Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove and The Other McCain for the Rule Five links – and do go read the latest in my series on the history of sixguns over at the Glibertarians site.

In other news, it seems Obamacare is no more.  Only not really.  Excerpt:

A federal judge has struck down the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). A group of Republican state attorneys general argued in their lawsuit that the repeal of the tax penalty gutted the argument for ACA legality. Bloomberg has more, with the publication adding that the DOJ tried to argue that the individual mandate, including provisions to keep the premium rates the same among healthy individuals and those with pre-existing conditions, should be struck down, but keep the rest of the law intact. That included Medicaid expansion, the employer mandates, the exchanges, and premium subsides for hospitals. 

The judge ruled that the mandate and the rest of the law couldn’t be separated. Don’t fall in love with this ruling, as I’m seeing that it a) probably won’t survive an appeal, which is going to happen; and b) it’s not an injunction. In short, law Twitter is saying that the judge’s ruling merely treats the “motion for a preliminary injunction as a request for summary judgment.”

In other words, nothing is going to happen.

None of this should have been necessary in the first place.  In January of 2017, with President Trump newly ensconced in office and Paul Ryan wielding the Speaker’s gavel; with all those promises to “repeal and replace” (why not just repeal?) ringing in our ears, the GOP missed their opportunity; in fact, they blew it, badly.

They knew their opportunity was coming.  They should have had bills prepared.  All Speaker Ryan should have had to do was to bang the gavel and yell “Go!”

But they didn’t.  Now the House is in Democrat hands, while the Senate is even more firmly Republican; nothing much will happen in the next two years.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing; our freedoms and bank accounts are all safer when the Imperial apparatchiks are caught up in gridlock.

But this is much ado about nothing.  The ruling isn’t an injunction.  The ACA is still in place, with its few benefits and manifest flaws.  The Democrats will increasingly call for completely socialized health insurance, and the GOP will continue to bumble about like The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

The more things change…