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WASHINGTON: A US court in Florida has struck down President Barack Obama's historic healthcare reforms, ruling that the requirement for individuals to purchase insurance is unconstitutional and is too central to making the law function.

The White House termed it as judicial activism.

Giving a major blow to the historic Health Care Reform Act which was signed by Obama last year, the US District Judge Roger Vinson in his judgement ruled that the so-called individual mandate exceeds congressional power.

The whole law cannot stand as the law depends on the mandate to work. "I must conclude that the individual mandate and the remaining provisions are all inextricably bound together in purpose and must stand or fall as a single unit," said Vinson, who on Monday became the second federal judge in two months to rule against the individual mandate.

"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," Vinson wrote.

"If Congress can penalise a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain for it would be "difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power" and we would have a Constitution in name only.

on to the scotus.

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Interesting how the original US political parties were largely produced around different views of how the US Constitution ought to operate.  By definition, Federalist politicians (and Judges like Marshall) supported the idea that the Federal authority should have greater powers, that the President within it ought to have greater powers and that instruments of the Federal state ought to have greater powers.

The early 'Old Republicans' and then the 'Democrats' wanted to see powers retained by individuals or states (or Congress vs the President), etc.

The problem that I find with some commentary on Obama's Health scheme is that the dialogue is often about the scheme itself and not about the implications of the scheme.  That's one reason that I quite like Beck (though I think he makes SOME stupid observations).  He does look at this in context

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and this is just bloody brilliant on the part of the judge.

In ruling against President Obama‘s health care law, federal Judge Roger Vinson used Mr. Obama‘s own position from the 2008 campaign against him, arguing that there are other ways to tackle health care short of requiring every American to purchase insurance.

"I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,'" Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of the 78-page ruling Monday.

he also said on ellen degeneres' show, in reference to hillary clinton's healthcare plan, "Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it. So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t."

woops.