A second federal judge ruled on Monday that it was unconstitutional for Congress to enact a health care law that requires Americans to obtain commercial insurance, evening the score at two-to-two in the lower courts as conflicting opinions begin their path to the Supreme Court.

This is the crucial issue for the future of Obamacare.  Republicans have no hope of repealing it over the next two years. And my guess is that Obama will win re-election in 2012, so repeal will not happen before 2017 at the earliest.

But the constitutional challenge might succeed.  It all comes down to Justice Kennedy.

In Room for Debate, at the New York Times.

Nothing.

A bitter dispute over whether a gay conservative group should co-sponsor the conservative movement’s largest gathering of the year has led some prominent supporters to withdraw from the event next month.

Riding the winds of success in November’s midterm elections, this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which is set to begin Feb. 10 in Washington, is expected to draw such Republican presidential aspirants as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul as well as thousands of activists.

But some conservative pillars, including church-based groups like the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and Liberty University and others like the Heritage Foundation, are refusing to participate. They are angry that the gay organization, GOProud, has been given a seat at the planning table. These groups are implacable opponents of same-sex marriage, which they say GOProud implicitly endorses by saying that the question should be left to the states.

GOProud is right; if conservatives were at all consistent in their affection for states rights, they would vote to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

1. More investment in techonology = bigger handouts to the green lobby.

2. More investment in education = bigger handouts to teachers.

3. More investment in infrastructure = bigger handouts to construction unions.

The push for free trade agreements is great.

The call to eliminate tax loopholes while lowering tax rates makes perfect sense.

The claim that Obamacare will reduce the deficit is utter nonsense.

E.J. McMahon provides an excellent analysis of the issue.  A key line:

The biggest state budget gaps will never be closed until politicians use the tools they already have to challenge the overweening power of public employee unions.

I agree.

As the Obama administration prepares a report on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, some of the nation’s largest banks are offering a few suggestions.

Wells Fargo and some other large banks would like private companies, perhaps even themselves, to become the new housing finance giants helping to bundle individual mortgages into securities — that would be stamped with a government guarantee.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. The rest is here.

The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines.

The new effort comes as many large drug makers, unable to find enough new drugs, are paring back research. Promising discoveries in illnesses like depression and Parkinson’s that once would have led to clinical trials are instead going unexplored because companies have neither the will nor the resources to undertake the effort.

Do we think the administration has even considered that the problem here might be the huge costs imposed on new drug development by the FDA?

Newly energized by their success in November’s midterm elections, conservative legislators in dozens of states are mounting aggressive campaigns to limit abortions.

Two comments:

1. As a matter of public policy, I think each state should be able to set its own abortion policy, free of federal pressure or restriction in either direction.

2. I nevertheless oppose state-level restrictions like the ones being discussed in the story (e.g., a ban on abortion at 20 weeks after conception).

You might think these two positions are inconsistent, but I disagree.  My own views are strongly pro-choice, but I accept that many reasonable people feel differently.  Imposition of one abortion policy on all states, therefore, generates anger and polarization.

A state-by-state approach is not perfect from my perspective, because some states will restrict abortion more than I think desirable. But this seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

Former Louisiana Senator Russell Long was famous for the ditty,

Don’t tax you, Don’t tax me, Tax that fellow behind the tree.

The U.S. is facing exactly this problem, except with respect to spending cuts:

As President Obama and Congress brace to battle over how to reduce chronic annual budget deficits, Americans overwhelmingly say that in general they prefer cutting government spending to paying higher taxes, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Yet their preference for spending cuts, even in programs that benefit them, dissolves when they are presented with specific options related to Medicare and Social Security, the programs that directly touch the most people and also are the biggest drivers of the government’s projected long-term debt.

The poll results make perfect sense; most people expect to benefit from Medicare and Social Security, so they want to cut other programs – the ones that benefit somone else – all those folks standing out in the forest.

The problem is that we cannot address the debt situation without cutting Medicare and Social Security, so the political path is fiscal health is hard to fathom.