All complex legislation (or indeed any large scale endeavor) is subject to the potential invalidation of one or more of its provisions - complexity guarantees mistakes. Therefore, the wise legislator bungs a "Severability" clause into every bill. This clause essentially says: "invalidation of any part of this legislation does not invalidate the whole". That way the proponents can go back and fix the offending bits without blowing up the entire bill and having to start over. Pretty standard stuff, really. And something that one would assume that a bunch of Hope and Change filled Harvard lawyers would have learned at their mother lawyer's knee.
Yet the Obami blew it. Didn't put in the clause. Furthermore they made the argument that without the offending passage relating to the individual mandate, the entire 2,700 page train wreck wouldn't work. Let me repeat that: not only did they not put in the little 'protecto-clause', they announced to the world that invalidating the most constitutionally vulnerable provisions would blow the whole thing up. Which is the equivalent of putting a huge kick me sign on Obama's keister. So surprise, surprise! the entire thing was thrown out.
The question I have is this: how did they know? I mean, how did they know that 'it' wouldn't work without the individual mandate? Given that no one had read the thing and therefore no one understood it, how could they have know what would or would not make it work? And why then, since they didn't understand their own bill, did they make such a definitive argument effectively daring the judge to toss the whole mess?
And of course, given all of the spurious self dealing BS encompassed in the 2,700 pages, how could they have forgotten to toss in a simple severability clause?
These cats aren't just left wing power freaks, they're incompetent left wing power freaks. Such are the wages of a lifetime of unchallenged arrogance.
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