jenna: with the november midterm elections just around the corner and balance of power in the senate very much in play, more so than previously thought, at least according to article from the new york times, entitled, midterm republican surge still hasn t materialized. this article reading in part, as july turns to august gop is on the clock. if there is to be a wave this november, signs of a shift towards the gop ought to start to show up somewhere soon. every day that goes by without a shift towards the gop increases odds there will not be a wave after all. talk to karl rove about this, who is rejoining us yet again after breaking news on the health care ruling. karl, what do you think about this? are you surprised there is not clearer wave in favor of republicans or do you think the new york times is wrong here? well, look, let s do a little
speech for the era, if you poison it, does it not die? no, it doesn t. many people are rightly concerns that american law goes too far in treating corporations like people. but that s not what broke ground in the health care ruling and corporate personhood is not always a bad thing. it provides a way to sue corporations and corporations to be held libel for the harms they cause. since the 1800s, all members of the current court, have upheld it in certain cases. this week s ruling is actually far more radical and goes further. five conservative justices ruled corporations can have a belief system all their own and those beliefs allow them to duck laws the rest of us have to follow. this is the first time the court has ever created such a corporate power as justice ginsburg noted in her dissent. and second, there s a lot of
impact. how does an inactive congress make the court more powerful? well, the court does two kinds of cases. sometimes it decides what the constitution says. that s the last word. sometimes it just decides what a statute means. if it gets it wrong, congress is free to come back and overrule the court by just passing a new statute. of course, a polarized, gridlocked congress that doesn t pass any statutes makes the court even stronger in statutory cases too. put this in perspective as it pertains to that health care ruling. justice kennedy said of that decision in the minority descent that in calling the health care mandate a tax, he essentially the majority engaged in vast judicial overreach and decided to save a statute that congress did not write. is that what you re talking about here? that may be an aspect of it. the descent generally finds something wrong with the approach of the majority, as
decisions that suggests they are close, often 5-4 and suggests that the rewriting process, the supreme court revises and rewrites like the rest of us when we work on something important, the rewriting process may be difficult. we saw that in the health care ruling where chief justice roberts was going back and forth about what the opinion would like like. sometimes we think we agree and then realize we disagree i break off. what happens if the consequences of the supreme court if they vote down what is most likely what most people would consider to be the most important civil rights decision in our lifetime? we have been following that closely. what you see in the voting rights act area is tremendous skepticism from the conservative justices about whether we need this. that outrages people because you look at a lot of issues down south and certain areas that are covered we say we want the justice department to look before the lines are redrawn. if they are done for
money. and she s not fully behind all of the elements of obama care, but these states have a choice. and this came it was sort of part of the health care ruling from the supreme court that didn t get as much notice. what the supreme court said was that the administration could not punish states which did not expand their medicaid, that is health care plan for the poor. and what the administration visioned was that states would expand their medicaid plans, include more people in it, sort of raise the amount of income you could have and still get medicaid from the state. and in that way expand some of the coverage and jan brewer and other republican governors have said okay. and one of the reasons is that the federal government says we ll pick up the tab until 2020 of those that you add. right now it s split depending on a formula that goes state by