Akhil Reed Amar

The criticism continues to mount over U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson's ruling in the Florida Attorney General's legal challenge to the landmark Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Last week, a group of scholars at the Center for American Progress provided a devastating interactive assessment of the judge's opinion, revealing it to be one riddled with historical inaccuracies and teetering on a wobbly understanding of Supreme Court precedent.

Now a leading constitutional law expert and Yale Law School professor has penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times offering a scathing critique of Vinson's work.

Professor Akhil Reed Amar says that after reading Vinson's opinion, in which the judge invalidates the entire health care law because he says Congress does not have the constitutional authority to enact the law's individual responsibility provision, he found one thing immediately clear: "My students understand the Constitution better than the judge."

Amar says the "central issue" in the legal challenges to the health care reform law is "how much power the Constitution gives Congress, and the landmark Supreme Court opinion on this topic is the 1819 classic, McCulloch vs. Maryland." Chief Justice John Marshall (right), Amar writes, said the Constitution provides Congress implied and expressed powers. There have been only two times, the professor continues, since 1937 that the Supreme Court has found that federal action goes beyond Congress's constitutional powers. Specifically those instances were ones that fell outside Congress's constitutional power to regulate commerce among the states.

But the landmark health care law, Amar says, as do many other constitutional law experts, clearly regulates an industry that crisscrosses the entire nation. The health care law regulates an industry "that obviously spans state lines, involving billions of dollars and millions of patients flowing from state to state."

He continues that there is nothing "improper in the means" that the Affordable Care Act uses to regulate that industry either. "Laws," he writes, "may properly regulate both actions and inactions, and in any event, Obamacare does not regulate pure inaction. It regulates freeloading. Breathing is an action, and so is going to an emergency room on taxpayers' nickel when you have trouble breathing."

The opponents looking to tear down the landmark health care reform law should back politicians that support its repeal, Amar says, not "use seats on the lower courts to distort the Constitution, disregard applicable precedents and disrespect a duly elected Congress, which gave Americans in early 2010 exactly what the winning party platform promised in November 2008.

In his conclusion, Amar notes another "judge named Roger," who gave the country a high court decision that ranks among the Supreme Court's most despicable opinions.

Amar concludes:

The case was Dred Scott vs. Sanford, involving a slave who sued for his freedom because he had lived with his master in places where Congress had banned slavery. In an opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the court not only ruled against Scott, saying that even free blacks were not citizens and therefore had no right to sue; it also declared the Missouri Compromise, which had outlawed slavery in Northern territories, unconstitutional.

History has not been kind to that judge. Roger Vinson, meet Roger Taney.