A new appeal being filed Monday by the Pacific Legal Foundation contends that the law violates the provision of the Constitution that requires tax-raising bills to originate in the House of Representatives.
Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer Timothy Sandefur said the problem with the law is just one example of how “Obamacare is so unconstitutional in so many ways.”
Sandefur said the justices will face one challenge to the law after another until it is significantly changed or repealed.
The court has twice turned back major challenges to the health care law, in opinions written by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2012 and in June. The court also has allowed family-owned businesses with religious objections to opt out of paying for contraceptives for women covered under their health plans. A related case involving faith-oriented colleges, hospitals and charities is pending.
The new appeal, filed on behalf of small-business owner Matt Sissel, stems from the Constitution’s Origination Clause, which requires that the House be the first to pass a bill “for raising revenue.”
The foundation said the health overhaul is expected to generate roughly $500 billion in a dozen separate new taxes by 2019, clearly making it a bill to raise revenue. The appeal said the legislation made its debut in the Senate when then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., gutted an unrelated bill that already had passed the House and inserted language that became the Affordable Care Act. The original measure was designed to help veterans buy homes.
The House then adopted the revised measure.
George Will was on the Sissel case last year, explaining ♡bamaCare!!!’s shoddy origination:
Did it, however, originate in the House? Of course not.
In October 2009, the House passed a bill that would have modified a tax credit for members of the armed forces and some other federal employees who were first-time home buyers — a bill that had nothing to do with health care. Two months later the Senate “amended” this bill by obliterating it. The Senate renamed it and completely erased its contents, replacing them with the ACA’s contents.
Case law establishes that for a Senate action to qualify as a genuine “amendment” to a House-passed revenue bill, it must be “germane to the subject matter of the [House] bill.” The Senate’s shell game — gutting and replacing the House bill — created the ACA from scratch. The ACA obviously flunks the germaneness test, without which the House’s constitutional power of originating revenue bills would be nullified.
I’m not getting any hopes up that the Supremes will side with the Pacific Legal Foundation, and you shouldn’t either. The Roberts Court has already bent over backwards twice, including full cranial-rectum inversion, to protect ♡bamaCare!!! and to keep it fully the law of the land with only a couple minor exceptions.
This Court isn’t going to throw out the law in its entirety, after two years of “full” implementation, merely because Democrats lied, cheated, and broke the Constitution to get it passed.
Really at this point there are only two things left to be curious about. The first is just how much deeper Roberts can perform a rectal-cranium inversion to excuse away ♡bamaCare!!!’s problematical origination. The second is whether the GOP will turn to similar legalized lawlessness to get their way on their preferred legislation.
They’d be fools if they didn’t.
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