Elena Kagan in U.S. News and World Report
On Civil Rights:
Concurred on allowing federal ObamaCare subsidies
The Supreme Court upheld one of the main tenets of ObamaCare, ruling 6-3 that millions of Americans are entitled to keep the tax subsidies that help them afford insurance. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court's majority opinion and was joined by
Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.The ruling, the 2nd case in which the justices have decided in favor of the Affordable Care Act, preserves benefits for an estimated 6.4 million Americans &
deals a crippling blow to the law's Republican opponents, who have attempted to undermine it since its passage in 2010.
The law's architects claimed that subsidies were always meant to be distributed through both federal and state channels, and that
the goal of the law was to cover all Americans. The Supreme Court agreed. Roberts said [forbidding federal subsidies] "would destabilize the individual insurance market, and likely create the very 'death spirals' that Congress designed the Act to avoid."
Source: US News&World Report on 2015 SCOTUS decision King v. Burwell
Jun 25, 2015
On Government Reform:
Aggressive advocate for campaign finance reform
Kagan has already distinguished herself as an aggressive advocate for campaign finance reform. The first case Kagan argued as solicitor general was Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee. It was one of the cases Obama referenced when he
said, "In a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens." In one fell swoop, the Court upended decades of campaign finance laws that kept corporations and their unlimited financial resources out
of the political process. Kagan argued that if Roberts and the other conservative justices had their way, which they ultimately did, the voice of the ordinary American would simply be overpowered by the deep pockets of corporate America.
This issue is not going away anytime soon. In one way or another, it will be before the Court in the coming years and the next justice will play a critical role in the outcome.
Source: Josh Gottheimer in US News & World Report, "5 Reasons"
Apr 9, 2010
Page last updated: Aug 01, 2023