Perhaps a not-discreditable sense of the political moment lies behind the chief justice's opinion after all. The court's job, he wrote, is not to "protect the people from the consequences of their political choices."
He may have meant: The chief justice's job is to get the court out of the way while the body politic still remains suspended between recognizing the unsustainabilty of the current welfare model and deciding what to do about it.
This was always the fatal problem of ObamaCare. Reality could not have instructed President Obama more plainly: The last thing we needed, in a country staggering under deficits and debt, a sluggish economy and an unaffordable entitlement structure, was a new Rube Goldberg entitlement. The last thing we needed was ObamaCare. The nation and the times were asking Mr. Obama to reform health care, not to double-down on everything wrong with the current system.
Even with this week's Court success, he failed—and it's not as if there wasn't a deep well of policy understanding in Washington that he could have drawn on to take the country in a better direction. Regardless of any Supreme Court ruling, reality will pass its own judgment on the Affordable Care Act and it won't be favorable.
