President’s call to end such laws is federal government’s attempt to impose its will.

By David Rivkin Jr. and Andrew Grossman

After George Zimmerman’s acquittal for shooting Trayvon Martin, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder urged the state of Florida to abandon its “stand your ground” law. If this were just taking advantage of a high-profile case to advance a political agenda, that would be bad enough. But the president’s and attorney general’s demands are inappropriate for a more fundamental reason: the federal government trying to impose its will on states.

The debate over where to draw the line between federal and state authority has been hard-fought from the early days of the republic. But the one area where state authority has gone unchallenged is in the power to define criminal laws. The states are better placed than the federal government to respond to local conditions and their citizens’ immediate concerns regarding public safety.

The overwhelming number of ordinary crimes is prosecuted by the states. The federal government lacks the resources and the manpower to take over any substantial portion of them. When a person is prosecuted in federal court, it’s for a federal offense, such as fraud in national financial markets or terrorism. While the federal government has been encroaching on state responsibility to address local crime, federal prosecution still remains the exception.

This division of power reflects the reality that there is not any one-size-fits-all criminal law. The states can and do adopt different approaches to defining crimes to meet their unique needs and their citizens’ preferences. When an innovation works, other states are free to adopt it.

That is how the “stand your ground” defense quickly spread to the majority of the states — 31, according to law professor Eugene Volokh’s count. “Stand your ground” has long been the default rule for self-defense within the home, and more recent statutes, such as Florida’s, extend this protection to public places. The difference is that traditional self-defense puts a victim of an attacker outside the home at risk of conviction if a jury second-guesses whether retreat might have been possible and, if so, at what risk to the victim. “Stand your ground” shifts the focus back to where many believe it should be: the attacker and the attack.

That’s hardly a radical change, and it raises no concern — for example, that such laws are motivated by racial discrimination or produce racially disparate result — that might justify federal meddling. Indeed, a 2012 analysis by Florida’s Tampa Bay Timesfound that black defendants who asserted a “stand your ground” defense went free 66% of the time, slightly more than white defendants. Moreover, blacks took advantage of the defense at a rate nearly twice their proportion of the state population. If blacks are more likely to be victims of violent crime, it only makes sense that they would disproportionately benefit from a stronger right to self-defense.

So then why all the controversy? Blame those who would make a federal issue of states’ legitimate differences of opinion. A virtue of federalism, apparently lost on the president and attorney general, is that there doesn’t have to be only one right answer.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman practice law in the Washington office of BakerHostetler.

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/07/24/david-rivkin-and-andrew-grossman-on-federal-and-state-laws/2578625/

Why the President’s ObamaCare Maneuver May Backfire

By postponing the employer mandate, Obama has given millions of Americans the legal standing to sue.

By  DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. AND LEE A. CASEY

President Obama’s announcement on July 2 that he is suspending the Affordable Care Act’s employer health-insurance mandate may well have exposed his actions to judicial review—even though that is clearly what he sought to avoid.

The health-care reform law’s employer mandate requires businesses with more than 50 employees to provide a congressionally prescribed set of health-insurance benefits or pay a penalty calculated at about $2,000 per employee. The law was to take effect on Jan. 1, 2014, but Mr. Obama has “postponed” its application until 2015. His aim, the administration said, was to give employers more time to comply with the new rules. But it was also seen as a way to avoid paying at least part of ObamaCare’s mounting political price in the 2014 congressional elections.

Whatever the reason, the president does not have the power to stop the implementation of a law. If there is one bedrock constitutional legal principle, it is that the president must “faithfully execute” federal statutes. He cannot suspend laws he dislikes on policy grounds or because he fears their political consequences.

Mr. Obama, however, has made a habit of exercising an unlawful suspending power, refusing to enforce selected federal laws, including various provisions of the immigration laws against young, undocumented aliens; work requirements enacted as part of the 1996 federal welfare reform law; and the testing accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind education law.

One key problem with suspension power—aside from the fact that it destroys the balance of power between the two political branches—is that, when skillfully exercised, it sidelines the judiciary. The Constitution requires that a party commencing litigation must have what is commonly called “standing,” i.e., the party must have suffered or will suffer a legal injury that a court can redress. A determined president can head off litigation by effectively rewriting federal statutes in ways that do not create individual injuries so no party has standing.

