BREAKING: Court Rules In Favor Of Virginia Challenge To ObamaCare

FNC reporting district court rules individual mandate unconstitutional.

Stand by for more.

Still looking for a story summarizing everything. Right now twitter is a good source for people, including Gabe, who are going through it.

Bottom line seems to be this.

Judge Hudson (pg 24): mandate "exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I"

Gabe emails with a link to the decision (pdf) and this note:

The judge held that the act is severable, so only the indv. mandate and those provisions "directly dependent" on the indv. mandate that refer back to it specifically will be struck down

On Severability: [ace]: I have to correct a mistake I made here-- I said that without a severability clause, the act would fall if any section of it was found unconstitutional.

Turns out that's not right; courts will still try to keep as much of law with an unconstitutional section as possible. I guess the whole act would fall only if the bill was found to be so dependent on this section as to render it senseless without it.

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett was recently thinking about the issue. He thought the whole act would fall. I guess this judge sees it different.

(Gabe, by the way, correctly forecast the outcome here by stating (in an email discussion about this) that only the mandate itself and those bits of ObamaCare directly reliant on the mandate would fall.)

posted by DrewM. at 01:07 PM

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