SCOTUS and the Road to Nullification

It is possible the media is playing up the Worst Case Scenario regarding the impending SCOTUS decision on the Affordable Care Act and now the case before SCOTUS concerning Arizona's Draconian anti-immigration legislation.   I would certainly like to think that's all it is.  Most of the news stories carry a caveat about how the oral argument does not really tell much about how SCOTUS will finally rule.  I would like to take some comfort in that, but it seems it works both ways.   I believe most people thought the Citizens United case would be decided on narrow grounds and be fairly inconsequential, based on whatever it was SCOTUS seemed to be signaling--or not signaling--before the case was actually decided.   What the people got was a surprise:     SCOTUS ruled orporations are people too and get to spend as much money as they like to spread their opinions around.  Therefore, I am now wondering if it is only a matter of time before outfits like Angie's List or Consumer Reports get hit with a deluge of lawsuits for libel and slander because they dissed somebody or other's product in the ratings.  

I still have not got my head around the re-interpretation of the second amendment that seems to nullify the many laws and regulations designed to cut down on the epidemic of senseless gun violence.  

Even if SCOTUS only overturns the individual mandate and severs the rest of ACA from the ruling, it seems to me to throw the door open to arguments from, say, the fringe "sovereign citizen" movement--at least if the states are willing to entertain such, which, given the far right Republican condition of some of the state legislatures doesn't seem like such a stretch.  Not so long ago a member of the U.S. Congress, speaking from the floor of the House, openly expressed sympathy for the man who crashed his plane into an IRS facility in Austin, killing himself and at least one IRS employee.   

And how can allowing Arizona essentially to determine its own immigration enforcement policy fail to lead to a welter of state laws that could render U.S. immigration policy incoherent and/or futile.  (It seems it should cut both ways.   SCOTUS has ruled that California cannot enforce more stringent environmental laws than the U.S. has because it would infringe upon trade treaties the U.S. has made with other countries allowing foreign corporations to do business in the U.S. according to U.S. laws).  

R. 

 

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