Tag Archives: Constitutionality of ObamaCare

The Supreme Court weighs ObamaCare

Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce is broad but not limitless.

(published in The Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2012)

On Monday, the Supreme Court will begin an extraordinary three-day hearing on the constitutionality of ObamaCare. At stake are the Constitution’s structural guarantees of individual liberty, which limit governmental power and ensure political accountability by dividing that power between federal and state authorities. Upholding ObamaCare would destroy this dual-sovereignty system, the most distinctive feature of American constitutionalism.

ObamaCare mandates that every American, with a few narrow exceptions, have a congressionally defined minimum level of health-insurance coverage. Noncompliance brings a substantial monetary penalty. The ultimate purpose of this “individual mandate” is to force young and healthy middle-class workers to subsidize those who need more coverage.

Congress could have achieved this wealth transfer in perfectly constitutional ways. It could simply have imposed new taxes to pay for a national health system. But that would have come with a huge political price tag that neither Congress nor the president was prepared to pay.

Instead, Congress adopted the individual mandate, invoking its power to regulate interstate commerce. The uninsured, it reasoned, still use health services (for which some do not pay) and therefore have an impact on commerce, which Congress can regulate.

Congress’s reliance on the Commerce Clause to support the individual mandate was politically expedient but constitutionally deficient. Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce is broad but not limitless.

First among the limits is the very nature of congressional authority, which is based on specifically enumerated powers. As the Supreme Court has consistently acknowledged, the Constitution denies the federal government the type of broad public health and welfare regulatory authority known as a “general police power,” which is reserved exclusively to the states. The court has also repeatedly held that preservation of this division between federal and state authority is a matter for supervision by the courts, and its precedents make clear that congressional Commerce Clause regulation must be subject to some judicially enforceable limiting principle.

The defining characteristic of a general police power is the states’ ability to regulate people simply as people, regardless of an individual’s activities or interaction with goods or services that might themselves be subject to regulation. Thus, the Supreme Court has ruled that states, exercising their general police power, can require all resident adults to obtain a smallpox vaccination. Only this type of authority could support ObamaCare’s individual mandate, which applies to all Americans as such, regardless of any goods they may buy or own, or any activities in which they might choose to engage.

Congress has crossed a fundamental constitutional line. Neither the fact that every individual has some discernible impact on the economy, nor that virtually everyone will at some point in time use health-care services, is a sufficient basis for federal regulation. Both of these arguments, advanced by ObamaCare’s defenders, are flawed because they admit no judicially enforceable limiting principle marking the outer bounds of federal authority.

On the left and right, legal thinkers too often forget that Congress has no constitutional power simply to regulate the economy. Rather, that power comes from a series of discrete authorities—to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, to tax, spend and borrow, to coin money and fix its value and so forth—that together allow it broad control over the nation’s economic affairs. As a result, congressional efforts to address national problems may well be less economically efficient than would a more straightforward exercise of police power. The Constitution subordinates efficiency to guarantee liberty.

The Constitution divides governmental power between federal and state governments so that one may check the other. This requires that the electorate be able to tell, especially on Election Day, which government is responsible for which policies and regulations with which we live.

As Justice Anthony Kennedy explained in one leading Commerce Clause case, United States v. Lopez (1995): “The theory that two governments accord more liberty than one [emphasis added] requires for its realization two distinct and discernible lines of political accountability: one between the citizens and the Federal Government; the second between the citizens and the States.” Congress’s use of its commerce power in passing ObamaCare eradicates those “discernible lines of political accountability.”

Even so, Congress’s enumerated powers support a vast and ever growing regulatory state, much of it based upon the Commerce Clause. Neither that Leviathan, nor the Supreme Court’s precedents upholding it, is now at issue.

Justice Antonin Scalia explained in another of the Supreme Court’s recent Commerce Clause cases, Gonzales v. Raich (2005), that the power to regulate interstate commerce, especially in conjunction with the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper [emphasis added] for carrying into execution” its enumerated powers, gives Congress broad authority to reach even local and non-commercial activities when necessary to make legitimate regulatory schemes effective. Raich upheld federal control of purely local cultivation, sale and use of marijuana, and it is often incorrectly cited as support for the individual mandate.

But the Necessary and Proper Clause does not guarantee Congress whatever power it would like to reach its policy goals. That provision supports only otherwise legitimate exercises of Congress’s enumerated powers. So under the Commerce Clause, Congress can try to achieve universal coverage through regulating the interstate health-care insurance market, as ObamaCare does, by requiring insurance companies operating in that market to cover pre-existing conditions. Then under the Necessary and Proper clause, Congress could also require employers to collect data on pre-existing conditions from new hires so insurers can better plan.

Requiring all Americans to have health insurance may well create a new revenue stream for insurance companies so as to lessen these new burdens on them, but it does nothing to make these new coverage requirements effective regulations of interstate commerce as the Supreme Court uses that term. In particular, the individual mandate does not prevent avoidance or evasion of these new insurance regulations. Nor does it make compliance easier to police, as was the case in Raich. There, the ability to regulate local marijuana production and use was necessary to make its interstate regulation effective because, as Justice Scalia noted, the homegrown variety “is never more than an instant from the interstate market.”

Unlike the regulations at issue in Raich, the individual mandate applies regardless of anyone’s interaction with a commodity, service or other activity, like the interstate sale or transport of marijuana, that Congress can legitimately regulate. Put another way, the Controlled Substances Act is about the regulation of drugs, not people. It affects individuals only to the extent that they interact with the substances it proscribes, and it can be avoided by simply avoiding those substances.

