Two Thirds of Americans want Supreme Court to strike down all or part of Obamacare bill

While the poll by the New York Times and CBS news finds that over two thirds favor overturning some or all of the Obama health care bill only 24 per cent said they hoped the court would affirm the entire bill as legal. A decision is expected by the end of June.

While 41 per cent wanted the court to strike down the entire bill 27 per cent wanted only the individual mandate forcing people to purchase insurance to be overturned. The mandate includes a penalty for not buying insurance. These numbers have not changed very much over recent months.

Not surprisingly Republicans were more opposed to the law than Democrats. Almost two thirds of Republicans thought the whole law should be jettisoned while 43 per cent of Democrats said all of the law should be upheld. Actually this is rather surprising because even among Democrats there is no majority for upholding the entire law.

Among independent voters a large majority of 70 per cent were in favor of seeing all or some of the law struck down. A majority even wanted to see the whole bill struck down. Only 22 per cent of the independents hoped the entire law would survive.

Whatever public opinion is most analysts think that it will have little influence on the Supreme Court decision..An article in the Georgetown Law Journal in 1910 said:“Supreme Court justices care more about the views of academics, journalists and other elites than they do about public opinion,” “This is true of nearly all justices and is especially true of swing justices, who often cast the critical votes in the court’s most visible decisions.” However the views of journalists, academics etc. are just as contradictory as those of the public so they might as well decide on the basis of their own expertise and views. After all they will probably be most influenced by those journalists and academics writing in favor of what they may tend to support in the first place. For more see this article.