Washington Post : Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan should have no trouble approving ObamaCare - Scalia and Kennedy may join them

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Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy joined with their more liberal colleagues to uphold another law under the government’s Commerce Clause powers.

Washington Post -
Obama may have more than five votes to uphold health-care law -
By Eva Rodriguez -
September 28, 2011

Obama may have more than five votes to uphold health-care law

Some excerpts :

The Obama administration’s decision on Wednesday to seek review of a lower court’s ruling on the constitutionality of its signature health-care program almost guarantees a Supreme Court decision by next June. And the administration is predicting victory.

“We believe the challenges to Affordable Care Act . . . will ultimately fail and that the Supreme Court will uphold the law,” the administration said in a statement.

So, does the president have the requisite five votes to prevail? I think so — and maybe more.

Prognosticating what the justices will do is always risky business, but here goes. (Sprinkle grain of salt here.)

The four more liberal justices on the court — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — should have no trouble reading the Constitution as bestowing broad powers on the federal government to regulate all manner of commerce. Although the court in recent years has pinched back congressional efforts to use the Commerce Clause to promulgate laws prohibiting guns near schools and those targeting violence against women, these were clearly non-commercial activities and quite different from the health-care law and its regulation of the medical insurance marketplace. Stronger and more directly applicable precedents remain, in which the court blessed the government’s regulation of wheat and marijuana production because these activities had an impact on interstate commerce.

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