Health Care Question

[Ira (Chip) Lupu]

This discussion is getting awfully shrill.  Rioting in the streets over a decision on the constitutionality of the health care bill?  Please.  

Permit me to offer a story.  I was on a brief vacation in Broward County, Florida, on that day in December, 2000, when the Supreme Court ruled in Bush v. Gore II that the election was over, and that Florida should stop its recount.  What was so striking to me was that everyone on the beach, and on the streets, and in the restaurants, were very quiet -- everyone went about his or her business as if nothing had happened.  No doubt, inside the Washington Beltway, where I work, everyone was going crazy.  Outside that Beltway (and outside the legal academy), people take very large political decisions quite in stride.

By the way, re: affirmative duties to act -- read U.S. v. Miller re: the laws of Virginia, NY, etc, compelling able-bodied men to acquire (at their own expense) arms and ammunition for use in the state militia. 

 
Ira C. Lupu
F. Elwood & Eleanor Davis Professor of Law
George Washington University Law School
2000 H St., NW 
Washington, DC 20052
(202)994-7053
My SSRN papers are here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=181272#reg


---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:38:16 -0400
>From: conlawprof-bounces at lists.ucla.edu (on behalf of Nelson Lund <nlund at gmu.edu>)
>Subject: Re: Health Care Question  
>To: CONLAWPROFS professors <CONLAWPROF at lists.ucla.edu>
>
>   Presumably, then, rioting in the streets should also
>   be an appropriate response if the Court does not do
>   that? Or should one's view of the propriety of
>   rioting in the streets differ depending on whether
>   one agrees with the legal merits of the Court's
>   decisions? Or on one's views of the merits of the
>   legislation at issue? Or one's views of what is
>   "transcendentally important"? Or on whether the
>   decision was made by Republican judges?
>
>   Nelson Lund
>   George Mason
>
>   Sanford Levinson wrote:
>
>     I confess I find it also a bit bizarre that the
>     discussion proceeds as if it is totally irrelevant
>     that a 5-judge Republican majority  will be asked
>     to set aside, on the basis of remarkable
>     controversial (and, for many of us, entirely
>     dubious) theories of the Constitution, the most
>     important piece of domestic legislation in almost
>     fifty years.  I think it would be a far more
>     remarkable piece of interventionism than even the
>     Old Court in 1935-36 in terms of the invalidation
>     of a truly central (indeed, transcendentally
>     important) piece of legislation.  Would there be
>     rioting in the streets if the Court did that?  I
>     certainly hope so.
>
>      
>
>     sandy
>
>      
>________________
>_______________________________________________
>To post, send message to Conlawprof at lists.ucla.edu
>To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/conlawprof
>
>Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private.  Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.