Is This the Way to Overturn Obamacare?

The Pacific Legal Foundation has requested the Supreme Court hear its constitutional challenge to Obamacare, which argues that the revenue-raising bill began in the Senate instead of the House so it should be struck down.

The Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare’s individual mandate, which requires every American citizen to purchase health insurance or pay a fine to the IRS, was constitutional as a tax.

“The Constitution requires that all taxes start their life in the House of Representatives and the law that became the ACA began in the Senate instead,” PLF Principal Attorney Timothy Sandefur said at a press conference outside of the Supreme Court.

“Even if it’s a tax it’s still unconstitutional,” he added.

Sandefur said the Founding Fathers wrote the origination clause to keep the taxing power in the hands of the House of Representatives – the most democratic branch of the federal government – instead of the Senate.

“Congress chose to break that rule by taking an unrelated six-page bill the House had passed and amending it by erasing its entire contents and substituting the 2,000-plus pages that became the ACA,” Sandefur said.

“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.”

According to Sandefur, the Pacific Legal Foundation and its client, Matt Sissel, an Iraq War veteran and small-business owner, want to see the Supreme Court accept their challenge to Obamacare, Sissel v. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, to “liberate Americans from a harmful law that was imposed in defiance of those procedures and protections.”

Sissel, who said the foundation is representing him free of charge, argued that no one should be forced to purchase a “federally-dictated” healthcare plan.

“The government shouldn’t limit our choices about such intensely personal matters or burden us with expensive inflexible mandates,” he said.

“It’s frustrating to see Congress treat the rules for new taxes as optional. Just like the rest of us, Congress must follow the law and the Constitution or our freedoms are at risk – that’s why this case is important for the Supreme Court to take up.”