Activist judge Roger Vinson's ruling makes George Washington unconstitutional
I'm
not an ambulance chaser, nor am I a judge. I can't even claim sidekick
status to a comic book superhero who rights the wrongs of America with
his doctorate in constitutional law.
But
riddle me this, Batman: If the president signed a law forcing every
American to purchase a rifle and ammunition in preparation for a
possible call to active military duty, but the Constitution specifically forbade forcing Americans to purchase ammunition, could a federal judge then overturn the entire law – including the rifle mandate – on the basis that only the ammunition portion of the law was illegal?
A
judge in Florida has ruled against President Obama's health-care reform
law, saying that the provision that forces Americans to buy health
insurance is a breach of Congress' constitutional authority. He did not
argue the illegality of the law's other provisions. He said only that
the mandate (the ammunition provision, in this seemingly left-field
metaphor) was unconstitutional.
Federal district judge Roger Vinson argued that, "[b]ecause the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void."
It
would be easy to brand this 70-year-old, bachelor's degree-educated
wannabe Tea Partier as a kook who admitted to relying on the legally insignificant analyses
of a known hate group to craft his ruling. Rest assured, his education,
his age, and his apparent bias do not play into my critique. Calling
Vinson a geriatric Frankenstein pig fucker with shit for brains would
not be a merit-based evaluation of his mental capacity, his overall
intelligence, and his cognitive ability to perform the duties expected
of a judge, which is why I'm not arguing that he's a pig fucker. I'm
merely asking how a man tasked with interpreting the legality of public
policy can denounce every aspect of a law on the basis that one aspect
of it is, in his opinion, unconstitutional.
Rather than rule only against the mandate portion of the law, as was the expectation and the precedent set in a mirror ruling made by a federal judge in Virginia, Vinson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, instead threw out the entire law on the basis that all the reforms will
fail without the mandate. Granted, President Obama's health-care law
doesn't include a "severability clause" that would allow the judge to
strike down a portion of the law without invalidating the entire law,
but if Vinson believes the entire law is illegal, then why didn't he issue an injunction against the policy and immediately halt its implementation?
First
of all, we must ask if the health-care law itself would be invalidated
without the mandate, as that is the basis for Vinson's ruling. It turns
out several states have created laws banning insurance companies from
denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Also, Vinson did not
rule that the provision in the law that allows children to stay on their
parents' insurance plans until age 26 was unconstitutional. These
provisions would still be in place without the mandate. They would still
be legal.
It
doesn't require a magnifying glass to read between the lines of
Vinson's ruling. He's saying what even the president has said – that
without the mandate, the bill would fail. But failure, in this sense,
means it wouldn't generate the revenue predicted, it wouldn't achieve
the coverage rates predicted, and it wouldn't lower costs for individual
insurance consumers as predicted.
The question, however, is not whether or not the bill is effective. It is the job of Congress, of lawmakers,
policy experts, and legislative analysts to determine the effectiveness
of a bill. The question is, when did it become the job of a judge, of an
interpreter of the law, to decide effectiveness?
We talk often, and we often talk vehemently,
about "activist" judges. Any leftist who angers the right is an
activist judge. Any right-winger who pisses off the left is an activist
judge. In most cases, these are ideological critiques, not merit-based
evaluations.
This,
I think, is one of the few cases where the "judicial activism" argument
holds water. It would not be inappropriate for a federal judge to air
his personal views that health-care reform would be cheapened without a
mandate. We wouldn't balk at the observation, as the president and
nearly every Democrat in Congress has already admitted as much. But is
it appropriate that a judge has shot down an entire law based on the
personal evaluation of how effective a law would be without the one
portion he has deemed unconstitutional?
That's the question. I'm open to critiques.
(Cross-posted from Muddy Politics.)
Labels: Affordable Care Act, health-care reform, U.S. judiciary
2 Comments:
Obama is a New World Order shill, specifically bought and paid for with fascist, dirty Federal Reserve Notes...with a clear call to wreck this country, on purpose! This is not a conspiracy theory!
By Anonymous, at 2:55 PM
No, no. Not a conspiracy theory. Had you provided your keen observations and irrefutable citations of fact before this piece were written, perhaps it could have been better reflected the fascism argument. Darn.
By Muddy Politics, at 11:04 AM
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