A Big Gulp for Bloomberg

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s much-talked-about prohibition of large-size sugary drinks, like Coke and Pepsi, set to have gone into effect today, has been over-ruled. At least temporarily. New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling put the kibosh on the law, on Monday, enjoining and restraining the city “from implementing or enforcing the new regulations.”

Mayor Bloomberg promises to appeal the ruling. Apparently, he sees this as such an important policy move that spending taxpayers’ money on legal fees is another great thing he can do for the people he’s supposed to serve.

But, until his next assault, let’s appreciate the judge’s ruling:

In halting the drink rules, Judge Tingling noted that the incoming sugary drink regulations were “fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences” that would be difficult to enforce with consistency “even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole.”

“The loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the stated purpose of the rule,” the judge wrote.

The judge also censured Bloomberg for overstepping his bounds by cooking up the regs not via the City Council — the city’s legislative body — but from the Board of Health, which just happens to have been appointed by . . . Michael Bloomberg.

The prohibition of larger-sized soft drinks never made much sense. Add onto its limited scope (applying to some vendors, not others) and its core notion (prohibiting sale by dosage, when consumers could with only marginal inconvenience get around the rules) Bloomberg’s legislative hanky panky, and it wasn’t just any Nanny State horror.

It was an autocratic move.

Nicely stopped. For now.

This is COmmon Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.