Next verse, same as the first

So we have a federal judge in Florida declaring Obamacare unconstitutional. A few thoughts:

First, it wouldn't surprise me if Judge Vinson is right, but I'm not a constitutional scholar and therefore my views are just that. What I do know is that the folks who drafted the legislation, whoever they are, made it pretty easy for Vinson to strike the whole thing down, as Jennifer Rubin points out in her blog at the Washington Post. She quotes the opinion as follows:

Having determined that the individual mandate exceeds Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, and cannot be saved by application of the Necessary and Proper Clause, the next question is whether it is severable from the remainder of the Act. In considering this issue, I note that the defendants have acknowledged that the individual mandate and the Act's health insurance reforms, including the guaranteed issue and community rating, will rise or fall together as these reforms "cannot be severed from the [individual mandate]."

In other words, as Rubin explains:

Oops. Not some crazy judge, but the administration was the source of the notion that the individual mandate can't be severed from the rest of the law.

But it's not just the administration; it seems Congress did its part to contribute to the invalidation of the whole statute. Judge Vinson observes that "the Act does not contain a 'severability clause,' which is commonly included in legislation to provide that if any part or provision is held invalid, then the rest of the statute will not be affected." He observes that this defect is not necessarily determinative. However, "The lack of a severability clause in this case is significant because one had been included in an earlier version of the Act, but it was removed in the bill that subsequently became law." Oh, now, there's a problem.

It's a problem because judges do look carefully at legislative intent when they rule. They have to, of course -- it's crucial to understanding why a law has been passed. Not surprisingly, because Obama, Reid and Pelosi were in such a hurry to ram the thing through, they got sloppy.

Second, since Obamacare is inevitably headed for the Supreme Court, does Vinson's ruling matter? I suspect it does, since the Supremes will take his reading of the matter into account.

Last, although I'd love to see Obamacare get thrown out entirely, Vison wisely did not halt implementation of it for now. I hate judicial overreach and have been critical of judges who singlehandedly take the law into their own hands. The best guess is that we get an expedited review of Vinson's ruling and that the matter heads for the Supremes soon. And at that point, Anthony Kennedy gets to play divine right monarch yet again. Sigh.