Litigation

Tea Leaves Tucked in Health Care Ruling?

By Peter Hardin

Federal Judge Roger Vinson’s brief reference — tucked in his 78-page opinion declaring the federal health care overhaul unconstitutional — to the colonists’ revolt over a tea tax has triggered a tempest of questioning.

“Tea Party Shadows Health Care Ruling,” declared a New York Times headline for an article about analyses of Judge Vinson’s ruling, including comments by supporters of the health care law who spotted in the decision a nod to the modern-day tea party movement.

?On first read, the most striking aspect of Judge Vinson?s ruling today is not its remedy ? striking the Affordable Care Act in its entirety ? but the impression one gets that the opinion was written in part as a Tea Party manifesto,? law professor Mark Hall of Wake Forest University wrote.

Legal scholars who disagreed with Judge Vinson’s ruling cited the tea tax passage as evidence the Republican-appointed judge “had infused his ruling with political bias,” according to the article.

Some newspaper editorial boards sounded similar themes. A San Jose Mercury News editorial warned:

“Step aside, Sarah Palin. The tea party has a new darling: Florida federal Judge Roger Vinson. His ruling Monday throwing out the whole health care law is the ultimate in judicial activism, which conservatives claim to decry.”

A Portland Oregonian editorial dismissed Judge Vinson’s passage about the tea tax as language that  “almost seemed to be telegraphing a valentine or wink-wink to the tea party.” The passage in his ruling, quoted in an earlier Gavel Grab post, stated:

?It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.?

The opinion continued to draw extensive criticism that it represented “judicial activism.” A New York Times editorial derided the ruling as “a breathtaking example of judicial activism and overreach. It is hard not to believe this decision was driven at least in part by ideology.”

Judge Vinson had his staunch defenders, however. “ObamaCare defenders will call him a judicial activist. That is bunk. His ruling is the very model of judicial restraint,” wrote James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal.

In a Huffington Post commentary, Bob McNamara of the Institute for Justice wrote, “Epithets like ‘judicial activism’ assume that there are areas of governmental activity that the courts simply have no business meddling with — that, no matter what the Constitution requires, courts shouldn’t bother enforcing those requirements. This is wrong — and not just wrong, but dangerous.”

Full post as published by The Gavel on February 02, 2011 (boomark / email).