The First Challenge

Is Obama's healthcare reform plan in trouble? A federal district court judge in Virginia just declared the individual mandate unconstitutional. This is a key element of the plan, and if removed the entire plan could collapse.

But wait. There's something about Judge Henry E. Hudson that might, just might, have bearing on his decision:

Federal judge Henry E. Hudson's ownership of a stake worth between $15,000 and $50,000 in a GOP political consulting firm that worked against health care reform -- the very law against which he ruled today -- raises some ethics questions for some of the nation's top judicial ethics experts. It isn't that Hudson's decision would have necessarily been influenced by his ownership in the company, given his established track record as a judicial conservative. But his ownership stake does create, at the very least, a perception problem for Hudson that could affect the case.
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The rules are pretty straightforward: if a judge is invested in a company that is a litigant in a case, he or she can't be involved. But in cases where a company owned by a judge has an interest in the outcome of a case but is not a direct litigant, the lines get much more murky.

Murky it is.

A.k.a. the fix is in.

Slow Learners

With the GOP already coming up with strategies to take on Supreme Court nominees the master strategist hasn't chosen, let alone announced yet, one wait and wonders when the boulder will drop, as goes Roadrunner on Coyote, so it will go on the Republicans, please mark my words.

Is life not, all so often, as overdetermined as the sagest Hollywood drama? As the man drawing the mission of going up against the first part-African American President on his first Supreme Court appointment is ranking Republican Judiciary Committee member, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

And this the very committee that rejected him for a Federal prosecutor post years ago as he seemed, at the very least, soft on segregationist judges.

Now imagine how this one plays out.

W.I.L.E.