Pro-Abortioin President Barack Obama

By Dave Andrusko

It’s been long thought that the various legal challenge to ObamaCare might come to a head at the Supreme Court in 2012, right smack in the middle of the presidential election campaign. That evidence for that conclusion grows stronger when the Obama Justice Department announced Monday that it will forgo an appeal to the full 11th Circuit Court of Appeals with respect to an August decision by a three-judge panel.

That 2-1 ruling was the first time an appellate court had declared unconstitutional the ObamaCare requirement that virtually all Americans have health insurance by 2014 ( the “individual mandate”). “The two judges based in Atlanta concluded Congress had overstepped its power by regulating the behavior of persons who do not wish to buy insurance,” according to David Savage of the Los Angeles Times. That lawsuit was brought by the attorneys general of 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business.

“[T]he administration can appeal directly to the Supreme Court and ask the justices to schedule the case to be heard and decided during the term that begins next week and ends in June,” Savage writes. “If the court follows that schedule, the justices will hand down a ruling on President Obama’s signature legislation just as the election campaign moves into high gear.”

But, as is always the case, there could be delays. There is a multiplicity of cases that have been heard at various levels with different conclusions—the rationale for having the Supreme Court address the issue in the first place.

However, if the Justices wish to delay, there was a decision that came out of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court, based in Virginia, that gives them a perfect out.  Earlier this month, in throwing out a challenge to ObamaCare brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia, the judges cited a federal law the impact of which would be that no court could rule on the law’s constitutionality until after 2014—the point at which the first taxpayer who chooses to pay a penalty rather than get health insurances antes up.

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