Hand-Wringing on Health Care

The Republican politicians and activists who took the ACA mandate to court did not themselves dispute such logic. They knew Supreme Court precedent gave them what George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, a sometime adviser to Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, termed a ?less than one percent chance? of success. They sued anyway. The steam powering their opposition sprang from two sources: 1) partisan politics, part Tea Party zeal and the desire to discredit Barack Obama and obstruct his agenda; and 2) a hope, animating the libertarian legal advocates who staffed the lawsuits, of replacing existing law with pre-New Deal, so-called ?Lochner Era? doctrines that would invalidate substantially all 20^th-century regulatory, civil rights, and safety net legislation. This libertarian brand of judicial activism had consistently been scorned by mainstream conservative legal leaders, including Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and John Roberts.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=178aa7ea5f82a4f5bfbfaacacd15c1aa

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