This is encouraging; Virginia’s lawsuit alleging the unconstitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate has now survived a motion to dismiss by Eric Holder’s Justice Department…

RICHMOND, Va. – In the first ruling of its kind since President Obama signed the measure into law, U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson has denied the federal government’s motion to dismiss the Commonwealth of Virginia’s lawsuit that challenges Section 1501 of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act.

Section 1501 is the “Minimum Essential Coverage Provision,” that requires individuals to buy health insurance or face a “noncompliance penalty.”

Hudson said the commonwealth, represented by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, has Article III standing to pursue the litigation, and that “the Commerce Clause aspect of this debate raises issues of national significance. The position of the parties are widely divergent and at times novel. The guiding precedent is informative, but inconclusive.

“Never before has the Commerce Clause and associated Necessary and Proper Clause been extended this far,” the court said. Virginia’s challenge under Congressional taxing powers “raises an even closer and equally unsettled issue,” Hudson wrote.

Hudson’s ruling is frighteningly reminiscent of the one laid down in June by District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans striking down the Obamoratorium – both in his recognition that the federal action in question was at least suggestive of unconstitutionality and in the almost preemptive assault on his credibility by the left. A Bush appointee, Hudson has been tarred by the Huffington Post as in cahoots with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, just as Feldman was attacked as a tool of the oil industry.

In both cases, left-wing operators have used passive investments in companies tangentially associated with the dispute at hand. While it was accused of Feldman that his holding stock in Transocean, which he had sold prior to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, compromised his impartiality, in Hudson’s case it is a 13-year investment in a communications and public relations firm which has Cuccinelli as a recent client. The firm, Campaign Solutions, Inc., issued the following statement about Hudson’s relationship to its clientele:

Judge Hudson has owned stock in Campaign Solutions going back 13 years to the founding of the company or well before he became a federal judge. Since joining the federal bench, he has fully disclosed his stock ownership in the company. He is a passive investor only, has no knowledge of the day to day operations of the firm, and has never discussed any aspect of the business with any official of the company.

The pattern, of course, in the case of Obama’s moratorium – applied to this case – is that the circuit court will back Hudson and the administration will ignore the statements of the judiciary. The fact that Obamacare is a piece of congressional legislation and the Obamoratorium was a regulatory fiat action may provide for a different outcome.

Either way, the president has lost in court yet again. And his allies are reverting to personal attacks.