PrairiePundit

Image via Wikipedia Politico: The federal lawsuits against last year’s health care overhaul were greeted with eye-rolling and snickers from many conventional legal scholars. Nobody’s laughing now. A federal judge in Virginia ruled late last year that a key underpinning of the health care law stretches the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution past the breaking point, while another judge in Florida is expected to rule on Monday. Both cases are likely to proceed toward the Supreme Court. And the challenges to the health care reform law are just the most visible sign of a broad, national flowering of state efforts to find shelter from the federal government in sometimes-neglected corners of the Constitution that touch conventional political hot buttons such as immigration and gun control, and exotic ones, such as citizenship and currency. “This has been brewing for decades, and it just needed a catalyst to set it off. The Obama health care package happened to be that cataly...

NY Times: A judge’s decision on Thursday declaring that a state law allowing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts should take precedence over a federal definition of marriage has exposed the fractures and fault lines among groups working to bolster states’ rights. The decision, by Judge Joseph L. Tauro of United States District Court in Boston, supports and echoes a central tenet of the Tea Party, 9/12 and Tenth Amendment movements, all of which argue that the authority of the states should trump Washington in most matters not explicitly assigned by the Constitution to the federal government. Congress, the judge said, had infringed on a question that was the province of local voters and legislators. But in using the argument to support gay marriage in Massachusetts, where the case arose, the judge created an awkward new debating point within the less-government movement about where social goals and government policy intersect, or perhaps collide. Some people involved...