Try not to be surprised...

[elfs]

You know that one judge who claims that the federal mandate in Health Care Reform requiring us all to have some kind of healthcare is unconstitutional? Despite the fact that two other judges have said the law is constitutional, it's Henry Hudson's ruling that's getting all the press. I'm sure he's proud of that.

Henry Hudson is proud of one other thing, too: "20 years of active service to the Republican party."

Try not to be surprised.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

CHAP. LXXVII – An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled - That from and after the first day of September next, the master or owner of every ship or vessel of the United States, arriving from a foreign port into any port of the United States, shall, before such ship or vessel shall be admitted to an entry, render to the collector a true account of the number of seamen, that shall have been employed on board such vessel since she was last entered at any port in the United States,-and shall pay to the said collector, at the rate of twenty cents per month for every seaman so employed; which sum he is hereby authorized to retain out of the wages of such seamen. (US Fifth Congress, 1789, ratified in Congress and signed by John Adams)

That's not a law-of-the-sea issue; that's a law affecting shipowners in their own ports. It's the very first payroll tax, it applied across the board to a universal class of people, and it was for healthcare. It's one of those inconvenient truths that John Adams effected a mandated health care law.

[tagryn]

That was rebutted by Volokh here. To sum: The Act certainly did not order seamen to purchase any form of private insurance, nor did it order them to purchase any other type of private good. The Act is a solid precedent for federal involvement in health care, and no precedent at all for a federal mandate to purchase private products.

If the mandate was written to require employers to purchase healthcare for all employees, that would be a better analogy.