘National Federation’

By Edward Zelinsky
As virtually all Americans now know, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, sustained the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”). President Obama hailed the Court’s decision as confirming “a fundamental principle that here in America — in the wealthiest nation on Earth — no illness or accident should lead to any family’s financial ruin.” The President and his supporters tell us that PPACA will provide health care coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans. From the President’s vantage, the Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius guarantees the desired expansion of health care coverage.

Does the Supreme Court care what the public think?

As we continue to look back on Thursday’s Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, the question of how the Court’s opinion was influenced by the public has been raised. To provide some background, we excerpted The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction by Linda Greenhouse.

Five things you need to know about the Affordable Care Act

With the Supreme Court’s decision on the legality of the Affordable Care Act finally made, we pulled together a quick list of things you should know from Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know by Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol.

Will health care reform work in the end?

In light of the Supreme Court decision yesterday upholding the Affordable Care Act, I thought this brief excerpt from Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know by Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol was in order.

Barry Landau and the grim decade of archives theft

By Travis McDade

Ten years ago, responding to $200,000 worth of thefts by curator Shawn Aubitz, United States Archivist John Carlin said he had “appointed a high-level management task force to review internal security measures” at the National Archives. “A preliminary set of recommendations are under review and a number of new measures are already in place.” Four years later, an unpaid summer intern smuggled 160 documents out of the very same Archives branch. His only tool was a yellow legal pad.

Health care reform and federalism’s tug of war within

By Erin Ryan
This month, the Supreme Court will decide what some believe will be among the most important cases in the history of the institution. In the “Obamacare” cases, the Court considers whether the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) exceeds the boundaries of federal authority under the various provisions of the Constitution that establish the relationship between local and national governance. Its response will determine the fate of Congress’s efforts to grapple with the nation’s health care crisis, and perhaps other legislative responses to wicked regulatory problems like climate governance or education policy.

World Refugee Day: holding up the mirror?

By Alison Kesby
You may be aware that today, 20 June 2012, is World Refugee Day. At one level, World Refugee Day is a time to pause and take stock of the state of international protection – to examine anew the myriad causes of refugee flows and the strengths and weaknesses of the international protection system. It is a time to reaffirm the importance of the 1951 Refugee Convention but also to ask afresh important questions: who today is in need of protection, and why?

In this ‘information age’, is privacy dead?

By Raymond Wacks
Are public figures entitled to privacy? Or do they forfeit their right? Is privacy possible online? Does the law adequately protect private lives? Should the media be more strictly controlled? What of your sensitive medical or financial data? Are they safe and secure? Has the Internet changed everything?

How not to infringe Olympic intellectual property rights

By Rachel Montagnon
Since 2005, when London won the Host City contract for this year’s Olympics, there has been an intensity of interest in how the London Organising Committee (LOCOG) would go about the protection of the Olympic image and in the detail of the UK Government’s legislative attempts to exclude those who would attempt to take advantage of that image, without paying for the privilege.

How New York Beat Crime

By Franklin E. Zimring
For the past two decades New Yorkers have been the beneficiaries of the ‘argest and longest sustained drop in street crime ever experienced by a big city in the developed world. In less than a generation, rates of several common crimes that inspire public fear — homicide, robbery and burglary — dropped by more than 80 percent. By 2009 the homicide rate was lower than it had been in I961. The risk of being robbed was less than one sixth of its 1990 level, and the risk of car theft had declined to one sixteenth.

Reforming the Farm Bill

By Amanda Kay McVety
On 5 June, the US Senate began discussing its draft of the 2012 farm bill. The final bill will govern American farm and food policy for the next five years, and quite a bit of attention is being paid to proposed changes in the funding of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) and environmental sustainability programs. But more than America’s health is at stake because the bill will affect farmers and families around the globe. What happens here matters there. Government subsidies to “farmers” (often actually massive agribusinesses) in the world’s wealthiest nations make life harder for everyone in the world’s poorest.

What should we do with failed businesses?

By Jason Kilborn
What should we do with failed businesses? This question has plagued societies around the world for centuries. With the advent of formal bankruptcy or insolvency procedures in the Middle Ages, the questions have multiplied as societies on every continent except Antarctica have struggled to implement the most effective techniques for managing private economic collapse.

On America’s Constitutions

Many have focused on the US Constitution as an enduring document that has guided America from a young, chaotic nation to a world power, but are we missing its flaws? For every “majestic generality” of the constitution, there are the bizarre burdens of electoral college and quirks of governance. We sat down with Sanford Levinson, author of Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance, to talk about America’s constitutions — state and national — and their role in current politics.

The US Supreme Court on plea bargaining

By Richard Lippke
Are individuals entitled to effective assistance of legal counsel as they decide whether or not to enter guilty pleas instead of going to trial? In two recent decisions by the US Supreme Court, a narrow majority of the Court said “yes”.