Conservative legal case against the Affordable Care Act suffers a setback

One of the things that has confused me about the attack on the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality is that it's so limited. The Affordable Care Act isn't under attack, actually. Only the individual mandate is. And though the individual mandate is important to have, it could be replaced with some sort of automatic enrollment scheme, or some sort of modified penalty in which failure to purchase insurance locked you out of the bill's protections for a certain number of years. The strategy seemed like trying to destroy a car by convincing a mechanic that the carburetor doesn't fit and needs to be modified and replaced.

Avik Roy's post on today's Sarbanes-Oxley ruling helps the story make more sense: Conservatives were hoping that the absence of a specific "severability clause" -- language stating the law could stand even if a part was removed -- meant that if a part of the law was struck down, all of the law would be struck down. That doesn't make much sense to me, and it turns out that the Supreme Court agrees: As Roy notes, a part of Sarbanes-Oxley was struck down today, and there was no severability clause, and the court kept the rest of the law standing.