The latest Newsweek attempts to read the tea leaves associated with the ObamaCare Supreme Court hearing by analyzing the high court’s perennial swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy:
If Kennedy has a lodestar, it is a fixation on individual liberty. That is why liberals heard his questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, on the constitutionality of Obamacare’s linchpin individual mandate, with such foreboding. In obliging every American to purchase a health-care policy, Kennedy mused, the law “changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.”
Helen Knowles, who has written a book about Kennedy’s opinions, thought she saw a clear signal in that exchange suggesting Kennedy was leaning against the government. But Knowles also notes Kennedy’s insistence upon individual responsibility, and his remarks in that regard—noting that an individual’s decision not to buy health insurance does have an effect on the health-care market—gave liberals some cause for hope. “I have no idea just which way he’s going to come out on this,” she says.
Kennedy has regularly dealt grief to both sides of the ideological spectrum. Liberals still blame him for the presidency of George W. Bush because of his deciding vote in Bush v. Gore. Most maddening to conservatives has been Kennedy’s inconstancy. In 1992 a Republican majority believed that it had Kennedy’s vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Justice Antonin Scalia had gone for a walk with Kennedy the night before the decision and thought he had Kennedy’s vote. The next day Kennedy voted with the abortion-rights bloc upholding Roe.
