Federal Judge: A Wink at the Tea Party in Overturning Health Law

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, ruling against the Obama administration’s health care overhaul, reached back to a seminal American Revolution-era event now in vogue with today’s tea party movement. The central issue in dispute is whether the Constitution gives Congress the power to require Americans to buy health insurance or face financial penalties. In his 78-page ruling in favor of 26 states that sued to overturn the law, Judge Vinson recalled the 1773 Boston Tea Party. “It is difficult to imagine 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,” wrote the judge, a Reagan appointee who sits in Pensacola, Fla. Some administration officials read the ruling and saw a wink to today’s tea partiers, who were partly spurred into action by the health care legislation debate over the last two years. Mark Meckler, co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, one of the largest tea party organizing groups, saw a clear nod: “It’s very exciting. He’s invoking the tea party movement. It’s what we have felt all along about Obamacare,” using opponents’ moniker for the health care law...more