Welcome to your Friday open thread. Hooray for Friday (yes I can no longer hide my love affair with Fridays). Share your thoughts below in our open thread.
I don’t think this got much attention yesterday, but the judge that “struck down” health care reform on dubious grounds has declined to issue a stay on implication of the law.
Though Vinson could have issued an injunction stopping implementation of the health reform law, he didn’t. On the other hand, plenty of conservatives interpreted his decision as offering the “functional equivalent” of an injunction, meaning that the 26 states that are parties to the case could simply consider the current law null and void in their states.
In something of a gamble, the Obama administration asked Vinson to clarify matters. Today, he did.
A federal judge who struck down the entire healthcare reform law issued a stay of his ruling in order to give the Obama administration seven days to file an appeal.
The administration asked U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson for a clarification of his Jan. 31 ruling after some states said they would stop efforts to implement the law in light of his decision.
The administration is expected to file an appeal with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
This is, in other words, a procedural win for the administration and the ACA. Vinson added, however, that the Justice Department must seek an expedited appellate review of his ruling within the next seven days.
So, bottom line: the Affordable Care Act is still on the books, and whether some far-right state officials like it or not, it must still be enforced.
This will wind it’s way through the courts but this is important because it will be a lot harder to get rid of the law as it gets implemented. Can you imagine the outcry if a judge took away your health care subsidy?
Mike Huckabee has really stuck his foot in his mouth lately. He tried to humor the birthers by pushing “intellectual” birtherism (sometimes referred to as post-birtherism), the idea that Obama was infected by Kenyan anti-colonialism. Then he tried to walk it back while still claiming Obama is some kind of anti- American weirdo. His test of Americanism is “Little League and Boy Scouts.”
Last night on Fox News, Mike Huckabee continued his attacks on President Obama’s American-ness, saying “This is not a kid who grew up, you know, going to Boy Scout meetings and playing Little League baseball in a small town.”
Dan Amira: “If the absence of Little League or Scout meetings is really so disconcerting to Huckabee, we wonder what he would say about Ronald Reagan, who also never participated in either of those things… In fact, out of all our presidents, only George W. Bush is a former Little Leaguer, and only John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and Bush were in the Boy Scouts. All of our other presidents, we guess, had an exotic, un-American upbringing, and a skewed worldview.”
Oh my. Huckabee has sinned against St. Reagan.