Is SCOTUS ruling good or bad for Obama?
While one survey found a slight uptick in the popularity of Obamacare since the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on the Affordable Care Act, the larger question pertains to whether or not the legislative victory will help President Obama in the long-run, and that jury is still out.
A poll conducted after Thursday’s ruling and published on Sunday found an uptick in Americans’ support for the health reform law – but the majority is still against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Before the ruling, 43 percent of respondents supported the ACA and as of Sunday that rose to 48 percent – while those opposed fell from 57 to 52 percent, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll.
"This is a win for Obama. This is his bill. There's not really any doubt in people's minds that it belongs to him," Julia Clark, vice president at Ipsos Public Affairs told Reuters in this article. "It's his baby. It's literally been labeled 'Obamacare' ... which maybe works in his favor now that there's a little bit of a victory dance going on."
Even still, Reuters reported that, “Republican opposition to the law stayed strong, if somewhat weaker than before the high court ruled.”
Prior to the court’s decision, 86 percent of Republicans opposed it – a statistic that dropped to 81 percent in the latest survey, while the flip side found that 14 percent of Republicans previously supported the ACA, and now 19 percent do. Among Democrats, meanwhile, support held tight at 75 percent in favor, 25 percent against.
Whether changes reflected in the poll will continue or abate as buzz and controversy about the Supreme Court’s ruling dies down remains to be seen. But some pundits are already suggesting that the ruling may ultimately hurt President Obama more than it helps.
“This dismaying result may be a particularly painful defeat for conservatives who expected something different from Roberts, but its impact on Obama’s presidency — however long it lasts — may be severe,” Poulos wrote in a Forbes post Chief Justice Roberts betrays conservatives, dooms Obama. “It ties his signature accomplishment to one of the most potent political divisions in a generation. It hardwires divisiveness into the survival of the law.”
And that comes at a time when Americans are already more politically polarized than they have been in the last 25 years, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Whereas there were 10 points separating them in 1987, “Republicans and Democrats are now divided by an average 18 percentage points across 48 value questions about government, business, the environment and social issues,” Pew’s survey found.
No area is more widely-divided than the social safety nets, which Pew determined to be an average difference of 41 percentage points between Republican and Democrat respondents.
Indeed, Republicans are already lashing back. Florida Governor Rick Scott, for instance, said that, “What that ruling showed us is we have two opportunities. One, we don't have to do the expansion," Scott said. "I mean, the expansion's not going to be good for anybody. It's gonna cost $1.9 billion a year growing. It'll make Florida way more dependent, we'll have to have to raise our taxes.”
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, meanwhile, has already scheduled a vote for July 11 to repeal the law. "We know that most of the American people don't like this law," Cantor said on CBS, adding that what people really want is patient-centered care.
That kind of political back and forth may be exactly what Chief Justice Roberts had in mind when joining the left in the ruling. “I am beginning to see some Machiavellian possibilities in Chief Justice Robert's actions. I agree that he was looking to salvage the reputation of the court as a neutral arbiter, and that he is not a fan of the President nor the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But he may have found a way to appear fair, while also trying to do political damage to the legislation's supporters,” contends Brian Ahier in a blog post: Political implications of the Supreme Court decision on health reform. The Health IT Evangelist at Mid-Columbia Medical Center, City Councilor in The Dalles, Oregon continued that “the fact that the health reform law remains in place may end up hurting the president's chances for re-election more than helping them. Chief Justice Roberts certainly knows this is a possibility and could have slyly saved reform, only to ultimately try to ensure its death. I believe his hope is that the political process will undo the legislation.”
Tom Sullivan blogs regularly at Government Health IT.
