Remember that Anne-Marie Slaughter article in The Atlantic about a month and a half ago, whose title—"Why Women Still Can't Have It All"—drove feminists bonkers, while the substance nevertheless rang true for roughly 70 gazillion working parents in this country who are doing the impossible every single day? Rebecca Traister proposed forever retiring the phrase "having it all" here, and I chastised the magazine for the framing. But the article's core idea was right, as I wrote at the time: 

Yesterday, President Obama went to Florida and told seniors that Mitt Romney wants to end Medicare as we know it, and it appears that this argument (and some related ones) will be a central feature of the Obama campaign's message in the coming days. It's entirely possible, as Jonathan Chait has suggested, that all the Obama campaign's attacks on Romney's finances and record at Bain Capital are the first stage of a two-stage strategy that culminates with an attack on the Ryan budget. Since we'll be talking about this a lot soon, I thought it might be worthwhile to refresh our memories on what this is all about, particularly with regard to Medicare, and how it relates to the current campaign.

First: Is it fair to tar Mitt Romney with the Ryan plan? No question.

Texas has a higher proportion of its population living without health insurance than any other state. But like many other states with lots of poor people, it has the misfortune of being governed by Republicans, which explains why yesterday, Governor Rick Perry announced that the state will refuse to accept the money the federal government is offering to expand Medicaid eligibility to everyone who makes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Perry says that this expansion of Medicaid, which is almost entirely paid for by the federal government, will nevertheless bankrupt the state and put the oppressive boot on the necks of Texans. So he's happy to keep 25 percent of his population uninsured.

In case you're wondering, Texas currently sets eligibility for Medicaid at 26 percent of the federal poverty level, which means that if you earn more than $6,000 a year for a family of four, you're not eligible. That's not a typo. Six thousand dollars a year for a family of four is what the state of Texas considers too rich to get on Medicaid. Look down the list of eligibility levels, and you find that only Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, and Louisiana set their eligibility lower. It is just so weird how those poor Southern states are the stingiest with health care benefits, isn't it?

It's possible that eventually, Texas and the other states will come around to the expansion of Medicaid. Sarah Kliff explains how this happened with Medicaid's enactment in the 1960s and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in the 1990s; conservatives initially resisted, but the money and the opportunity to insure their population eventually became irresistable. One of the key factors then and now is the presence of organized, influential interest groups—particularly the hospitals that have to deliver uncompensated care to the uninsured, costing them billions—that can exert their influence on the government's decisions.

But the Republicans who resisted and then gave in were different from the Republicans of today, and this will be a test of just how far they'll go to make a statement about their hatred of the federal government in general and their hatred of Barack Obama in particular. Today's Republicans are the ones who would turn down a deal offering ten dollars of spending cuts for one dollar of tax increases. But that was a hypothetical question, and this question is very real. There are actual human beings whose lives are at stake. I'd love to hear someone ask Rick Perry this question: Which do you think is worse, someone living without health insurance, or someone getting health insurance through a government program? I'm not sure what he'd say, but his actions say quite clearly that he'd prefer that the person have no health insurance. Of course, we're not talking about him personally, or his kids, or anybody he knows having to go without insurance. We're talking about poor people. So screw them.

While the Supreme Court's decision to uphold most of the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius was generally good news, the decision did have one unfortunate side effect. The Court limited the use of federal spending power with respect to Medicaid, permitting Congress to withhold new grants but not existing Medicaid funds from states if they failed to adopt Obamacare. In other words, governors can reject new federal funds to implement the health-care law without losing the rest of their Medicaid money.

Since not much campaign news happens over the July 4th holiday, Mitt Romney took the opportunity to change his campaign's tune on whether the Supreme Court was right that the penalty in the Affordable Care Act for those who can afford health insurance but refuse to get it is actually a "tax." To review, the Supreme Court said the government has the authority under its taxing power to penalize those who refuse to get insurance, leading Republicans to cry, "Tax! Tax! Tax!" with all of their usual policy nuance and rhetorical subtlety. The only problem this poses for Romney is that calling it a tax means that Romney imposed a tax with his health care plan in Massachusetts, which means admitting that Romney sinned against the tax gods. So first his spokesman came out and said that no, it's really just a penalty, but then Romney came out and said, well, if the Supreme Court said it's a tax then it's a tax, but it wasn't a tax when I did it, because the Supreme Court didn't call it that.

What does all this arguing over semantics tell us? It tells us that the press and public are both complicit in creating the hurricane of stupidity that every presidential campaign devolves into.

For years, conservatives have articulated a clear legal philosophy to guide their beliefs about the proper role of the courts and the way judges should arrive at their decisions, much clearer than the philosophy liberals espouse. They said they supported "originalism," whereby judges would simply examine the Constitution as the Founders understood it to guide its interpretation today. They said they opposed "judicial activism," wanting judges to simply interpret the law instead of making their own laws. Liberals always replied that these ideas were a disingenuous cover for something much simpler: conservatives just want judicial decisions that support their policy preferences. They see whatever they want in the Constitution, and define "judicial activism" as nothing more than decisions whose outcomes they don't like.

The reaction to Chief Justice John Roberts joining the Supreme Court's four liberals to uphold the Affordable Care Act shows something revealing about the conservative perspective on the Court and the law. Despite all the time they've spent asserting that the decisions they like are based only on principle, they seem incapable of even considering that a decision they didn't like could possibly be based in anything other than politics. Could John Roberts have sided with the liberals because in this case, he decided that they were right? Oh, come on, they reply, who are you kidding?