By suspending the Affordable Care Act’s employer insurance mandate, however, the president has potentially given millions of Americans the necessary standing to challenge his conduct. This is because the Affordable Care Act is a highly integrated law, with many of its key provisions dependent on each other. In addition to the employer mandate, the law also contains an “individual mandate,” requiring most Americans to sign up for a required level of health-insurance coverage or pay a penalty.

The individual mandate was one of the core parts of the Affordable Care Act considered by the Supreme Court in the 2012 case of NFIB v. Sebelius, where the court upheld the statute against constitutional attack. Throughout that litigation, the Obama administration portrayed the individual mandate as an “integral part of a comprehensive scheme of economic regulation” that included the employer insurance mandate, which was intended to give millions of Americans a way of meeting their new obligation to have health insurance. In other words, suspending the employer insurance mandate prevents the individual insurance mandate from working the way Congress intended.

Like the employer mandate, the individual mandate by law will take effect in January 2014 (unless the president postpones that as well). Individuals who will then have to buy their own health insurance will arguably have suffered an injury sufficient to give them standing to sue.

Once in court, these litigants can argue that the very integrated nature of the Affordable Care Act would make it unlawful to apply one part against them, while suspending another section. They can also argue that only Congress can determine whether, once a statute is fundamentally changed post-enactment, it should survive or fall.

This inquiry usually arises when courts, having invalidated on constitutional grounds part of a statute, must determine whether or not Congress would have wanted the valid remaining parts of the law to remain in effect. The relevant constitutional doctrine is called “severability.”

As the Supreme Court noted in the leading severability case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (2006), the ultimate fate of the revised statute is decided based on the “legislative intent.” In the case of the Affordable Care Act, if the courts were, for example, to determine that the employer insurance mandate is unconstitutional, the well-established severability analysis would lead them to conclude that the individual mandate (and likely the entire law) must also fall because Congress did not intend those provisions to operate in the absence of the employer insurance mandate. The president’s suspension of that part of the law, therefore, should also produce the same result, rendering the remainder of the statute unenforceable.

This argument should find favor with judges who are weary of the use of suspension power that improperly aggrandizes presidential authority, diminishes congressional power, and denies the judiciary an opportunity to have its say. Courts would have to conclude that the whole statute must fall while the president’s suspension is in effect. While reaching this conclusion, they might also declare the suspension itself unconstitutional. Both results would mark a significant win for the American people.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323368704578596360026187772.html?mod=wsj_streaming_stream

An ObamaCare Board Answerable to No One

The ‘death panel’ is a new beast, with god-like powers. Congress should repeal it or test its constitutionality.

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth P. Foley

Signs of ObamaCare’s failings mount daily, including soaring insurance costs, looming provider shortages and inadequate insurance exchanges. Yet the law’s most disturbing feature may be the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, sometimes called a “death panel,” threatens both the Medicare program and the Constitution’s separation of powers. At a time when many Americans have been unsettled by abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department, the introduction of a powerful and largely unaccountable board into health care merits special scrutiny.

For a vivid illustration of the extent to which life-and-death medical decisions have already been usurped by government bureaucrats, consider the recent refusal by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to waive the rules barring access by 10-year old Sarah Murnaghan to the adult lung-transplant list. A judge ultimately intervened and Sarah received a lifesaving transplant June 12. But the grip of the bureaucracy will clamp much harder once the Independent Payment Advisory Board gets going in the next two years.

The board, which will control more than a half-trillion dollars of federal spending annually, is directed to “develop detailed and specific proposals related to the Medicare program,” including proposals cutting Medicare spending below a statutorily prescribed level. In addition, the board is encouraged to make rules “related to” Medicare.

The ObamaCare law also stipulates that there “shall be no administrative or judicial review” of the board’s decisions. Its members will be nearly untouchable, too. They will be presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed, but after that they can only be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Once the board acts, its decisions can be overruled only by Congress, and only through unprecedented and constitutionally dubious legislative procedures—featuring restricted debate, short deadlines for actions by congressional committees and other steps of the process, and supermajoritarian voting requirements. The law allows Congress to kill the otherwise inextirpable board only by a three-fifths supermajority, and only by a vote that takes place in 2017 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 15. If the board fails to implement cuts, all of its powers are to be exercised by HHS Secretary Sebelius or her successor.

