In case you were locked in the trunk of a car yesterday, Judge Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida ruled that Obamacare is a big ol' pile of unconstitutional mess.
The Court ruled that the part of the bill that mandates that individuals purchase health insurance is unconstitutional, because it is beyond the scope of Congress' regulatory authority under the Commerce Clause. Basically, because the individual mandate applied even if you did not do anything other than continue to breathe, you were not "engaging in commerce," and Congress overstepped their bounds. Contrary to what many Democrats seem to argue, the power of the federal government is not without limit...and the Constitution is that limit.
The Democrats responsible for this monstrosity of a bill got smacked in the face by two of their own decisions. First, the bill did not have what's called a "severability clause," or language that provides that if any part of the legislation is found unconstitutional or otherwise unenforceable, that the rest of the bill would still have legal effect. Ironically, the original version of the bill
did include a severability clause. If you remember back to when the Democrats passed this bill (again,
without a single Republican vote), they had to engage in serious negotiations to buy, I mean obtain, the votes they needed (see, e.g.,
Cornhusker Kickback, etc.). The negotiations were so tight that no one was willing to risk any of the provisions for which they had so carefully bargained, so the severability clause was deleted.
Without a severability clause, if one part of a bill is killed, especially a part as major as the individual mandate is for the health care bill, the whole entire bill must die with it.
(Keep reading after the jump, including link to view the Court's entire opinion and video interviews of Pam Bondi and Bill McCollum.)
