In a win for the millions of Americans who are set to receive health insurance through last year’s healthcare reform law, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act constitutional. The full ruling can be read here.

The ruling comes in one of several challenges to the healthcare reform law being floated by Tea Party-affiliated groups and Republican attorneys general. (This particular challenge comes from the right-wing Thomas More Law Center.) The groups all challenge the law’s individual mandate, an idea first proposed by conservative groups as an acceptable method of ensuring universal healthcare. The appeals court found that the individual mandate is well within the reach of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which allows Congress to regulate commerce between the states.

The 6th Circuit is the first federal appellate court to rule on the healthcare reform law, and it has been called one of the more conservative benches. Judge Jeffery Sutton, a George W. Bush nominee and former Scalia clerk, wrote a concurring opinion upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. His concurrence offers a detailed and extremely respectful analysis – and rejection – of the claims that the law violates the Constitution because it compels people to purchase a product. He has been called “one of the nation’s leading advocates for conservative states-rights positions” yet, in addition to rejecting the Commerce Clause argument, he also gave short shrift to More’s Tenth Amendment argument.

From the court’s decision:

By regulating the practice of self-insuring for the cost of health care delivery, the minimum coverage provision is facially constitutional under the Commerce Clause for two independent reasons. First, the provision regulates economic activity that Congress had a rational basis to believe has substantial effects on interstate commerce. In addition, Congress had a rational basis to believe that the provision was essential to its larger economic scheme reforming the interstate markets in health care and health insurance

The ACA is clearly constitutional, but the fight is far from over. Despite the fact that this case has one of the nations’ leading conservatives ruling for the constitutionality of the ACA, there are more constitutional challenges still making their way through the courts.