Roberts Court

by Jeremy Leaming

So it appears just based on oral argument action, if you believe pundits, such as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin that the high court’s conservative justices are ready to trash precedent and accept the simplistic arguments of the challengers that the Affordable Care Act’s minimum coverage provision is a wild overreach by the federal government.

As noted in this ACSblog post, UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler says we shouldn’t be surprised that the high court’s right-wing majority may be leaning this way. It has already proved it has no problem shunning precedent or being out-of-touch, for example see Citizens United v. FEC.

In a piece for The Huffington Post, ACS President Caroline Fredrickson argued against the idea that the minimum coverage provision is “unprecedented,” as its challengers like to call it.

“What is truly radical,” Fredrickson says, “is the economic theory the state and individual challengers are pushing, which calls for a greatly limiting the ability of Congress to address national concerns. It’s an argument that longs for the days when courts actively shut down congressional attempts to solve national problems.”

Geoffrey Stone, a constitutional law expert and a member of the ACS board, explains, also in a Huffington Post article, why the law’s minimum coverage provision, which will require Americans who can afford to do so to starting carrying health care insurance in 2014, is seemingly so unappealing to the high court’s conservative wing. Primarily the conservative wing appears to be obsessed with a slippery slope – if folks can be required to purchase health care insurance then what’s next?

Stone notes that the “slippery slope is a means of reasoning, not a conclusion. Every principle and decision has a slippery slope: The question is whether we can get off the slope before it reaches bad outcomes. In this instance, this is easy. The decisions of millions of individual Americans not to purchase health insurance (even though they can afford it) have a dramatic impact on the cost of health care for everyone else and on interstate commerce. This is clearly an appropriate matter for federal attention under the Commerce Clause.”

By Monica Youn, the Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow at NYU School of Law, and the editor of Money, Politics and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United.

That the conservative majority of the Roberts Court are champions of free speech is a trope that simply refuses to die. The New York Times summed up the Court’s most recent term by describing free speech as a “signature project” of Chief Justice Roberts, and numerous commentators have chimed in, contributing to the common misperception that the Roberts Court is “the most free speech Court in American history.”  Efforts to debunk this myth, by Erwin Chemerinsky, David Cole, and Nadine Strossen, among others, have seemingly failed to make much of a dent in the popular wisdom. 

Ben Sachs’ forthcoming Columbia Law Review article, “Unions, Corporations, and Political Opt-Out Rights after Citizens United,” serves as a useful corrective, and, indeed, is one of the absolutely essential pieces of scholarship that I’ve seen in the wake of the decision. But before getting into the article in more depth, let’s look at some basic numbers for background.

In its first five years, from 2006 until 2011, the Roberts Court granted certiorari in 29* cases in which a free speech violation was claimed (including the speech, press, assembly, and association guarantees). In these cases, the Court held that that a free speech violation existed in 10 of the cases, and that no free speech violation had been demonstrated in 19 of these cases. Thus, simply looking at the numbers, the Roberts Court has supported a free speech claim in 34.48 percent of argued cases. By way of comparison, as Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal have shown, from 1953 to 2004, the Supreme Court supported claims of deprivation of First Amendment liberties in 53.95 percent of argued cases. Thus, at the most basic quantitative level, the Roberts Court seems to be not especially protective of free speech rights.