Andrew Cohen, writing in the Atlantic, details how the Justice Departments is preparing its appeal of a trial court judge's decision declaring the Affordable Health Care Act unconstitutional:
The Justice Department's latest appellate brief in the fight over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is no fur-and-teeth affair. The first half of the 110-page filing, made April Fool's Day at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, reads like a policy paper on health care as much as it does a legal filing. And the second half of the document devotes itself to politely chronicling the number of ways in which the feds believe that U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson got it all wrong in January when he declared the Act unconstitutional in its entirety.
The tone of this document is mellow; the rhetoric far afield from where the ugly political discourse has taken the matter of health care reform (that's probably so, from the White House's perspective, for both legal and political reasons). Anyone who has followed the legal story of the Affordable Care Act, through all its trial court rulings over the past six months, will recognize the major points of contention offered now. But what is striking now is how soft federal lawyers took it with Judge Vinson, the Reagan appointee sitting in senior status in Northern Florida. You can go for pages without so much as a mention of the trial judge who has so forcefully threatened to shut the whole thing down.
