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Pelosi predicts Supreme Court will back healthcare law

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Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicts that the Supreme Court will rule, by a 6-3 vote, to uphold the healthcare law that she helped enact in 2010, though she acknowledged that “you never know what the court will do.”

Speaking Tuesday at a luncheon at the Paley Center for Media in New York, Pelosi criticized Republican opponents of the law for asking the court to overturn it when the GOP typically objects to judicial intervention.

“They were not big fans of the courts … until now,” Pelosi said. “Now, they support judicial review.”
Pelosi, a California Democrat who is now minority leader, said she was confident that the bill could withstand the challenge because “we wrote the bill in an ironclad way.”

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“You never know what the court will do, but I have confidence that if we’re talking about the law of the land and our compliance with it, that we will be OK,” she said. “But again, we never know.”

In predicting that the law will be upheld, Pelosi is likely banking on Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and one of the more conservative justices – perhaps Chief Justice John G. Roberts – siding with the left-leaning justices who are expected to favor the law.

Also Tuesday, Obama told a gathering of news executives that he has “enormous confidence” that the law will be upheld.

“As a consequence, we are not spending a whole bunch of time planning for contingencies,” he said.

Still, Obama’s reelection campaign has cast the healthcare law as a signature achievement of his presidency. Obama was happier on the day the bill passed than he was on the day he was elected president, Pelosi said the president once told her.

Referring to the “over 80 million people” who are already benefiting from the law, Pelosi said Congress would have to do something to hold onto a number of provisions if the entire law is struck down.

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“We really do have to find a way to keep what is in the bill and what is coming,” she said.

kim.geiger@latimes.com

Original source: Pelosi predicts Supreme Court will back healthcare law

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