In "Jurisprudential shell game," Lazarus, public policy counsel at the National Senior Citizens Law Center, writes:
Since Robert Bork, Edwin Meese, Antonin Scalia and their lieutenants founded modern c
onservative jurisprudence 30 years ago, its core watchword has remained invariant: abhorrence for "activist" judges who "legislate from the bench." To showcase their hostility to activism on the right as well as the left, court-focused conservatives have repeatedly denounced the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision Lochner v. New York. Lochner launched and has come to symbolize the notoriously anti-regulatory activism of the first third of the 20th century; the case held that maximum-hours regulation violated employers' and employees' "freedom of contract," a "right" that the five-justice majority divined in the Fifth and 14th amendments' ban on deprivation of liberty without due process of law. Bork called the ruling an "abomination." Meese agreed that the "activist Court of the Lochner era was as illegitimate as the Warren Court." More recently, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., at his 2005 confirmation hearing, said, "Reading that opinion, it's quite clear that they're not interpreting the law, they're making the law."
One of the leading opponents of the health care law and its individual coverage provision, Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli (pictured), has promoted his efforts against landmark law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as aimed at limiting government "across the board," Lazarus writes.
minimum coverage provision," and the "shared responsibility provision," the latter of which we will use here. As spelled out in the Department's briefs, statutory findings written into the Act,