I’m just going to quote John Sides:

The Washington Post tells me that in today’s hearing, Elana Kagan “sidesteps empathy question, says ‘it’s law all the way down,’” which leads the reporter, Paul Kane, to say “So much for the empathy standard.”

I know some people who will be disappointed. The American people. About 68% of them, to be precise. That is the percentage who said in a 2009 survey that it was “very important” for Supreme Court justices to “be able to empathize with ordinary people – that is, to be able understand how the law hurts or helps the people.” Only one other quality out of a list of 12 — “Uphold the values of those who wrote the U.S. constitution long ago” — was judged very important by more respondents (74%). Only 8% of the sample said that empathy was not important at all. Empathy also attracted the support of both parties: 77% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans said that it was very important.

Put me down with the people on this one. And also with the view that there’s really no contradiction between these views. Clearly, no judge should ever be in a position where he or she says “my understanding of the law dictates Outcome X but I’m going to rule so as to create Outcome Y just because I feel like it.” Equally clearly, however, judges regularly disagree about what the correct ruling is. And in particular, in closely divided Supreme Court decision we by definition have a substantial amount of disagreement.

Here I think the citizen is well within his rights to posit that the character of the justice is going to make a substantial difference in determining actual outcomes. John Roberts and the SCOTUS majority evidently approach the law with an attitude that says the owners and managers of businesses have a hard time getting a fair shake in this country, what with all the workers and environmentalists and consumers and their lawyers out there. By contrast, the progressive minority takes a more skeptical view of these claims. So you keep seeing these splits. It’s simplistic, of course, to say that this is just a question of who empathizes with whom. But I think it’s clearly relevant.

The drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act took several steps backward today. One can be perceived by reading this bombastic Erick Erickson blog post in which he denounces the House GOP leadership for it’s unwillingness to push hard to bring repeal to the floor. Erickson concludes from this that “Eric Cantor and John Boehner — particularly Eric Cantor — have decided they don’t need or want conservatives” which I think is basically a self-refuting statement. The party leadership’s unwillingness to push to bring this up reflects the fact that it’s a doomed and politically counterproductive crusade.

Second, we have yet more polling showing the public warming to the Affordable Care Act. Third, as David Cutler explains the latest CBO numbers confirm that the Affordable Care Act reduces the deficit. In constructing its alternative fiscal scenario, the CBO assumed for no clear reason that ACA’s cost-saving measures will be repealed in 2020, but the fact remains that full repeal would necessarily score as a big deficit-increaser.

All told, I think we can say that the 111th Congress’ legacy is secure and will remain so for a long while now.

Via Igor Volsky, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a new report detailing the continued enfattening of the United States of America:

Adult obesity rates increased in 28 states in the past year, and declined only in the District of Columbia (D.C.), according to F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2010, a report from the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). More than two-thirds of states (38) have adult obesity rates above 25 percent. In 1991, no state had an obesity rate above 20 percent.

The report highlights troubling racial, ethnic, regional and income disparities in the nation’s obesity epidemic. For instance, adult obesity rates for Blacks and Latinos were higher than for Whites in at least 40 states and the District of Columbia; 10 out of the 11 states with the highest rates of obesity were in the South — with Mississippi weighing in with highest rates for all adults (33.8 percent) for the sixth year in a row; and 35.3 percent of adults earning less than $15,000 per year were obese compared with 24.5 percent of adults earning $50,000 or more per year.

Both the promise and the peril of these trends is that all signs are that peer-group influence over this kind of thing is enormous. If you’re surrounded by many overweight people, that greatly increases your own chances of becoming overweight. Which means that right now we’re in a vicious cycle.

At any rate, it’s really just a coincidence but I looked it up and it turns out that I personally am one of Washington, DC’s no-longer-obese people, having dropped from 250 pounds (BMI 33.9 “obese”) on March 1 down to 211 pounds (BMI 28.6, merely “overweight”) as of this morning and I’m hoping to make further progress.