NewsTaco Gets It Right; Then Gets It Right Again
By Victor Landa, NewsTaco Editor
There was a gasp, there was confusion, then there was elation, or not, depending on where you stand on the Affordable Care Act.
The initial word from the U.S. Supreme Court was that the individual mandate portion of the Healthcare Reform law had been struck down. And word began to run through the Internets. Moments later that word was reversed. The mandate, according to other reports, had been upheld. So which was it?
It was both, in quick succession, as only the Supreme Court can produce it. What had happened is that the question of the individual mandate – that part of the Affordable Care Act that requires Americans to buy health insurance – had two parts to it: one with regards to a commerce clause, and another regarding taxing authority. The first question reported was the commerce question, which the Justices struck down. In essence the Supreme Court said that the Federal Government did not have the authority, under the commerce clause, to force Americans to purchase health insurance. The second question reported, only moments after the first, concerned the taxing authority, where a majority of the justices agreed that the Federal Government did indeed have the authority to mandate health insurance as a tax.
The interim, between one report and the other, caused the confusion.
NewsTaco posted a CNN tweet on Facebook about the initial commerce clause decision. And moments later re-posted a Supreme Court blog post about the commerce clause decision. Naturally, it was the first post that attracted the most attention.
This gives me two things to be excited about: one is the immediate nature of the digital media that provides a running – as it happens – picture of events; the other is the plugged-in nature of the NewsTaco reader. Put the two together and you get the reason we started our website – to create a space for ongoing conversation, where Latinos can engage and feel comfortable speaking their minds about topics that are important to them.
Precisely for this reason we’ve left that conversation intact on our Facebook wall, even though it was suggested we delete it because of the apparently false initial information. But, it wasn’t wrong, as reported in the moment. It was incomplete, and the information was filled-in later in that same conversation and in another post.
So now the work moves on to analyzing the Supreme Court decision and for that we’d love to hear your thoughts. After all, that’s what NewsTaco is about.
