Free Republic

'I can take care of my enemies all right," Warren Harding once said. "But my friends, my damn friends, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!" In the sense that so irked Harding, Judge Gladys Kessler is a great good friend of ObamaCare. The US district-court judge in Washington, DC, delivered a more telling blow against the law in the course of ruling it constitutional than critics have in assailing it as a travesty. At issue is the individual mandate. Two other district-court judges have struck it down on grounds that Congress doesn't have the power under...

We posted something brief yesterday about the ruling by Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler that ObamaCare is constitutional. However, with with some further analysis, courtesy of Avik Roy at Forbes, it becomes clear that Kessler’s decision may be weighted more in partisanship than in actual logic. This is an excerpt from Kessler’s ruling: “As previous Commerce Clause cases have all involved physical activity, as opposed to mental activity, i.e. decision-making, there is little judicial guidance on whether the latter falls within Congress’s power. See Thomas More Law Ctr., 720 F.Supp.2d at 893 (describing the “activity/inactivity distinction” as an issue of...

A federal judge has upheld the national health care law, making it the fifth ruling on the merits of the legal challenges to the individual mandate. The ruling by the Clinton appointee, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler of the District of Columbia continues the pattern of Democratic-appointed judges siding with the Obama administration and Republican judges siding with the plaintiffs in ruling the mandate unconstitutional. Kessler's ruling comes in a case brought by individual plaintiffs, where as the two decisions striking down the mandate have come in cases brought by 27 states, based in Virginia and Florida. Like the...