Lost in the shuffle here is the question of what it is Romney is denying he’s responsible for. Stipulate that Romney somehow had nothing to do with running a company of which he was the CEO and sole shareholder. Does he think, in retrospect, that his subordinates did something wrong by offshoring jobs? Clearly he […]

In a comment to my post yesterday titled “Romney’s VERY Private Equity,” which asked how Romney was able to metasticze his Bain-era IRA account to accumulate more than $100 million—Investment in Apple stock?  In precious-metals funds?  A quiet Louvre heist? I asked—reader Steve Hamlin wrote: Beverly, Re: Romney’s IRA contributions, there was a WSJ article […]

By now there’s been a lot of discussion in the media about the Vanity Fair and Associated Press exposés of Romney’s and his wife’s offshore bank accounts, to the limited extent that information about them is publicly available.  Romney is now likening overseas bank accounts and shell/money-laundering corporations to investing in real overseas companies—as if […]

Seems the devil really isin the details.  Or lack thereof.  Or (in this case) both.

The second biggest surprise of the day, after the survival of the Affordable Care Act, is that we’ve never really gotten over our collective crush on John Roberts. How else to explain today’s outpouring of praise, not merely for the decision but for the man himself, for his statesmanship and judicial modesty? All these years, […]

The chief justice, echoing Justice Scalia’s “broccoli” comment at the oral argument, rejected (as did the four dissenters, and so that is now the view of a majority of the justices) the Commerce Clause ground for the mandate, saying that to accept that ground would mean that “Congress could address the diet problem by ordering […]

Some people think Roberts cleverly used this case to severely limit Congress’s regulatory powers.  Others strongly disagree. I’m with the others. I think that as a practical matter, this will have almost no limiting effect at all on Congress’s regulatory powers.  I can’t think of any circumstance in which this limitation would apply and in […]

Yep, that’s right. (HT, Slate.) OK, guys, I COULDN’T RESIST. (After doing all this blogging on the case all day, I think I’m punch-drunk.) Hicccuppp.

I think there was a clue to Roberts’ thinking during the first day of argument—during the argument on the applicability of the Anti-Injunction Act, an obscure “jurisdictional” statute, which precludes courts from ruling on the constitutionality of a federal tax until after the statute becomes effective and the tax actually is due.  Roberts really indicated […]

While the Court’s upholding the mandate is deservedly taking front stage in the media coverage, the Court’s decision to strike down a part of the Medicaid expansion may ultimately have broader jurisdprudential consequence.  That, at least, will be a subject of debate among lawyers and academics in the days and weeks to come.  This is […]