The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has upheld Obamacare. Opinion written by Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee if you’re counting. More details here — all three judges voted to keep law in place.
Related topic — blind partisanship: Did you notice Sen. Jason Rapert trying to have it both ways in the paper this morning? He was among the most outspoken in the Republican effort to block anything and everything related to implementation of the health care reform law, including applying for federal planning money for a state-run health exchange for people with difficulty obtaining insurance. The alternative is letting evil D.C. bureaucrats run the exchanges.
The article quotes Rapert as complaining bitterly that Republicans, and not Gov. Mike Beebe, are getting the blame for refusing the planning money and turning the job over to the feds. Well, duh. Beebe has insisted on consensus in the process. Absent that consensus, he’s giving the Republicans what they demanded — federal control. They don’t like that much. Republicans want the ability to complain whichever way it turns out.
And speaking of blind partisanship: That’s the only thing at work in the mountain Republicans are attempting to make of the molehill of a discrepancy between voting precinct lists kept by the Census bureau, on which the congressional redistricting map was based, and by the Jefferson County Election Commission. No matter how the county labels its districts, it must divide the county between the 1st and 4th congressional districts as the legislature directed and it will be easy to do, without creating any “islands” in the county. Republican U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford is complaining because, well, just because. He claims to have no objection to the map all understood to have been approved. He just wants to score some points on potential opponent Clark Hall, chair of the House committee that produced the new map, over some irrelevant nomenclature differences.