Affordable Care Act upheld by Supreme Court

While the primary focus of this site is registry info, real estate statistics and technology, during the almost nine years of its existence, the LowellDeeds blog has served a secondary purpose of creating our own record of important external events.  Scanning through the archives you will find posts celebrating World Series victories and bemoaning region-stalling blizzards.  With that in mind, I thought it important to make note of today's announcement by the US Supreme Court of its decision upholding the Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

Back in March, many read the pointed questions and comments by various justices during the oral arguments as signalling the imminent invalidation of the law, or at least the individual mandate portion of it.  Proponents it seemed re-defined victory as the preservation of all but that individual mandate which many saw as a lost cause.  For that reason, today's upholding of almost all of the law including the mandate by a five to four vote came as a shock to most.  Also a shock was the makeup of the five justices in the majority: it included Chief Justice Roberts who had seemed, up until this week at least, as a reliable leg of the court's conservative block.

Opponents of the law immediately forecast its downfall via the ballot box in November if not in the halls of Congress even sooner.  But for now the law stands.  The full decision is here and what seems, by overwhelming consensus, to be the best commentary available on the machinations of the court on this and other issues, SCOTUSBLOG, is available here.