Let us suppose that at the end of the day the Individual Mandate provision of the new health care legislation is struck down as unconstitutional. What have we accomplished? For starters we will have won a Commerce Clause challenge, which would be noteworthy in itself. This would make clear that there are real limitations on the powers of the fe ...
Author: Luke A. Wake Today the federal district court for the Eastern District of Virginia heard oral arguments on a summary judgment motion in Virginia's challenge to the new health care law. PLF has filed a brief in support of Virginia's challenge to the individual mandate provision on behalf of Americans for Free Choice in ...
Author: Daniel Himebaugh In 2009, before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (colloquially, "Obamacare") became law, President Obama was asked whether a monetary penalty assessed against people who do not buy government-approved health insurance is a "tax." The president, perhaps recalling his campaign pl ...
Author: Joshua Thompson While I was looking through my Facebook account last night, I stumbled upon a post from a law school friend of mine that suggested that the Founders supported a health care mandate. His post revolved around a law passed (and signed by President John Adams) in 1798, titled, "An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disab ...
Author: Paul J. Beard II My essay, entitled "ObamaCare v. the Constitution," appears in the current issue of The Objective Standard, an excellent quarterly journal of culture and politics. Written with the layperson in mind, the essay describes the primary legal defects with Obamacare in the context o ...
Today, Pacific Legal Foundation, along with the Claremont Institute and the Cato Institute, filed this brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in the Obamacare lawsuits. The brief focuses on the federal government's power to give states money in exchange for them agreeing to do what the federal government wants them to do. In this case, the federal governm ...
Reason.tv focuses on three of this term's big Supreme Court cases, including the Obamacare lawsuits and Sackett v. EPA. ...
That's what the U.S. Solicitor General is requesting, in a pleading filed today. The Supreme Court has already set three days for oral argument—which as far as I can tell hasn't happened in at least a century—but now the parties are requesting that the justices hear an hour and a half of argument on the question of whether the Tax Anti-Injuncti ...
You'll remember that supporters of the Individual Mandate at first conceded that it was not a tax…and then changed their minds when some judges showed an interest in it, and ruled that the Mandate is a tax, so that federal courts lack jurisdiction to review its constitutionality. Today, however, Jeffrey Zients, acting director of the Office of M ...