‘I didn’t do this because it was good politics. I did it because it was good for the American people.’

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Thank you Bob and Drunken Irishman!!

Rise and Shine

Cagle

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Justice Antonin Scalia needs to resign from the Supreme Court.

…. So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line.

…. what boggles the mind is that Scalia thought it proper to jump into this political argument. And when he went on to a broader denunciation of federal policies, he sounded just like an Arizona Senate candidate.

…. Scalia should free himself to pursue his true vocation. We can then use his resignation as an occasion for a searching debate over just how political this Supreme Court has become.

More here

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Cagle

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Thank you Purpleshoes LA and your 72-year-old Mom!

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NYT: President Obama plans to travel to Colorado on Friday to tour areas devastated by raging wildfires, the White House said on Wednesday. One of the fires, in the foothills near Colorado Springs, has burned 24 square miles, destroyed an unknown number of homes and forced some 26,000 people to evacuate.

Mr. Obama called Gov. John Hickenlooper and Mayor Steve Bach of Colorado Springs, the state’s second-largest city, to get an update on the blaze, known as the Waldo Canyon Fire…

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Cagle

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Cagle

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12:0: Michelle Obama delivers the keynote address to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s conference

1:35: President Obama departs the White House en route Bethesda, Maryland

2:0: PBO visits the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

2:45: Michelle Obama delivers remarks at campaign event in Memphis

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Morning everyone – could be a long day.

‘why the 11th circuit is wrong about the mandate’

Steve Benen: …. The legal argument in support of the Affordable Care Act – specifically the individual mandate that ran into trouble at the 11th Circuit – has always been straightforward: the Commerce Clause empowers the federal government to regulate interstate commerce; the American health care system is interstate commerce; and the Affordable Care Act regulates the health care system. Ergo, the ACA fits comfortably within the confines of the Commerce Clause.

Today’s 2-1 ruling didn’t see it this way …. So, what’s the problem with today’s ruling? The reasoning is all wrong. Is the mandate “wholly novel”? That’s certainly open to some debate. The notion of government-mandated purchases is hardly foreign – existing federal laws require millions of homeowners, for example, to purchase flood insurance. Nuclear power plants have to purchase liability insurance, whether they want to or not. The Civil Rights Act mandated businesses engage in commercial activity that owners found objectionable. George Washington signed a law requiring much of the country to purchase firearms and ammunition. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson even supported legislation that required private citizens to pay into a public health-care system, and included a “regulation against a form of inactivity.”

…. This is the sort of ruling that not only relies on weak, politically-motivated reasoning, but also “ignores 60 years of precedent.”

And so a nation turns its lonely eyes to Justice Kennedy.

Full post here

‘pentagon suspends dadt in wake of court ruling’

Army Times: The Pentagon has ordered a halt to all separations of gay troops under “don’t ask, don’t tell” and will begin accepting applications from prospective recruits who identify themselves as homosexuals.

The moratorium issued Friday came after a ruling Wednesday by a federal appeals court in California ordering the Defense Department to immediately stop enforcing the law. The court said the law is unconstitutional because it treats gay Americans differently under the law.

More here

Thank you Suzanne

you want a fight? you got it ;-)

President Barack Obama’s signature on the health insurance reform bill at the White House, March 23, 2010

WH: Today, a judge in Florida issued a decision in a case filed by 25 Republican Attorneys General and Governors striking down the Affordable Care Act. This ruling is well out of the mainstream of judicial opinion. Twelve federal judges have already dismissed challenges to the constitutionality of the health reform law, and two judges – in the Eastern District of Michigan and Western District of Virginia – have upheld the law. In one other case, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a very narrow ruling on the constitutionality of the health reform law’s “individual responsibility” provision and upheld the rest of the law.

Full statement here

Salon: A Reagan appointee rules the entire healthcare reform act unconstitutional — and praises the Boston Tea Party……That sound you hear is the flutter of million ecstatic tweets of joy from conservatives, even if, in the short term, nothing substantive changes today. The legal status of the Affordable Care Act won’t be decided until the Supreme Court makes its own determination, a point that is at least a year or two away.

….a paragraph in Judge Vinson’s opinion seems more than a little resonant of current political fashions:

“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:

A Tea Party shout-out in a legal opinion on healthcare reform? Seems just a little bit obvious. Not to mention activist.

that virginia ruling on the health care bill?

Two points worth noting….

(1) TPM: The Virginia federal district court judge (a George W Bush-appointee) who ruled that the individual mandate in the health care bill is unconstitutional owns a stake worth between $15,000 and $50,000 in a GOP political consulting firm that worked against health care reform – the very law against which he ruled.

Henry Hudson

(2) Legal experts are attacking Judge Henry Hudson’s decision, citing an elementary logical flaw at the heart of his opinion. And that has conservative scholars – even ones sympathetic to the idea that the mandate is unconstitutional – prepared to see Hudson’s decision thrown out.

“I’ve had a chance to read Judge Hudson’s opinion, and it seems to me it has a fairly obvious and quite significant error,” writes Orin Kerr, a professor of law at George Washington University, on the generally conservative law blog The Volokh Conspiracy.

Read the details here

The challenge to the health care bill has been taken by Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s attorney general – who might just possibly be a ‘birther‘ and homophobe.

Classy guy.