Tuesday, October 4

Charles Lane in the WaPo...

runs alongside, then jumps aboard the "Remand" bandwagon, or more truthfully, the Deny Cert group. (Plenty o' room for all of youse now...)

For all the eagerness with which the law’s opponents have rushed into court to stop it, and for all the urgency with which the Obama administration now demands that the court uphold it, the individual mandate, and the accompanying financial penalty, does not take effect until 2014.

Surely this lawsuit can wait until there’s a plaintiff who’s actually been told to get insurance, or else. In the meantime, Congress could well repeal or change the law -- or at least the mandate -- thus rendering the whole constitutional dispute moot. Letting the political process run its course is what judicial restraint is supposed to be all about.
...
Five years ago, the finest appellate lawyer of his generation stood before an audience of Georgetown University law students and explained that, for the Court, restraint is often the better part of valor:

“If it is not necessary to decide more to a case,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, “then in my view it is necessary not to decide more to a case.” He and his colleagues need to remember those words, and live by them, now.


I guess ... they can hear us now.