"Experts eat crow on ruling"

It's never easy to predict the court. And expert prediction is very often wrong, as we've discussed before. But it has to be said almost no one got this Supreme Court decision right in advance. As the Hill says:

 

The Supreme Court’s healthcare ruling upended conventional wisdom and expert predictions at nearly every turn.

 

The court said in a 5-4 decision this week that the individual mandate in President Obama’s healthcare law is constitutional. The court also said the law’s Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional, but found a fix that didn’t require striking down the entire law.

 

Even lawmakers and legal experts who correctly predicted that the court would uphold the mandate were surprised by the details of the decision and the makeup of the court’s majority.

 

If Court outcomes are so unpredictable it detracts from the image of neutral legal reasoning and settled expectations.