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Can Republicans defeat Obama’s health care bill by persuading the courts that mandatory health insurance is unconstitutional? On December 13, 2010, Henry Hudson, a federal judge in Virginia, declared unconstitutional the central provision of the health care reform law. Judge Hudson reasoned that the law’s command that citizens purchase health care insurance extended beyond Congress’s authority to legislate. It has long been established that Congress may regulate citizens’ economic activities, such as entering into contracts, producing or purchasing goods and services, or shipping goods across state lines. But it is entirely unprecedented, Judge Hudson said, for Congress to regulate “inactivity”—a failure to buy insurance.

Obama dismissed the opinion as just “one ruling by one federal district court.” But to others, it came as a shock. Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s legal affairs correspondent, said that before Judge Hudson’s decision, most experts thought the legal challenges would fail in the Supreme Court by a large margin, 8–1 or 7–2, but that after the ruling, the betting is that the Court will split 5–4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy likely casting the decisive vote.1

It is easy to see why commentators might expect the case to be closely divided. Health care reform has been nothing if not intensely partisan. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed without a single Republican vote, and Republicans in the House have already voted to repeal it. The fight over its enactment helped promote the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican victories in the midterm elections. Most of the state attorneys-general who have challenged the law’s constitutionality in court are Republicans. Several Democratic state attorneys-general have filed a brief supporting the law. So far, three judges have ruled on the merits of the challenges. Two, both appointed by Democratic presidents, upheld the act. Judge Hudson, the first to rule otherwise, is a Republican appointed by George W. Bush. Another Republican-appointed judge, Roger Vinson, has a similar case pending in Florida, and he is likely to side with Judge Hudson.1a

The roots of the ideological divide, moreover, run deep. The principal constitutional issue at stake—the extent of Congress’s authority to pass laws governing Americans’ lives—has separated conservatives and liberals since the beginning of the Republic. “States’ rights” was the South’s rallying cry in its effort to retain slavery before the Civil War, and to defend racial segregation from federal intervention thereafter. From the turn of the century through the early years of the New Deal, conservatives successfully invoked “states’ rights” to interpret Congress’s power over interstate commerce narrowly and thereby invalidate progressive federal laws designed to protect workers and consumers from big business. And the last two times that the Supreme Court struck down laws as reaching beyond Congress’s Commerce Clause power, in 1995 and 2000, the Court…