Tea Party Shadows Health Care Ruling

The New York Times reports:

Among the legal commentariat, which blogs its instant analysis after each turn in the health care litigation, one assertion in Monday’s ruling against the law by Judge Roger Vinson is receiving particular attention.

“It is difficult to imagine,” Judge Vinson, of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., wrote in a central passage of his 78-page opinion, “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.”

Supporters of the health care act — which Judge Vinson invalidated after ruling it was unconstitutional to require citizens to buy health insurance — saw in the language a deliberate nod to the Tea Party movement.

Whether that was the judge’s intent cannot be known. But legal scholars who disagreed with the ruling seized on it as evidence that Judge Vinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, had infused his ruling with political bias.

“On first read, the most striking aspect of Judge Vinson’s ruling today is not its remedy — striking the Affordable Care Act in its entirety — but the impression one gets that the opinion was written in part as a Tea Party manifesto,” Mark Hall, a law professor at Wake Forest University, wrote on the blog Health Reform Watch.

Imagine that.