Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Most Effective Resistance Today Is Coming From the Courts

Republicans couldn’t repeal Obamacare in Congress, but judges keep trying.

December 19, 2018 at 11:00 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Do they make those buttons for black robes?
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The decision on Friday by a federal court judge in Texas to block the Affordable Care Act nationwide is a poetically perfect year-end twist in the Obamacare saga. Not since the first New Deal has a generational social change been so mired in judicial interference.

Democrats on the streets may think they are pursuing the resistance against President Donald Trump. But the most effective resistance in the U.S. today is judicial resistance — in this case, by a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the signature initiative of Barack Obama’s administration.