PLF client Matt Sissel explains in today’s Washington Times why he’s continuing to challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare. Excerpt:
I’m simply an average man taking a stand. I’m a self-employed artist and small-business owner, living in Washington state. I have no political involvement or ambitions.
I am also a realist. The Supreme Court accepts very few of the cases that are petitioned to it.
But I am hopeful the justices will recognize the urgent issue at stake: Will the Origination Clause — a constitutional protection against reckless and arbitrary taxation — be repealed through the back door, by Congress ignoring it and courts failing to enforce it?
Obamacare isn’t just an unprecedented federal intrusion into our private lives and our personal health care decisions. It is also a voracious revenue-raising machine. All told, its scores of new taxes and fines will siphon more than $800 billion out of the economy over the next 10 years, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. The individual mandate alone will cost $55 billion over that period.
The Founders knew that the taxing authority can be “the power to destroy,” as Chief Justice John Marshall put it. The Origination Clause was meant to make that power accountable to the people, by requiring taxes to begin in the “people’s House.”