Today, a Bush-nominated federal district court judge struck down the insurance mandate of the landmark health care bill. This is the bill that Republicans did everything in their power to derail – including creating the breathtaking lie that Democrats wanted to kill voters’ grandmothers.

The modern Republican Party has a deep-rooted antipathy toward the federal government (unless they’re running it). They have created all sorts of legal theories to reinterpret the Constitution – especially the Commerce Clause – so as to prevent Americans from using government as the founders intended to tackle our most serious nationwide problems. With a federal government made impotent by this revision of the Constitution, corporations will continue to pollute, cheat their consumers, discriminate against their workers, and put out fatally defective products with impunity.

Today, it is health care legislation on the docket. But that is just the opening salvo against a wide variety of government endeavors.

Talking Points Memo observes:

A year ago, no one took seriously the idea that a federal health care mandate was unconstitutional. And the idea that buying health care coverage does not amount to “economic activity” seems preposterous on its face. But the decision that just came down from the federal judgment in Virginia — that the federal health care mandate is unconstitutional — is an example that decades of Republicans packing the federal judiciary with activist judges has finally paid off.

Indeed, contrary to conservatives’ long-standing anathema to “activist” judges who “legislate from the bench,” that is precisely what Judge Hudson appears to be doing in this case.

For instance, on page 38:

However, the bill embraces far more than health care reform. It is laden with provisions and riders patently extraneous to health care – over 400 in all.

These are not the words of a neutral, apolitical judge, but of someone with a policy ax to grind and his own view of what the legislative process should have comprised. The activist ax comes out again on page 39, when discussing whether striking down the insurance mandate section of the bill requires the judge to strike down the entire law:

The final element of the analysis is difficult to apply in this case given the haste with which the final version of the 2,700 page bill was rushed to the floor for a Christmas Eve vote. It would be virtually impossible within the present record to determine whether Congress would have passed this bill, encompassing a wide variety of topics related and unrelated to health care, with Section 1501.

If you didn’t know better, you might think this was a talking points document put out by Congressional opponents of health care reform.