How Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Will Rule on Obamacare (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | When the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on the Affordable Care Act, often called "Obamacare" in the media, in 2012, speculation immediately centered on how each judge would vote. Conservatives point to the fact that a majority of justices (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy) were appointed by Republican presidents, dooming the ACA to defeat against the four Democrat appointees (Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Breyer and Kagan).

But it's not that simple. Appointees have a history of going against the party of the president who appointed them. And it will be no different with Justice Anthony Kennedy, picked by President Ronald Reagan.

One of the clearest signals of Kennedy's support came with his vote with the majority on the Gonzales v. Raich case in 2004, where he agreed with Justice Stevens that the Controlled Substances Act passed by Congress trumped California's "Compassionate Use Act," allowing Congress to regulate marijuana for medicinal purposes in a pretty broad interpretation of congressional power to employ the interstate commerce clause for a broad range of activities, according to The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Smart conservatives know this, and have reminded us of Kennedy's vote on U.S. v. Lopez case (also from The Oyez Project) from 1994 to 1995. Here, a boy brought a gun to high school, and he was arrested by local authorities. These charges were dropped in favor of federal charges from the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, passed by Congress. In court, the U.S. argued that local school zone activity triggered the application of the interstate commerce clause.

Here's what Justice Kennedy had to say in his opinion: "The statute before us upsets the federal balance to a degree that renders it an unconstitutional assertion of the commerce power, and our intervention is required. As The Chief Justice explains, unlike the earlier cases to come before the Court here neither the actors nor their conduct has a commercial character, and neither the purposes nor the design of the statute has an evident commercial nexus." He rejected a broad application of the commerce clause, but didn't feel it applied to guns in schools.

In this ruling, Kennedy was also clear to point out "Congress can regulate in the commercial sphere on the assumption that we have a single market and a unified purpose to build a stable national economy." It sounds as though he's ready to back the ACA.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/obama/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20111130/pl_ac/10558729_how_supreme_court_justice_anthony_kennedy_will_rule_on_obamacare

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