the small businesses who banded together to challenge this law but now have not received the result for which they hoped? they are now required by law to provide health insurance for their workers if they employ more than 50 employees or pay a penalty. small businesses, many of which are still struggling in this sluggish economy and were very vocally objecting in court to the law. our next guest argued against the health care overhaul before the high court, he was one of the two there were two main lawyers who argued, he was one of them and his name is mike carvin, counsel for the national independent federation of businesses, partner at the law firm of jones day where he and i used to practice. mike, welcome back to the program. thanks, megyn. how are you? megyn: how are you? i ve had better days but, yeah, it was not a helpful decision by the court today, obviously, for small businesses or anyone megyn: what does it mean for them now? it means obamacare will go into effect
reasoning here. i must tell you, given what i know about chief justice roberts, he s very disciplined in deciding cases on the most narrow grounds possible, not reaching issues again, i want to withhold final judgment, but i do kind of wonder why if he makes the decision that the congress has the power to tax the commerce clause analysis, but i have a great deal of confidence in chief justice roberts megyn: yeah. it s a good point because the court could have just said we uphold it on the taxing power, and it really ticked off some on the court including justice ginsburg who called that analysis scant sense and is stunningly retrogressive. and she sees, you know, a problem in the jurisprudence as the court has laid it out on the commerce clause and the power of congress. i want to ask you overall, sir,
have bent happiest news. i m sure from a cynical political per tech tough they would have rather have the supreme court take it down so they could rally the troops. instead it s romney s troops who are rallied. megyn: we have news on how today s news could affect the presidential race particular tonight fundraising arena. the romney campaign raised $1 million in less than four hours since the decision came down. the dpem krats sent out appeals based on the healthcare fight. no word yet on the response to those. one wildcard is part of the healthcare law that it did not uphold. it includes a huge medicaid expansion in all 50 states. the feds threatened to with hold existing medicaid.
what do you think in terms of the court now? i asked this of general mukasey, as a political football. does this decision undermine the ability to use this either by the right or the left as an election year issue? i think that an election year issue when the stakes are this high everyone s going to take advantage of anything they can use in order to advance megyn: but how? how do you go after this court now as a partisan body when you ve got chief justice roberts, a conservative appointee, siding with the left on the arizona immigration law and now on the president s health care law? oh, you mean well, i would just say most fundamentally this is what, why presidential elections are so important. if not this case, there are going to be other cases down the road that are equally maybe not as important, but very important. and so presidential elections are fundamentally so important because the president of the united states gets to decide who serves on the supreme court and is
it says, states, you have to have maybe a certain speed limit, or we re going to take away your highway funds. this part of the decision could be the one that has the most significant effect, as say, in clipping congress wings and giving more rights back to states. megyn: before i let you go, talk about what this means for the roberts court. because the feedback we re getting now, of course, some on the right are angry with him because they didn t want it upheld, but some are already saying it was a brilliant move by the chief justice because he managed to not expand congress power under the commerce clause, find a way to uphold legislation which, as you point out as a conservative philosophy to defer to the congress, and remove the high court between monday s decision on arizona and today as an election issue. i mean, who could really look at this court and say, oh, it s completely partisan, or it s completely in the tank for one side or the other? well, that s the upshot. i m not