Another judge slams ObamaCare

In the strongest such rebuff to date for ObamaCare, a federal judge in Florida ruled Monday the Obama administration's health care overhaul is unconstitutional.

The judge thus sided with the 26 states that sued to block it.

Despite the fact state Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, refused to join the suit, Nevada is one of those 26 states, after a private law firm took up the challenge and filed on the state's behalf.

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson accepted the states' argument that the new law, estimated to cost $938 billion over the next decade, violates Americans' rights by forcing them to buy health insurance by 2014 or face penalties.

Two other federal judges have upheld the insurance requirement, but a federal judge in Virginia also ruled the insurance provision violates the Constitution. Thus, a test at the Supreme Court looms.

In his ruling, Judge Vinson went further than the Virginia judge, declaring the entire 2,000-page health care law unconstitutional. "Regardless of how laudable its attempts may have been to accomplish these goals in passing the Act, Congress must operate within the bounds established by the Constitution," Judge Vinson wrote.

Attorneys for the administration first argued the states did not have standing to challenge the law. When that failed, they attempted to justify the federal intervention by citing the section of the Constitution that empowers the Congress "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

The government can levy a penalty on Americans who decide not to purchase health insurance because all Americans are consumers of medical care, they argued.

In the past, Judge Vinson noted in his ruling, the high court deferred to an extremely broad interpretation of the powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause, going so far as to declare in the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn, that the federal government could fine an Ohio farmer and order him to destroy wheat he had grown to feed his own chickens, on the grounds that by growing his own, he had reduced the amount of wheat he would buy on the open market.

Thus, because wheat was traded nationally, the court held the federal government could punish Mr. Filburn for growing more wheat than he was allotted under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 -- even for his own use -- as his actions "affected interstate commerce."

But in the past 15 years, the high court has begun to retrench. In cases that threw out laws banning guns near schools and federalizing crimes against women, Judge Vinson cited the high court's refusal to invoke the Commerce Clause under vague theories.

This allows for a glimmer of hope that a high court with renewed constitutional backbone will find and declare there are, at least, some limits to what a "central government of limited powers" can take over and order us to do.