Up and out of bed and at the computer at 6:45 a.m. because today—like so many other days before it this month—could be the day.


Have to agree with Chris. Other decisions are being released while we wait for the two biggies...


This good news and counts as a biggie. The court has ruled that a law can be racist—and it can be challenged—even if everyone in the Texas state legislature was veeeeeery careful not to use the n-word during debate and even if the governor of Texas remembered not to wave the Confederate battle flag at the signing ceremony.

And here's a biggie...


The decision upholding Obamacare, which will prevent Republican governors from stripping millions of Americans in red states of the health insurance on a technicality, wasn't even close: 6-3. Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan all voted in the pro-Obamacare majority. The last time the Supremes had a chance to destroy Obamacare the tally was 5-4 and Roberts cast the crucial deciding vote. This time Obamacare didn't need Roberts but got him anyway; Roberts even wrote the majority opinion. From that majority opinion: "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them." Speaking on behalf of the left: We only wish Congress had designed the ACA to destroy health insurance markets—we wish the ACA shut the private and immoral health insurance market/racket down and replaced it with Medicare for all, aka a single-payer health-care system. You know, the kind of health-care system they have in Israel, that socialist hellhole conservatives are always railing against? That health-care system.

Says Scalia in his (inevitable, predictable) dissent: "We should start calling this law SCOTUScare."

Say the crazed commenters at Breitbart: Tyranny! Tyrants! Tyrannical! Nazism! Stalinism! Islamism! Obama must be blackmailing Roberts! Transgender people are the worst! What do transgender people have to do with SCOTUS upholding Obamacare? Nothing! But let's bash 'em anyway! (Salon rounds up some more crazed right-wing reaction.)

Says Scotusblog: "A victory for the ACA and the Obama Administration."

True. This is victory for the ACA and the Obama administration. But it's also a victory for our immoral, profit-driven health insurance industry. I'm honesty glad the court upheld Obamacare and I'm honestly glad that millions of people living in red states—many of them Republicans, many of them Breitbart commenters—aren't going to lose their health insurance because their Republican governors would rather see them die than see Obama win one.

But a part of me kindasorta wishes SCOTUS had destroyed Obamacare.

"We tried it your way, conservatives," we lefties would be able to say in the wake of Obamacare's defeat. "The ACA and its 'free markets' and its massive subsidies for private health insurance companies—that was your plan all along. Of course it was a conservative plan: By design, the ACA left millions of Americans uninsured and tens of thousands would suffer and die as a result. That plan has 'Republican' stamped all over it. Don't try to pretend it wasn't yours: The ACA was designed by the right-wingers at the Heritage Institute as the Republican alternative to single-payer. You pretended to hate it because a black Democrat got it through Congress. But you motherfuckers would've been lining up to eat presidential ass if it had been a white Republican president that signed the ACA into law. That's not the way it played out. Obama got your health-care plan through Congress and signed it into law so you had to pretend to hate it—which also meant pretending it wasn't your idea all along—and now you've convinced the court it's unconstitutional on a technicality because black guy. We get it. And you know what? Fuck you and your right-wing alternatives to single-payer. Now we're going to push for—and we will settle for nothing less than—a single-payer health-care system. Fuck you some more."

That's what we would've been saying this morning if SCOTUS had scrapped Obamacare. But they didn't. So instead we're saying yay for the right-wing alternative to single-payer. Yay.

No more decisions today. We will all have to get up at the same time tomorrow when the court might—or might not—release its marriage equality decision.

Says Vox:


Under single-payer, the uninsured rate would drop to zero.

Says David Axelrod:


True. Now Jeb!, Cruz, Rubio, Huckabee, Santorum, et al can safely campaign/demagogue against Obamacare without having to worry about the consequences.

Says Obama:


Back to work? I've been at work since six in the morning. I'm going back to bed.