Who nominated the judge that was supposedly nominated by a republican.

I just don't see how anyone who takes the Constitution seriously at all can force someone to buy something. There will be no end to it. Which of course is good news for GM.

That's Brilliant; Sign me up!

Conservatives have an inherent disadvantage in the appellate courts. We respect the principle of stare decisis, so we are more reluctant to overturn precedent. The left has no such qualms, and feels free to change the Constitution to suit their needs whenever. But when conservatives try to overturn a change of theirs, and return to an earlier interpretation, they shout, "Stare decisis! You're being hypocritical!"

Problem is, many conservative judges actually give in to that argument. So there is a continual ratchet effect -- liberals free to change the law to their heart's content, and conservatives forced to go along with it.

The only way Obamacare will be overturned is legislatively. To have any hope, we must elect more Republicans to Congress and the Senate, and more than anything, replace Obama in 2012.

So lemme get this straight: judges who draw paychecks from the federal government have ruled that the federal government has essentially unlimited powers...

Did anyone expect this to be decided fairly? Does history provide many examples of a power-grabbing entity voluntarily conceding on a claim that was less than legitimate?

It'll be a power-play at the SCOTUS level too -- with too few justices understanding that the legitimacy of a law matters.

Having read the heart of the ruling, I have to say that I find this opinion to be deeply flawed.

Among its most intellectually vacuous claims was that "the text of the Commerce Clause does not acknowledge a constitutional distinction between activity
and inactivity, and neither does the Supreme Court."

Why on earth would we expect the Commerce Clause to draw an explicit distinction between activity and inactivity when they are opposites of each other? The distinction is implicit! This is where the court gets totally lost in legal theory instead of exercising common sense. Throughout the opinion, the decision not to purchase health insurance is rephrased as the practice of "self-insuring". This was obviously done to try and transform the inactivity that is being regulated into a true economic activity, which, of course, it is not.

Basically, the court's logic is that any American who, at any time, has made the conscious decision not to purchase health insurance has instead consciously decided to "self-insure."

By completely dimissing the notion that an American might decide to completely forego healthcare services as impossible, the Court was able to avoid answering the uncomfortable question of why someone who merely breathes ought to be forced into a private business relationship. This was clever, but deeply intellectually dishonest. No surprise.

There is a reason for panic. If you have lost Jeff Sutton, you have lost one of the most conservative judges in America. The good news is that he declined to overturn Congress for conservative reasons, and knowing when he did so, the SCOTUS would have the final word.

OK, you have to take your conservatism in legal practice as well as in life. Judge Sutton took the cautious, conservative tack of saying: I am not going to say this statute, which I know the SCOTUS will rule on, and say it is unconstitutional as applied to everyone. That does not make him a clown. He did not rule as to ALL inactivity -- it was the question of the decision on how to pay for health care costs. You cannot read this opinion as applying to anything else.

This is where I also feel that the court errs. Calling the choice not to purchase private health insurance an act of "self insurance" is how you turn an inactivity into an activity.

The problem, as I see it, is that self insurance is only a theoretical activity. If, for example, I choose to save and set aside $300,000 to cover any future medical expenses, the only "activity" I have truly engaged in is that of saving my money. Until and unless I actually spend that money on healthcare expenses, I haven't "self-insured" myself in any meaningful way. I certainly haven't entered into any sort of actuarial, risk-based agreement as the conventional commercial meaning of insurnace would imply.

Self-insurance is a meaningless misnomer relied upon by the court to turn the passive into the active. Insurance is purchased to account for the financial risk of a catastrophic expense. If you have the money to cover that expense, then you have no such financial risk in the first place, and therefore no need for insurance.

Good sentiment, but the car insurance analogy fails here too (just like when libs use it to justify ObummerCare). You DON'T have to buy car insurance UNTIL you buy a car. In ObummerCare you ALWAYS HAVE TO buy health insurance--the only opt-out is being dead.