TPM Reader DM responds to the 11th Circuit’s decision:
I’m a lawyer. It’s hard to explain just how outside the mainstream this kind result would have been just 5-10 years ago.
I graduated a top law school in ’02. If you had written something like this on your 1L Con Law exam you would have gotten an F, because it’s not just a wrong view, it’s a view that ignores 60 years of precedent.
To overturn the health care law is to erase the profound turn that the Supreme Court took in 1937 when it rejected the Lochner Era approach and adopted the modern/New Deal era approach to jurisprudence.
The idea that we’re even having this conversation – and the Circuit courts are splitting on this question! – suggests just how far we’ve come in a very, very short time. The movement conservatives have all come out of the closet – even the ones on the federal bench. They smell a final victory: a return to Gilded Age America.
