ABA Journal:  The Pennsylvania lawyer who successfully challenged the Obama health care law cited the Book of Revelation in his suit against the federal government.

Lawyer Paul Rossi represents Barbara and Gregory Bachman, Lancaster Online reports. The York County couple say they want to finance a new car, but they are reluctant to take out a five-year loan because they will have to pay for health insurance beginning in 2014 as a result of the new law.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner of Harrisburg ruled for the Bachmans on Tuesday, holding that Congress had no authority to enact the individual mandate under the commerce clause, report the Legal Intelligencer and the Associated Press. Conner said his ruling was based on constitutional jurisprudence rather than some of the “hyperbolic rhetoric” of plaintiffs lawyers who predicted America would evolve into a socialist state. “These suggestions of cataclysmic results … are both unproductive and unpersuasive,” Conner wrote.

Lancaster Online quotes from Rossi’s complaint. “If Congress has the power to command individuals to engage in commerce (rather than merely regulate commerce) such a power would harken far beyond Orwellian prose but, rather, to some of the darkest passages of the Book of Revelation and the Beast’s control over all commerce,” he wrote.

ABA Journal: The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t agreed to review the Obama administration’s health care law, but that hasn’t stopped the pundits from making some predictions.

The swing voters may be Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Reuters reports. At issue is whether Congress had the constitutional authority to include a provision requiring Americans to buy insurance or to pay a penalty.

The court’s four liberal justices are likely to vote to uphold the law, constitutional experts told Reuters. But they disagree on likely votes by some of the others.

CNN:  A federal appeals court has tossed out key provisions of the sweeping health care reform bill championed by President Obama, setting up a likely election-year showdown at the Supreme Court over the landmark legislation.

A 2-1 panel of the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Friday found that the law’s “individual mandate” section — requiring nearly all Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014 or face financial penalties — was an improper exercise of federal authority.

“The individual mandate exceeds Congress’s enumerated commerce power and is unconstitutional,” Chief Judge Joel Dubina wrote. “This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives.”

The Hill:  The Obama administration on Monday announced that new healthcare plans will be required to cover contraceptive drugs and counseling without co-pays, starting next year.

The Health and Human Services guidelines, however, exempt some religious groups from having to offer the birth control coverage following an outcry from Christian conservatives.

The coverage guidelines largely reflect earlier recommendations from the Institute of Medicine that received overwhelming praise from women’s health advocates last month. 

CNS News.com:  The House Judiciary Committee is launching an inquiry to probe the involvement that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan had in “health care legislation or litigation” when she was serving as President Barack Obama’s solicitor general and was responsible for defending the administration’s position in federal court cases.