I will say this about Jonathon Turley; at least he is consistent. Turley always gave it to Olbermann on Countdown straight about the Bush Administration; whether it was what Olbermann wanted to hear….or not. For this he has my respect.
Anyhow, Turley tells it like it is about the Obama healthcare plan, which he calls the Ford Pinto Healthcare plan:
After this week’s decision striking down the entire federal health care law as unconstitutional, the White House went into a full convulsive rage at Judge Roger Vinson of the Northern District of Florida.
Borrowing an attack that has more often been heard from Republican administrations, Stephanie Cutter, a senior adviser to President Obama, issued a statement denouncing Vinson as a “judicial activist.” That charge was quickly picked up by Democratic lawmakers. The evidence cited for this charge was the fact that Vinson “declared that the entire law is null and void even though the only provision he found unconstitutional was the (individual mandate) provision,” which requires every citizen to buy health insurance.
What the White House does not mention is that it played a game of chicken over health care with the court and lost a critical battle in Florida. Instead of inserting a “severability clause” designed to protect an act from this type of global rejection, the legislation was rammed through a divided Congress with diminishing public support.
The absence of the clause was just one of the flaws in this legislation, which even sponsors now admit must be amended to address serious problems ranging from passage. Of course, even without such a clause, judges can still avoid striking down an entire law and confine their rulings to a specific provision. That is what Judge Henry
Hudson did last year in Virginia after finding the individual mandate unconstitutional. Hudson was right to do so, in my view, but that does not make Vinson a judicial activist. The charge of activism sounds like the lament of every bad gambler after being discouraged from playing a high-risk hand.
I very highly recommend that you read the rest of that. One thing I will say about Turley; he is not a partisan. Turley is a Constitutional scholar and I admire the guy greatly for his refusal to cow-tow down to the liberal left. I always said that this law would be repealed; and this is why. You just do not write a piss poor law like this and expect it not be challenged.
…and this is what this law was….a piss poor written law.