Baldwin, Connery in "Hunt for Red October"
Film Friday
Yesterday’s Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision upholding Obamacare had all the makings of a Hollywood movie. After all, it had enough unpredictable twists and turns to keep observers on the edge of their seats to the final closing shots.
Here’s one film adaptation. Supporters of the uninsured and uninsurable make a desperate plea to the Supreme Court, including to Antonin Scalia, who appears to be Lionel Barrymore playing Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. To ramp up the emotional appeal, the film has given us the drama of a child with pre-existing conditions who can’t get healthcare (to get a sense of the emotional punch, think of the hungry kids in Grapes of Wrath). A heroic lawyer–say, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, or Gregory Peck–talks of the 30 million Americans who will remain vulnerable to illness if Obamacare goes down, but he is derisively mocked with inane hypotheticals involving broccoli. The one hope is for a conservative to vote with the four liberals—potential swing justice Anthony Kennedy, played by John Lithgow—but unfortunately he seems to buy the broccoli argument. All hope seems lost.
The decisive moment arrives and Supreme Court John Roberts (Sean Connery) reads the decision. As he proceeds to dismantle the Commerce Clause argument—that Congress can regulate interstate commerce and can therefore require “free riders” to buy health insurance —there are reaction shots of liberals groaning and putting their heads in their hands. CNN and Fox News report to the nation that the Supreme Court has found the mandate unconstitutional, thereby destroying Obamacare.
But wait a moment. These news networks have jumped the gun. It turns out that there is a special clause that, if two arguments are put forth and the Supreme Court finds one constitutional, even though the other is not, then the law itself is deemed constitutional. It so happens that the Solicitor General, when he argued for Obamacare, had made a fallback argument that the mandate is a tax. And if it a tax, then the law is constitutional because no justice questions Congress’s right to levy taxes. As Justice Roberts reads on, liberal expressions begin to change.
There he is, the “radical in robes” as liberal blogger Michael Tomasky has called him, arguing that the mandate is a tax and therefore constitutional. The law is saved and the family of our sick little girl, is shown capering around her bedside. The movie ends with triumphal music, a liberal happy ending.
But is this the real end of the movie? Maybe there’s another twist. And because Hollywood only gives us happy endings, we now have to imagine that our movie is a rightwing film.
It turns out that Roberts is just pretending to side with the four liberals because he had bigger goal—to defeat the villainous Obama and to undermine the power of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. (To make this plot work, you have to forget about sick children.) Therefore, while tricking the Left to applaud him, he reframes the issue in such a way that Obama is seen to have raised taxes. This sets the president up to be defeated by Mitt Romney, who will then ride in on his white horse and repeal this tyrannical measure (thereby redeeming his own youthful indiscretion, when he was in favor of a mandate). Freedom from broccoli wins the day.
In this version of the movie, Roberts is Sean Connery in Hunt for Red October, pretending to attack the United States when actually he’s defecting. Or maybe he’s Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting, who only pretend to kill each other
In his daring move, Roberts proves the Court to be impartial, not a bunch of partisan hacks. This means that he can be more effective when he plays the long game, say undermining affirmative action, union organizing, and the like. Like the young disillusioned admirers in Shane or Destry Rides Again, Roberts’ conservative attackers do an about-face. The final scene shows them gazing up adoringly.
Am I, an enthusiastic supporter of universal health care, refusing to see that my glass is half full. A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish would compare me to Woody Allen:
“This decision is a major political problem for Obama”? And this: “…this ruling was a disaster for the left”?? Are these people fucking kidding me? They remind me of that scene in Hannah and Her Sisters where Woody Allen’s character learns he doesn’t have a brain tumor. He comes running out of his doctor’s office, dancing down the street, before suddenly realizing that life is still horrible and meaningless. He then turns around goes shuffling down the street in the other direction. The American Left: even when they’re winning, they think they’re losing.
Let’s take this for what it was: A huge political victory for Obama. But more importantly, a huge victory for all Americans who have suffered and are suffering because of a lack of health insurance. We haven’t won the war yet, but we just won a major battle.
Point taken, both about my undue pessimism and about the war not yet being over. There will be many more twists and turns to this movie. Whee!
