The Two Sides of the One-Sided Affair

The Huffington Post has an article up about Jon Stewart blasting the House Republicans for causing the government shutdown over the “… f**king law!”

The article also states, and I don’t believe they are quoting Stewart here, that Jon:

placed the blame squarely on the House Republicans for going to great lengths in their one-sided fight against the Affordable Care Act.

My first thought in reading that was: And this is as opposed the the Democrats going to great lengths, including not even reading the bill, in their one-sided effort to pass the law in the first place?

The article also mentions Stewart’s comment that “all three branches of government had upheld the law.”  Two of those branches were bound and determined to force this legislature through without any Republican support and the third has long had a policy, as I noted here, of deferring to the legislature in economic issues.

But the law need not be in every respect logically consistent with its aims to be constitutional. It is enough that there is an evil at hand for correction, and that it might be thought that the particular legislative measure was a rational way to correct it.

In other words, if you can get a law passed that affects economics in the United States, you pretty much don’t have to worry about the judicial branch taking action against it.  As the decision in the Supreme Court case last year regarding, among other things, the validity of the individual mandate, the Court declared:

When a court confronts an unconstitutional statute, its endeavor must be to conserve, not destroy, the legislation.

In other words, if the Congress manages to pass an unconstitutional law, the court will bend over backwards to find a way to find it constitutional.

So let us not pretend that the Democrats are the ones wearing the white hats.