The IPAB’s godlike powers are not accidental. Its goal, conspicuously proclaimed by the Obama administration, is to control Medicare spending in ways that are insulated from the political process.

This wholesale transfer of power is at odds with the Constitution’s separation-of-powers architecture that protects individual liberty by preventing an undue aggregation of government power in a single entity. Instead, power is diffused both vertically—with the federal government exercising limited and enumerated powers and the states exercising all remaining authority—and horizontally, with the powers of the federal government divided among the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

This diffusion of power advances another key liberty-enhancing constitutional requirement: accountability. Accountability enables the people to know what government entity is affecting them, so that they can hold officials responsible at the polls. Congress can also hold the executive responsible through oversight and measures like impeachment.

As Chief Justice John Marshall observed in Wayman v. Southard (1825), Congress may delegate tasks to other bodies, but there is a fundamental constitutional difference between letting them “fill up the details” of a statute versus deciding “important subjects,” which “must be entirely regulated by the legislature itself.” Distinguishing between the two, the court said, requires an inquiry into the extent of the power given to the administrative body.

The power given by Congress to the Independent Payment Advisory Board is breathtaking. Congress has willingly abandoned its power to make tough spending decisions (how and where to cut) to an unaccountable board that neither the legislative branch nor the president can control. The law has also entrenched the board’s decisions to an unprecedented degree.

In Mistretta v. United States (1989), the Supreme Court emphasized that, in seeking assistance to fill in details not spelled out in the law, Congress must lay down an “intelligible principle” that “confine[s] the discretion of the authorities to whom Congress has delegated power.” The “intelligible principle” test ensures accountability by demanding that Congress take responsibility for fundamental policy decisions.

The IPAB is guided by no such intelligible principle. ObamaCare mandates that the board impose deep Medicare cuts, while simultaneously forbidding it to ration care. Reducing payments to doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers may cause them to limit or stop accepting Medicare patients, or even to close shop.

These actions will limit seniors’ access to care, causing them to wait longer or forego care—the essence of rationing. ObamaCare’s commands to the board are thus inherently contradictory and, consequently, unintelligible.

Moreover, authorizing the advisory board to make rules “relating to” Medicare gives the board virtually limitless power of the kind hitherto exercised by Congress. For instance, the board could decide to make cuts beyond the statutory target. It could mandate that providers expand benefits without additional payment. It could require that insurers or gynecologists make abortion services available to all their patients as a condition of doing business with Medicare, or that drug companies set aside a certain percentage of Medicare-related revenues to fund “prescription drug affordability.” There is no limit.

If the Independent Payment Advisory Board exercises these vast powers, political accountability will vanish. When constituents angrily protest, Congress, having ceded its core legislative power to another body, will likely just throw up its hands and blame the board.

Since ObamaCare eliminates both judicial review for any of the board’s decisions and public-participation requirements for rule making, this unprecedented insulation of the board guts due process. Even the president’s limited ability to check the board’s power—since he can remove members only for neglect or malfeasance—represents a more circumscribed standard than usual for presidential appointees.

The bottom line is that the Independent Payment Advisory Board isn’t a typical executive agency. It’s a new beast that exercises both executive and legislative power but can’t be controlled by either branch. Seniors and providers hit hardest by the board’s decisions will have nowhere to turn for relief—not Congress, not the president, not the courts.

Attempts to rein in government spending are laudable, but basic decisions about how and where to cut spending properly belong to Congress. In the 225 years of constitutional history, there has been no government entity that violated the separation-of-powers principle like the Independent Payment Advisory Board does.

While the board is profoundly unconstitutional, it is designed to operate in a way that makes it difficult to find private parties with standing to challenge it for at least its first several years in operation. An immediate legal challenge by Congress might be possible, but also faces standing difficulties. Unless and until courts rule on IPAB’s constitutionality, Congress should act quickly to repeal this particular portion of ObamaCare or defund its operations.

Mr. Rivkin, a partner at Baker Hostetler LLP, served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush and represented 26 states in challenging ObamaCare. Ms. Foley is a professor of constitutional law at Florida International University and the author of “The Law of Life & Death” (Harvard, 2011).

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578539823614996636.html