But there are still deep divisions among the justices.
This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a unanimous ruling of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. Sign up here. Original Formula Saturday Night Live once had a running gag on “Weekend Update” where Chevy Chase would announce, “This just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” The Affordable Care Act has become something like the anti-Franco: It keeps not being dead. Its latest brush with the grave was a lawsuit by 13 conservative attorneys general that most experts laughed off as ridiculous, until it also kept not-dying, all the way to the very conservative Supreme Court. But that court today agreed overwhelmingly the lawsuit was, in fact, ridiculous. Only Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch could read it without cracking up. Noah Feldman takes heart from this ruling, evidence that in our polarized age there still exist some common-sense ideas on which even Sonya Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas can agree. This one just happens to keep the ACA alive. Again. Not that there isn’t division on the court, of course. In the day’s other big ruling, all nine judges agreed Philadelphia can’t force Catholic Social Services to put foster kids in gay families. But Noah Feldman, in a second column, points out that beneath the placid surface of these unanimous waters, all nine justices were contorting themselves into impossible positions to lay the groundwork for future battles over religion and LGBTQ rights. Polarization is still not dead, either. Further Courts Reading: Everybody who owns a house knows it isn’t all porch swings and picket fences. It’s also termites and boilers that crap out in February. On the other hand, it’s also soul-crushingly expensive. Still: Homeownership is the American Dream, I am required by the Constitution to type. Or at least it had a strong American Dream argument, somewhere up until around the time we started slicing and dicing mortgages and selling them in bundles with AAA credit ratings.
