What The Supremes Will Be Looking At On Obamacare
Simon Lazarus and Dahlia Lithwick write on Slate about the Supreme Court's "unexpected and astounding reasons for wanting to hear a challenge to Obamacare":
The health care law, signed by President Obama in March 2010, extended insurance coverage to more than 30 million Americans, in part by requiring citizens to purchase health insurance by 2014 or face a tax penalty. That "individual mandate" provision was the one that launched a thousand Tea Parties, and it's the issue to which most constitutional scrutiny has been devoted: Can the government, under the Constitution's Commerce Clause, regulate "inactivity" (i.e., the decision not to purchase health insurance), and by what principle can we limit such unspeakable powers (i.e., how far can it go in forcing citizens to eat broccoli)?The court will hear arguments on that issue for two hours. It will also entertain 90 minutes of argument on the mandate's "severability"--that is, whether the entire law collapses if the individual mandate provision is deemed unconstitutional. (The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, even as it struck down the mandate, believed that the law itself would stand.)
So that's three-and-a-half hours of debate. What are they going to argue about for the remaining two hours? That's where it gets interesting.
The court asked the parties to brief and argue for an hour whether the lawsuit brought by the states challenging the insurance mandate is barred by the 19th century Anti-Injunction Act. That's a law that precludes claimants from asking for a refund on a tax until the tax has been collected and paid. If the court were to determine that this law applies in this case, then the courts wouldn't have jurisdiction to even consider the challenges until 2015, when the tax-penalty provision goes into effect.
If this stands, expect the next "individual mandate" to be your diet. Specifically, the government sanctioned diet.
I R A Darth Aggie at November 21, 2011 7:16 AM
Brought to you by the letters "C" and "F"...
this is why when you fix code in test rather than when you are writing it, it never works right, and ends up costing 4X the budget... because you didn't figure out the whole problem, and a whole approach to fixing it. You stitched together a Frankenstein monster and expected it to walk, even when you put the feet on backwards.
It is also a cautionary tale about letting a thing that is bad go through to law and then expecting to fix it later.
SwissArmyD at November 21, 2011 9:46 AM
Well Ohio just amended their state's Constitution with a 65.63% vote to include this:
Anonymous at November 21, 2011 8:14 PM
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