Think Tank West

By Ilya Shapiro As I continue digesting Judge Vinson’s ruling, I notice two key things beyond the facts that the “individual mandate is unconstitutional”: 1.  In performing his severability analysis — determining which parts of the overall legislation survive — the judge threw out all of Obamacare: In sum, notwithstanding the fact that many of [...]

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By Roger Pilon POLITICO Arena asks a second question today: How badly does today’s ruling hurt the Obama administration’s health reform efforts? My response: In finding Obamacare unconstitutional, Judge Roger Vinson hit a home run today for the Constitution. From the start, he made it clear that this case, brought by 26 states, two private [...]

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By Michael F. Cannon Federal Judge Roger Vinson has struck down the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional.  Excerpts from the opinion: 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 [...]

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By Ilya Shapiro Today’s ruling vindicates the constitutional first principle that ours is a government of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers. Like Judge Hudson in the Virginia case, Judge Vinson recognized that the individual mandate represents an unprecedented and improper incursion beyond those powers: the federal government, under the guise of regulating commerce, cannot [...]

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By Roger Pilon Judge Vinson’s ruling today that Obamacare’s individual mandate is unconstitutional, following on the heels of Judge Hudson’s similar ruling in the Fourth Circuit, should give the new Congress all the confidence it needs to rescind this provision and more. Indeed, the idea that government could order a person to buy a product [...]

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By Neal McCluskey Since its beginning, one of the primary drivers behind public schooling — government schooling — has been a desire to compel belief, whether in “American” values, God, the primacy of science, or myriad other things that some people have thought it essential for all people to accept. The result has been constant conflict that, rather than uniting diverse [...]

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By Michael F. Cannon An article at HealthPolicySolutions.org (“a project of the Buechner Institute for Governance at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver”), about how ObamaCare is causing Colorado’s child-only health insurance market to implode, contains this startling admission by the top lobbyist for Colorado’s health insurance companies: “Requiring all [...]

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By Tad DeHaven Freshman Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has raised the bar in Washington by releasing a bill that would make substantial, specific, and immediate cuts in federal spending. While policymakers on both sides of the aisle have largely paid lip service to stopping Washington’s record run of fiscal profligacy, Paul’s proposal makes good on [...]

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By Christopher Preble The new Egyptian cabinet was sworn in today amidst a seventh day of protests across the country.  For the White House, the continual tweaking of their response to the crisis, and declining to call for Mubarak to step-down, has left many in Egypt and the region wondering if the United States does [...]

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By David Rittgers The ongoing war of words between Glenn Beck and Frances Fox Piven over the prospect of workers rioting in the streets isn’t just a two-way dance. Stanley Kurtz has provided insight into Piven’s work over the years in his book, Radical-in-Chief, and a prominent figure of the left, Barbara Ehrenreich, has fired [...]

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