Tea Party Judge Roger Vinson ‘Borrows Heavily’ From Family Research Council To Invalidate Health Law

From ThinkProgres

From the page: "The most surprising part of Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling was his argument that the individual mandate was not severable from the health care law as a whole and must therefor bring down the entire Affordable Care Act. “In sum, notwithstanding the fact that many of the provisions in the Act can stand independently without the individual mandate (as a technical and practical matter), it is reasonably ‘evident,' as I have discussed above, that the individual mandate was an essential and indispensable part of the health reform efforts, and that Congress did not believe other parts of the Act could (or it would want them to) survive independently,” Vinson writes.

But a closer read of his analysis reveals something peculiar. In fact, as Vinson himself admits in Footnote 27 (on pg. 65), he arrived at this conclusion by "borrow[ing] heavily from one of the amicus briefs filed in the case for it quite cogently and effectively sets forth the applicable standard and governing analysis of severability (doc. 123)." That brief was filed by the Family Research Council, which has been branded as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). "

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"Vinson's conclusion is peculiar because Congress usually defers to Congress on questions of severability. In fact, even Judge Henry Hudson - the Virginia Judge who also found the individual mandate to be unconstitutional - left the whole of the law intact noting, "It would be virtually impossible within the present record to determine whether Congress would have passed this bill, encompassing a wide variety of topics related and unrelated to health care, without Section 1501. Therefore, this Court will hew closely to the time-honored rule to sever with circumspection, severing any "problematic portions while leaving the remainder intact.""

As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in Free Enterprise Fund et al. v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, Because [t]he unconstitutionality of a part of an Act does not necessarily defeat or affect the validity of its remaining provisions," Champlin Refining Co. v. Corporation Comm of Okla. , 286 U. S. 210, 234 (1932) , the "normal rule" is "that partial, rather than facial, invalidation is the required course.""