From Reuters:
A federal judge in Florida struck down President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare overhaul as unconstitutional on Monday in the biggest legal challenge yet to federal authority to enact the law.
U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled that the reform law’s so-called individual mandate went too far in requiring that Americans start buying health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty.
“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void,” he wrote, “This has been a difficult decision to reach and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications.”…
One can figure this is just a first step in the legal process, but I wonder if liberals will really want to fight this? There is a changing dynamic in America these days and while the courts are not reflective of popular movements, they are affected by their times. The paradigm of the past 80 years or so – that government has a right to interfere – is falling and if Obama and his Democrats press this issue in the courts, they might find themselves undoing great swaths of liberalism as judges suddenly re-discover the Constitution. The day of federal mandates is ending and this defeat of ObamaCare might just be the pebble which starts the avalanche.
More than likely, however, the liberals won’t see it like that – for so many years they have relied upon the courts to undo conservatism, they might not recognize that their day in court (as it were) is passing. Hubris tends to take over in dying elites and we can probably rely upon our liberals to keep marching right off the cliff.
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