Matt Sissel and his Pacific Legal Foundation lawyers discuss their challenge to Obamacare (Credit: PLF)
The Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a request with the U.S. Supreme Court to review the “shell” game through which then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid imposed Obamacare on the nation.
The case, which challenges the health care plan’s constitutionality based on the Origination Clause, is intended to strike the entire law – taxes, mandates, rules, regulations, bureaucrats and all.
The foundation announced the action with a news conference Monday at the court in Washington.
“Every day it becomes more clear that Obamacare is bad medicine for America,” said PLF Principal Attorney Timothy Sandefur, who represents small-business owner Matt Sissel.
“Obamacare cancels freedom of choice in people’s medical decisions and swamps healthcare providers with micromanaging federal dictates. And more and more, it is triggering unaffordable insurance-premium hikes for tens of millions of families and individuals.”
Sandefur said that “beyond its assault on healthcare freedom, Obamacare represents an attack on some core constitutional principles and protections for taxpayers.”
“Obamacare raises taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars, but it was enacted in violation of the Origination Clause, which was designed to safeguard against arbitrary and reckless taxation. Obamacare was unveiled in the Senate, even though the Origination Clause requires taxes to start in the House, the body closest to the people,” he said.
“Pacific Legal Foundation and Matt Sissel are asking the Supreme Court to accept our challenge to Obamacare, in order to uphold and enforce the Constitution’s safeguards against arbitrary taxation, and to liberate Americans from a harmful law that was imposed in defiance of those procedures and protections,” said Sandefur.
Pacific Legal argues that Reid simply took the number of a House-passed bill that raised no taxes and and pasted it on the front of the thousands of pages of Obamacare, which taxes Americans $500 billion a year.
However, the Constitution requires that all tax bills start in the House.
“The Senate amendment that gave rise to [Obamacare] was not germane to H.R. 3590, because it replaced the entire contents of that bill with completely unrelated material, and originated a revenue-raising bill where H.R. 3590 had contained no taxes at all,” the brief explains.
“Here, the application of the germaneness requirement would call for no political or policy judgments, but simply an ordinary determination that [Obamacare] was not germane to H.R. 3590 in its original form.”
In other words, the brief explains, “wherever the line of the Senate’s power to ‘amend’ may be, the Senate’s choice to erase the entire content of a bill and replace it with a Senate-originate revenue bill is surely beyond it.”
The case was filed on behalf of decorated Iraq War veteran Matt Sissel. It was dismissed by a trial court, then a divided appeals court refused to provide relief.
It calls for the entire Obamacare bill to be struck down, “because it is a massive tax-raising bill that began in the Senate instead of the House, as the Constitution requires,” PLF explained.
Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution provides that all bills for raising revenue have to begin in the House, to “keep the taxing power close to the people.”
Representatives must face election every two years, while senators are at risk of being fired by voters only every six years.
The lower court’s conclusion was that if there was a “main object or aim” in addition to raising taxes, Congress could skate around the Constitution’s requirement.
“The appellate court’s decision subverts the Origination Clause, by giving courts and politicians a road map for evading its requirements and its protections for taxpayers,” Sandefur said in a prepared statement delivered to WND.
“Under the new doctrine from the appellate court, judges and politicians can shield revenue-raising bills from the Origination Clause on their own say-so, simply by declaring that a tax measure’s purposes disqualify it from the need to be launched in the lower House. We believe the Supreme Court needs to hear this case, because the integrity of an important constitutional provision has been called into question, by an appellate decision that amounts to a sweeping transfer of power to the judiciary.”
PLF said Sissel chooses to pay medical expenses on his own and objects on financial, philosophical and constitutional grounds to being ordered to purchase a health plan he does not need or want.
“I am in this case to defend freedom and the Constitution,” said Sissel. “I strongly believe that I should be free – and all Americans should be free – to decide how to provide for my own medical needs, and not be forced to purchase a federally dictated healthcare plan. I am very concerned about Congress ignoring the constitutional road map for enacting taxes, because those procedures are there for a purpose – to protect our freedom.”
The brief explains that lower courts are confused on the issue, and legal scholars are divided.
Can the Senate, then, “use a House-enacted bill as a ‘shell’ to be gutted and replaced with Senate-originated language on an entirely different subject?” the case asks.
“[Experts conclude] that the founders did not understand ‘amend’ to include complete substitutions of text, even if germane.”
It appears that Obamacare will be in the courts perpetually.
Just last week, WND reported on a brand new lawsuit by Kansas, Texas and Louisiana that challenges the law’s health-insurance provider fee on several grounds, including the 10th Amendment.
Other states are considering joining the case, which was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Wichita Falls, Texas,
Legal expert Hans von Spakovksy explained the lawsuit in a commentary.
“They argue that the fee is ‘an unconstitutional tax on the plaintiff states in violation of the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and the doctrine of intergovernmental tax immunity,’” he wrote.
He noted that in America’s federalist system, the federal government “has no right to tax state governments.”
The private insurers with whom most states contract to provide services must pay the Health Insurance Providers Fee to Washington. But since the Obamacare law requires states to pay to the contractors enough to cover the fees, the complaint argues it amounts to a tax on states.
“It is important to note that this lawsuit is not over the Medicaid expansion that was part of the Obamacare law and that states like Texas refused to accept. This is about a fee that the Obama administration, through the IRS, is now imposing on states as a condition of continuing to receive federal funds for the basic Medicaid and CHIP programs,” von Spakovsky explained.
“There is no question that this is a serious lawsuit raising substantive issues against the Obamacare law and the way it has been implemented in relation to Medicaid and other federal health insurance programs.
The U.S. Supreme Court already has reviewed Obamacare three times, first changing its “fees” to “taxes” to comply with the Constitution and later ruling “exchanges established by the state” also means exchanges established by the federal government, contrary to the plain meaning of the text.
The Supreme Court also ruled that the government could not force business owners to pay for abortion-causing drugs in violation of their religious faith, although the government continues to fight for the mandate in several other cases.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/reids-shell-game-on-obamacare-hits-supremes/
from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/reids-shell-game-on-obamacare-hits-supremes/
No comments:
Post a Comment