Americans cannot escape the individual mandate by any means because it regulates them as people, simply because they are alive and here. That requires police power authority. Permitting Congress to exercise that authority—however important its ultimate goal—is not constitutionally proper and would forever warp the federal-state division of authority.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey are lawyers who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. They represented the 26 states in their challenge to ObamaCare before the trial and appellate courts.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 22, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Supreme Court Weighs ObamaCare.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291883293776326.html

ObamaCare and the limits of government

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When asked if the healthcare law was constitutional, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi sneered, ‘Are you serious?’ Now the Supreme Court has decided it’s a worthy question

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

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether ObamaCare is constitutional, granting certiorari in a case brought by 26 states shortly after that law was enacted in March of last year. In so doing, it will be ruling upon the very nature of our federal union.

The Constitution limits federal power by granting Congress authority in certain defined areas, such as the regulation of interstate and foreign commerce. Those powers not specifically vested in the federal government by the Constitution or, as stated in the 10th Amendment, “prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” The court will now determine whether those words still have meaning.

As we argued two years ago in these pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (aka ObamaCare) is unconstitutional. First and foremost, the law requires virtually every American to have health insurance. Congress purported to impose this unprecedented “individual mandate” pursuant to its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, but the requirement is not limited to those who engage in any particular commercial or economic activity (or any activity at all). Rather, the mandate applies to everyone lawfully present in the United States who does not fall within one of the law’s narrow exclusions.

Under our Constitution’s system of dual sovereignty, only states have the authority to impose health and safety regulations on individuals simply because they are present. The Supreme Court has ruled many times that the Constitution denies to the federal government this type of “general police power.” Federal legislation must be grounded in one of the “enumerated” powers the Constitution grants to Congress—such as the power to regulate interstate commerce. Although the Supreme Court has interpreted that power broadly (especially since the 1940s), it has consistently held that the Commerce Clause has limits.

If Congress can require individuals to buy or otherwise obtain and maintain health insurance simply because they may be said to impact commerce by their very existence, without regard to any particular activity in which they have chosen to engage, then there is no limit on federal power. For example, if Congress can require you to buy health insurance because your lack of insurance may, at some point in the future, impose costs on the wider economy, then on the same theory it can require the purchase (or sale) of virtually any good or service, since the failure to have or use the relevant product can always be said to have some economic impact.

Both the trial judge and Court of Appeals in Florida et al. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services duly struck down the mandate as outside the scope of Congress’s legitimate authority. It is highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will overturn that decision. To do so would require it to junk nearly 200 years of its own jurisprudence and create a federal government of unprecedented and uncontrolled power.

There are, however, a number of other critical questions the Supreme Court will now resolve. In addition to imposing the individual mandate, ObamaCare revolutionizes the Medicaid program. For more than 40 years, Medicaid has been a cooperative federal/state program to fund medical care for the poor. The states also contribute funds and have enjoyed wide discretion in designing and implementing their own programs. Now, as a means of ensuring the universal coverage ObamaCare set out to achieve, Medicaid has been transformed into a massive new health-insurance program for many in the middle class. The states must accept new, detailed federal requirements or lose all federal Medicaid funding—leaving their neediest citizens without any safety net.

Although there is always an element of choice in accepting federal money, the Supreme Court has clearly stated that if federal funding conditions and threats become coercive, they also violate the Constitution’s fundamental federalism principles. Here, both the trial and appellate judges acknowledged this rule—based on a 1987 case called South Dakota v. Dole—but felt constrained to uphold ObamaCare’s Medicaid provisions because they found no direct and controlling Supreme Court precedent on the point. By accepting certiorari on this question, the Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to determine where that all-important line of federal versus state coercion may be, and whether ObamaCare has crossed it.

The Supreme Court will also consider the question of “severability”—whether the entire statute must be struck down because one or two of its provisions are unconstitutional. The test here is whether Congress would have still enacted the law without the unconstitutional provisions. As the trial judge correctly concluded, there is little question that without the individual mandate Congress would not have enacted ObamaCare’s other provisions, many of which make little sense without that critical requirement.

Finally, the Supreme Court has also agreed to consider one of the highly technical arguments raised in the case, whether the federal Anti-Injunction Act (AIA) prohibits a challenge to the individual mandate before the requirement actually takes effect in 2014. This issue has always been a red herring, arising because the government tried to argue that the individual mandate can be justified under Congress’s power to tax, even if it is insupportable under the power to regulate interstate commerce.

Virtually every lower court to consider ObamaCare—both those that have struck down the law as unconstitutional and those that have upheld it—has agreed that the AIA does not apply here. There is every reason to believe that the Supreme Court will do the same. The AIA was designed to protect federal tax-collection activities, generally requiring that a tax be paid before its legality can be challenged in court. The mandate, of course, is not a tax—but an affirmative regulatory requirement. It is enforced by a penalty. The only connection with the federal tax apparatus is that the penalty will be collected by the Internal Revenue Service from tax refunds otherwise due to violators, and its application here would only postpone challenges to the individual mandate to 2014.

Overall, the Supreme Court’s agreement to review ObamaCare’s constitutionality probably sounds that law’s death knell. When asked about these constitutional issues before the law was enacted, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi simply sneered, “Are you serious?” At this point it is safe to say, yes we are.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey are lawyers who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. They represented the 26 states in their challenge to ObamaCare before the trial and appellate courts.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204323904577038232724779286.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

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