WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Monday he was “confident” the US Supreme Court would uphold his health care law and warned the court that a decision to strike it down would amount to an “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” step.
“I continue to be confident that the Supreme Court will uphold the law,” Obama said during an appearance in the White House Rose Garden alongside Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically-elected congress,” he continued, noting that the law was constitutional.
“That’s not just my opinion,” he said, but also the “opinion of legal experts across the ideological spectrum.”
He added that two conservative appellate court justices had also found the law constitutional, noting that it “wasn’t even a close case.”
Last week, the Supreme Court spent three days listening to six hours of oral arguments over the constitutionality of the law. The court appeared to be sharply divided on many of the issues presented by Obama’s signature piece of legislation, with many indicators pointing to a 5-4 decision in which Justice Anthony Kennedy casts the deciding vote.
The court is expected to deliver its ruling in late June.
The president noted that since he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, over two-and-half million young people had been given access to health care and millions of seniors have paid less for prescription drugs.
“I think the justices should understand that in the absence of the individual mandate, you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people with pre-existing conditions can get health care,” Obama said.
The individual mandate requires citizens to buy health insurance by 2014 or else pay a penalty and has been sharply criticized by detractors — including all four Republican presidential candidates — for exceeding the scope of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
“We are confident that this [law] will be upheld because it should be upheld,” Obama said, noting that the justices should be aware of the “human element” in the law when considering whether or not to strike it down.