Even many history-deficient contemporaries in America today will recall that the statement “No taxation without representation” was a key motive behind the American Revolution and the decision of the nation’s founders to throw off the arbitrary tyranny of England’s king.
It drove those who launched the Boston Tea Party, the farmers and teachers who took up arms against the redcoats and more.
Now the U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to rule on that issue.
In the case, if the government’s position is upheld, the precedent would allow the U.S. Senate to launch any tax on the American people that senators could imagine, just so long as they claimed there was another purpose involved, such as changing behavior.
The Pacific Legal Foundation already has asked the 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.
“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 health-care providers with micromanaging federal dictates. And more and more, it is triggering unaffordable insurance-premium hikes for tens of millions of families and individuals.”
Now a friend of the court brief has been filed by Michael Connelly of the United States Justice Foundation and Herb Titus and William Olson of William J. Olson, P.C. that is on behalf of the USJF, Public Advocate of the United States, Gun Owners Foundation, Gun Owners of American, Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund, Institute on the Constitution and the Policy Analysis Center.
The focus of the case is that the U.S. Constitution requires that taxation bills begin in the U.S. House of Representatives. But Obamacare was written mostly by White House advisers and then given to then-House Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, who took an unrelated and unconnected bill that the House already had approved, replaced the original text with 2,700 pages of Obamacare, and adopted it.
The fact that the original unrelated bill was approved by the House has been argued to support the idea that Obamacare was launched in the House of Representatives.
But the new amicus brief charges that courts, so far, have seemed to manipulate the law to accommodate the end goal of imposing Obamacare on America.
For example, when Obamacare was adopted, the White House authors of the tax-and-spend plan were very specific: The billions of dollars in payments being demanded from Americans were penalties, not taxes.
But the Supreme Court said as penalties, the required payments would be unconstitutional, so the payments in reality are taxes.
The White House quickly agreed.
Then the Supreme Court took up questions about the Obamacare requirement that subsidies go only to taxpayers enrolled in health insurance programs established by states.
The justices, however, looked at the possibility of a collapse of President Obama’s signature law because most states wanted no part of the deal, and said “established by the state” really mean exchanges established by the federal government.
The latest challenge looming hearkens back to the Magna Carta, recognized as the foundation of England’s freedoms and rights and the bedrock of the American Constitution.
“Eight hundred years ago this past June 15, the Magna Carta planted the seedbed in which the people’s right not to be taxed without representation sprouted and grew,” the brief argues. “Modestly, but forthrightly, the Magna Carta declared the people freed from the imposition of any ‘scutage … in our kingdom except by the common council of our kingdom.’”
Not quite a century later, the 1297 Confirmatio Cartarum affirmed that the king promised to impose such taxes only “by the common assent of the realm.”
Centuries later, the issue was addressed in the second Great Charter of the liberties of England where King Charles I said “let right be done” on the issue of the prerogative of imperial taxes.
Among that “right,” was “that no man [may] hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such-like charge, without common consent by act of parliament.”
It was nearly 1700 when that was stated as “That levying money for or to the use of the crown …. without grant of parliament … is illegal.”
Then followed the American Revolution, which was sparked in part by a tax on not just tea, but legal documents, newspapers, college degrees and even playing cards.
It was discussed in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, it was required that taxation bills originate in the House, the body of lawmakers closest to voters since they stand for election every two years.
Specifically, the Constitution says such laws must “originate in the House of Representatives” and the Senate has permission only to “propose or concur with amendments.”
The brief argues, quoting former Chief Justice Marshall, that there is no “middle ground.”
“The Constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it,” he had said.
Regarding the Obamacare case, the brief explains, the judges who already have ruled in the case have determined those constitutional requirements “may be altered at the sole discretion of Congress by simply attributing to the bill some primary nonrevenue purposes …”
It explained, then, “Presto – the Origination Clause does not apply.”
Interestingly, the brief points out that like the Supreme Court’s assertion that the goal of Obamacare is to change behavior regarding health insurance, “King George III averred that the 1765 Stamp Act had a nonrevenue purpose in that it would not only raise money, but would ‘unite the interests of the most distant possessions of the crown, and to encourage and secure their commerce with Great Britain.’”
Argued the brief, “Since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, various reviewing courts have labored in order to save it from a finding of constitutional infirmity. In doing so, they have fashioned several creative legal rationales to support the ACA which have caused many to question these decisions as outcome-driven.”
The PLF request for review called the law “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.
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.
Just recently, 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 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/2015/12/01/supremes-asked-to-rule-on-shell-game-taxation/
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