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Obamacare struck down as unconstitutional by Florida judge

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Hans Bader again, writing at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

A judge in Florida just declared the health care law known as “Obamacare” unconstitutional, ruling it void in its entirety. Judge Vinson rightly declared the health care law’s individual mandate unconstitutional, since the inactivity of not buying health insurance is not an “economic activity” that Congress has the power to regulate under the Interstate Commerce Clause. (Under the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Morrison (2000), which I helped litigate, only “economic activity” can be regulated under the Commerce Clause, with the possible exception of those non-economic activities that harm instrumentalities of interstate commerce or cross state lines.)

Judge Vinson also rightly declared the law as a whole unconstitutional. The health care law lacks a severability clause. So if a major provision like the individual mandate is unconstitutional — as it indeed was — then the whole law must be struck down.

[…]As I noted earlier in The Washington Examiner, “To justify preserving the rest of the law, the judge” in the earlier Virginia case “cited a 2010 Supreme Court ruling [Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB] that invalidated part of a law — but kept the rest of it in force. But that case involved a law passed almost unanimously by Congress, which would have passed it even without the challenged provision. Obamacare is totally different. It was barely passed by a divided Congress, but only as a package. Supporters admitted that the unconstitutional part of it — the insurance mandate — was the law’s heart. Obamacare’s legion of special-interest giveaways that are ‘extraneous to health care’ does not alter that.” In short, Obamacare’s individual mandate is not “volitionally severable,” as case law requires.

The individual mandate provision also was not “functionally” severable from the rest of the law, since the very Congress that passed Obamacare deemed the individual absolutely “essential” to the Act’s overarching goals (as Judge Vinson in Florida correctly noted).

[…]Cato legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, who filed briefs against the law in Virginia, comments on today’s decision here, calling it a “victory for federalism and individual liberty

I also got two more opinions about what this means:

Not sure who to believe. An injunction would have been better.

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Is the TSA more interested in airport security or supporting unions?

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Consider this story by Hans Bader in the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

The TSA shut the door Friday on a private airport screening program that was making the inefficient agency look bad by outperforming it in safety, innovation, and passenger satisfaction.  The TSA’s action was praised by a liberal union in Washington that expects to unionize the TSA, the American Federation of Government Employees. Its head, John Gage, applauded the Obama Administration for requiring a “federalized” government “work force.”

Previously, the Screening Partnership Program allowed airports to replace government screeners with private contractors. 16 airports did so. “But on Friday, the TSA denied an application by Springfield-Branson Airport in Missouri to privatize its checkpoint workforce, and in a statement,” TSA head John “Pistole indicated other applications likewise will be denied.” The TSA’s head said he did not see any “clear or substantial advantage” to the TSA in allowing additional airports to use private screeners, although he said that the few other airports that already use private screeners will be allowed to continue to do so.

[…]Earlier, the TSA retaliated against a veteran pilot who exposed the TSA’s security failures, taking away whistleblower Chris Liu’s credentials and firearm.

The Obama Administration is now seeking to unionize the TSA, even though the TSA was originally forbidden to unionize due to security concerns.  Unlike the TSA’s current head, all past TSA Administrators have recognized that collective bargaining and union work rules are inconsistent with the flexibility needed to protect public safety and adapt quickly to changes in terrorist tactics. (Undercover agents have managed to slip bombs past TSA screeners, and the TSA is even less effective at detecting them than the private security firms it replaced after 9/11).  The AFGE union predicted on January 21 that voting to unionize the TSA will begin by mid-March.

The problem with unionizing the TSA is that it leads to the same problems we have in public schools, where there is no concern about pleasing customers because it is impossible to fire teachers no matter how badly they perform. Is it the job of government to provide adult day care to a bunch of poorly-performing layabouts? If the TSA cannot do the job of keeping us safe, then why should be locked into hiring them? We need to have more flexibility to get the best people for the job, and that means that we cannot hire union workers who will not respond to our needs.

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Over 99 percent of people in southern Sudan vote for succession

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Map of Africa
Map of Africa

Great news in Sudan. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

More than 99 percent of Southern Sudanese voted to secede from the north, a referendum official said Sunday in the first official preliminary result announcement.

“The vote for separation was 99.57 percent,” said Chan Reek Madut, the deputy head of the commission that organized the referendum, to a crowd in the South’s capital of Juba, according to Reuters.

Voter turnout in the South was 99 percent, Madut said. And over 60 percent of Southern Sudanese living in the north turned out to vote, with 58 percent voting to secede, he stated.

Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil, chairman of the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission, said 99 percent of the Southern Sudanese diaspora in eight nations also voted to secede.

After decades of civil war and ongoing tension between the northern and southern governments, it looks like the south will finally become its own country. The weeklong referendum, which began on Jan. 9, is called for by the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended more than two decades of civil war.

[…]Southern Sudan President Salva Kiir, who is expected to lead the independent South, has called for Southern Sudanese to forgive the North for the years of violence during the civil war. Some 1.9 million people died during the war between the North and South and more than 500 churches were destroyed in the South.

“For our deceased brothers and sisters, particularly those who have fallen during the time of struggle, may God bless them with eternal peace,” said Kiir at Catholic Cathedral in Juba on Jan. 16.

“And,” he continued, “may we, like Jesus Christ on the cross, forgive those who have forcefully caused their deaths.”

Southern Sudan is the more Christian part of Sudan, so this is good news for Sudanese Christians.

Here’s a close up of southern Sudan:

Map of Southern Sudan
Map of Southern Sudan

Muddling linked to an interesting post providing more historical context for the referendum.

I’m still very worried about what is going on in Egypt and Pakistan. I am still trying to catch up on Egypt but the two posts linked by Gateway Pundit are the two best that I’ve seen.