It’s like I keep saying with the ACA. Federal government is supposed to be limited. It’s explicitly limited in the Constitution under Article 1, Section 8. The only laws Congress is supposed to write are supposed to be laws needed to effectively utilize their enumerated powers. They are NOT supposed to create new powers that are not enumerated under Article 1, Section 8. The Federal government we have now is in blatant violation of the Constitution, has been in blatant violation for several years, and nothing is done or even said about it really anymore. It’s gotten to the point that our “representatives” are no longer even PRETENDING to follow the Constitution OR actually REPRESENT their Constituents.
There is no enumerated power under Article 1, Section 8 that makes the ACA Constitutional in any way, shape, or form. And yet, The SCOTUS, in blatant violation of the Constitution, ruled the ACA Constitutional anyway. Our government is broken. End of story. Period. Full Stop.
The Commerce Clause argument was only one of three the government made in support of the law. It also argued that the law could be considered a tax, and this is the argument the court bought.
Specifically, the court held that the individual mandate is not a “penalty,” as the health-care law identified it, but a tax, and therefore a constitutional application of Congress’s taxation power.
In accepting the tax argument, the court relied on the “well-established” principle that “if a statute has two possible meanings, one of which violates the Constitution, courts should adopt the meaning that does not do so.”
The court then noted that the government’s argument—that the mandate represented a tax on people who choose not to buy health insurance—“makes going without insurance just another thing the Government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income.”
In deciding to accept the government’s tax argument, the court wrote that “the question is not whether that is the most natural interpretation of the mandate, but only whether it is a ‘fairly possible’ one.”
The health-care law also expanded Medicaid to cover all nonelderly people with an income below 133 percent of the poverty line, and gave the government the authority to penalize states that choose not to participate in this expansion by taking away their existing Medicaid funding.
The court called this “economic dragooning” that leaves states with no option but to accept the expansion, and found that it violated the Constitution because states could not have anticipated such a dramatic restructuring of Medicaid.
The constitutionality of the ACA was never argued.
My takeaway is they all live in closets because no one has any space to spare.
What would have been great is to follow some of these folks to their residences and call them out on the fact that they do have room. Watch them struggle for a new excuse. Then call them out on the fact that they don’t put their money where their mouth is, so really they should just shut the hell up.
Maybe someone in the white house leaked a memo that combined the addresses of the Court judges, location of nearest bus stations, and a schedule of bus connections from the ports of entry to those locations.
It was first the educational system that they targeted and then the media. So far they have succeeded. It will take years to rid this infestation of Marxist ideology from our institutions. I am not sure what the answer is, but if we are to survive and progress positively as citizens, some real hardcore changes need to be made and it will be painful. I think of Stalin and all I want to do is piss on his picture, but that wouldn’t be very graceful of me, but I think it.
Quite possible! Steven Miller is from California so I am sure this was something out of his bag of tricks. The guy has been front and center about this issue since day 1. This is out of the box thinking that this admin needs more of.
Which makes all the other arguments supporting it moot, because the law was UnConstitutional on it’s face and should have been struck down before ever deciding on those other arguments. They based their decision in part on court precedent that was also not backed by the Constitution, which they do routinely. Just because they erred on a prior decision and decided they didn’t doesn’t make every future decision based on that previous error correct. That’s the problem with basing decisions on precedent instead of the text of the Constitution itself. At least the gas tax can be justified because it funds roads. Post roads are an enumerated power under Article 1, Section 8. What does the “shared responsibility payment” fund? The ACA, which is NOT an enumerated power even if you further bastardized the general welfare clause. Case closed. The history of basing these decisions on precedent was also something borne of the courts themselves and not the Constitution. The Founders warned us what would happen if the Central Government became too powerful and here we have not one but two examples of the Federal Government granting itself new powers.
What does the Supremacy clause say? What is the highest law in the land? What are the courts violating by upholding a law that isn’t Constitutional? It’s not rocket science.
A court ruling that something is lawful makes it lawful even if we know that it’s actually unconstitutional since constitutionally they are the final arbiters of law.