Over the courthouse

Last week, I sat in an audience as Florida's newly-minted health-care-executive-turned-Governor Rick Scott cheered the District Court judge in Florida that "overturned" that evil scourge known in his circles as "Obamacare," which, as Governor Scott informed us, would otherwise have been the worst piece of budget-busting, tax-raising, job-killing legislation in the history of humanity (not exaggerating). So, what to make of this "overturned" legislation? Is there any chance that the more-conservative-and-more-Republican-than-not U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the recent District Court decisions in Florida and Virginia and kill health care reform?

Laurence Tribe thinks (hopes) not, and takes personal affront, on behalf of himself and the honorable justices of the Supreme Court, to the shameful idea that the Supreme Court could put ideology above the law and strike down the Affordable Health Care Act.

There is every reason to believe that a strong, nonpartisan majority of justices will do their constitutional duty, set aside how they might have voted had they been members of Congress and treat this constitutional challenge for what it is — a political objection in legal garb.

That's the conclusion. But Tribe's outrage over the very idea of a different result is the really beautiful part of the OpEd, this argument couched as a stalwart defense of integrity, this attempt to convince - not me, not you, I think, but the justices themselves - that Laurence Tribe respects them so much that, geez, they just could never, ever break the faith and act as, heaven forbid, legislators rather than honest arbiters of the truth embodied in the Constitution.

Who said chivalry was dead?