Judge Should Have Struck Down Entire Law (Letter to the Editor)

This editorial about a federal judge striking down Obamacare’s individual insurance-purchase mandate rightly noted that the law lacks a severability clause. Because of that, the judge should have struck down the entire health care law rather than just severing the unconstitutional part of it.

To justify preserving the rest of the law, the judge cited a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated part of a law — but kept the rest of it in force. But that case involved a law passed almost unanimously by Congress, which would have passed it even without the challenged provision.

Obamacare is totally different. It was barely passed by a divided Congress, but only as a package. Supporters admitted that the unconstitutional part of it — the insurance mandate — was the law’s heart. Obamacare’s legion of special-interest giveaways that are “extraneous to health care” does not alter that.