One may be loath to read all 193 pages of Thursday's U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, including dissents and footnotes.
But some of it is quite instructive, even entertaining, and in some places, downright sarcastic. The Justices wrote with some passion, and used several catch phrases to signify major themes in their legal wrangling.
We highlighted a few. To see the context, and perhaps select your own, visit the Supreme Court website.
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1. "Economic dragooning"
Chief Justice John Roberts used this phrase in his majority argument striking down the PPACA provision that states refusing to expand Medicaid programs to people earning up to 133% of the federal poverty level would lose all Medicaid funding. One definition of the word dragooning (we had to look it up) means to compel by violent measures or threats.
"The threatened loss of over 10% of a State's overall budget is economic dragooning that leaves the States with no real option but to acquiesce in the Medicaid expansion," Roberts wrote.
2. "The broccoli horrible"
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg used this phrase somewhat sarcastically in her ridicule of Justice Roberts' rejection of allowing the individual mandate to be enforced under the Commerce Clause.
Roberts wrote, "Under the Government's theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables."
Ginsburg countered: "As an example of the type of regulation he fears, the Chief Justice cites a Government mandate to purchase green vegetables ... One could call this concern 'the broccoli horrible.' Congress, the Chief Justice posits, might adopt such a mandate reasoning that an individual's failure to eat a healthy diet, like the failure to purchase health insurance, imposes costs on others."
3. "A loan shark's extortionate collections from a neighborhood butcher shop."
Variations of this phrase refer to a precedent case from 1942 in which the Commerce Clause authorizing Congress to regulate interstate commerce was extended to allow federal regulation of loan-sharking. This version was found in Justice Roberts' majority opinion in which he ruled that the individual mandate could not be enforced under the Commerce Clause, but could be as a tax.
4. "Crabbed reading"
In Ginsburg's dissent of Roberts' refusal to accept the power of the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, Ginsburg implied that her fellow Justice is ill-tempered and surly. "The Chief Justice's crabbed reading of the Commerce Clause harkens back to the era in which the Court routinely thwarted Congress' efforts to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it."
She also wrote that Roberts "rigid reading of the Clause makes scant sense and is stunningly retrogressive."
5. "Free ride"
Ginsburg argued in her dissent that the uninsured do indeed use healthcare, which has an inarguable impact on the insured, with costs of more than $100 billion in healthcare services—nearly 5% of the national total in 2009—passed on to other payers. "As economists would describe what happens, the uninsured 'free ride' on those who pay for health insurance."
She added, "By requiring the healthy uninsured to obtain insurance or pay a penalty structured as a tax, the minimum coverage provision ends the free ride these individuals currently enjoy."
6. "Bait to the needy"
This phrase comes in discussion of why the individual mandate is indeed affected by interstate commerce. States can adopt such policies for their own citizens, as did Massachusetts, with the realization that they could receive an influx of unhealthy individuals from other states.
"Like Social Security benefits, a universal healthcare system, if adopted by an individual State, would be 'bait to the needy and dependent elsewhere, encouraging them to migrate and seek a haven of repose.'"
7. "Hideous monster"
In their dissent, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas argued that the individual mandate is not relevant to the Commerce Clause. "If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton's words, 'the hideous monster whose devouring jaws...spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.'"
8. "Verbal wizardry"
In their dissent, the four justices took umbrage at the government's argument in defense of the individual mandate penalty being a tax. "What the government would have us believe in these cases is that the very same textual indications that show this is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act show that it is a tax under the Constitution. That carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists," they wrote.
9. "What makes that so?"
By page 50 of her 61-page dissent, Justice Ginsburg's exasperation with Roberts shows. In maintaining her argument that PPACA should be allowed to force states to expand their Medicaid programs, she disputes Roberts' contention that what the act is creating a new Medicaid program rather than expanding the existing one.
"The Chief Justice cites three aspects of the expansion," she wrote. "First, he asserts that, in covering those earning no more than 133% of the federal poverty line, the Medicaid expansion, unlike pre-ACA Medicaid, does not 'care for the neediest among us.' What makes that so? Single adults earning no more than $14,856 per year—133% of the current federal poverty level—surely rank among the Nation's poor."
10. "Gun to the head"
Chief Justice Roberts said that is what PPACA would in essence be aiming at states under the threat that if they refused to expand Medicaid to people who earn up to 133% of the federal poverty level, they would lose all federal Medicaid funding. "In this case, the financial 'inducement' Congress has chosen is much more than 'relatively mild encouragement'—it is a gun to the head," Roberts wrote.