Great! We will take all the help and support we can get.
It also violates my “pursuit of happiness” by forcing me to purchase it when I do not wnat to.
Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation filed a friend of the court brief in support of Virginia Attorney general Ken Cuccinelli — “that the insurance mandate provision of the new health care law violates the Constitution’s Commerce Clause by ordering individual citizens to buy a good or service or face a fine.”
Thanks WilliamIII.
‘A person’s not deciding to buy health insurance is not an ‘economic activity,’ and no precedent exists allowing Congress to compel people to engage in commerce who otherwise would not choose to do so.’
DAMN RIGHT
The author is an idiot, and has no business writing articles about Constitutional law, and probably shouldn't even be a journalist.
The Commerce Clause involves absolutely NO prohibitions applied to anyone on any subject whatsoever. Therefore, it is logically and legally impossible for anyone or any law to "violate" it.
The Commerce Clause grants a very limited authority to Congress to regularize ("make regular," the only meaning of the verb "regulate" in the 18th century when the Constitution was written) the interpretation and enforcement of the terms of any contract of sale where the buyer and seller were doing business with each other across State lines.
The Commerce Clause was explicitly NOT a grant of power to do anything else, nor a grant of power to criminalize anything whatsoever. We know that's true because the Framers explicitly told us that the Constitution was written from start to finish based on the assumption that the Federal government was only granted those powers explicitly enumerated (including any powers implied as "necessary and proper"—meaning rightful, not violative of individual rights.) Some of the Framers—including James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution—were even against any enumeration of the rights of individuals being included in the Constitution, since it should not be necessary to forbid the government from doing anything the Constitution did not explicitly authorize it to do. There is no need for an explicit Constitutional recognition of the freedom of speech (for example,) when the government is not granted any power to regulate it—let alone criminalize it.
The only actions the Federal government has the Constitutional authority to criminalize are explicitly listed in the Constitution. The two major actions that the Constitution authorizes Congress to criminalize are counterfeiting the national currency and piracy on the high seas—and not much else. The whole point to explicitly enumerating what may be criminalized is the same as the purpose of explicitly enumerating all the other granted powers: to withhold and exclude any powers not enumerated!
So the problem with ObamaCare isn't that it "violates the Commerce Clause," but rather that it wrongly relies on the Commerce Clause to justify its Constitutionality. But healthcare is not interstate commerce. Although modern healthcare does involve commercial transactions across State lines, Congress' Constitutional authority is strictly limited to those transactions, and is also strictly limited to regularizing them: establishing standard interpretations of the contracts of sale, and standard rules and mechanisms for the enforcement of those contracts when the buyer and seller are doing business in different States. And that's why the Commerce Clause in no way authorizes ObamaCare.
Go Ken Cuccinelli, GO!