Individual Mandate Constitutional

[stevo]

I am now debating whether or not I should go back now...

Is America lost?

Yes, it is.

Stevo

[Forever_frost]

Whatever Forever_Fox. It goes right in line with that other drivel he posted.

Really? then you won't mind refuting it

[Treasure Chest]

Similes are based on the similarity between two dissimilar things. The similarity may be implied or explicitly stated, but to equate them makes it something other than a simile.

That would be the definition of a metaphor. The comparison was explicit enough to be deemed a simile.

[LANTIRN]

I've been in a bad enough mood all day.

As have I.

This country has been lost, and nothing short of a civil war will fix it. We all know Romney is a progressive pile of shit like just about every other President for the past century. He will make promises and then not keep them, just like they all do.

[SMEGMA STENCH]

Never before in our countries history have we had a President act like this. Let's name a few unconstitutional acts from our president.

1. Made Recess appointments Article II Sec. 2 (the recess can only be a maximum 3 day recess as prescribed under Article 1 Sec. 5)

2. Declared War on Libya w/o Congressional approval provision for 60 days if an attack on US land or forces. Article I Sec. 8

3. Overthrew State governments with Stimulus Package-1607(b): “If funds provided to any State in any division of this Act are not accepted for use by the Governor, then acceptance by the State legislature, by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution, shall be sufficient to provide funding to such State.”

5. GM bailout only congress has any authority with money

6. ObamaCare initiated with a presidential decree, all taxation must originate in the house, the holder of the purse.

7. Matheson affair Bribery w/ judge appointments Article II Sec. 4 states he is worthy of impeachment

8. The war in Libya with no authorization by Congress, and when they didn’t agree he decided to go against his legal advisors anyway (Constitutional Lawyer that he is NOT).

9. Fast and Furious illegal gun running.

10. Bringing a lawsuit against AZ through the UN.

11. Holding an office in the UN at that same time he is President.

12. Defense of Marriage act.

13. Leaks to Hollywood of vital information regarding raid on bin Laden.

14. Failure to protect our citizens on the border.

15. Campaigning from the White House is illegal.

And people talk about using laws to defeat him. Have you ever seen the movie Mars Attacks? The Obama administration are the aliens, they keep making promises, they fuck you blind, then apologize and do it again - and people keep falling for it.

And the sad thing is hes only doing what theyre saying telling him to . He is a puppet . And they are just pulling the strings . Just think where they would take us if they had no opposition ! I have real doubts that the country would still be populated at all .

[CJ]

You forgot one.

You actually think this is racially motivated? Are you that fucking pathetic? So in spite of the 15 unconstitutional examples I've given, you think the TRUE reason he's on his way to a one term presidency is because he is black? It's pretty sad when this is what you're left with when everything is said and done. The last refuge of a scoundrel.

[Forever_frost]

You actually think this is racially motivated? Are you that fucking pathetic?

1) Yes he does
2) That's all he has
3) That's all the liberals have given him to defend Obama with

[Geor!]

ObamaCare: Was the conservative dissent on the mandate originally a majority opinion?

There’s a fair reason to think so and a not-so-fair reason. First, the not-so-fair:

Scalia’s dissent, at least on first quick perusal, reads like it was originally written as a majority opinion (in particular, he consistently refers to Justice Ginsburg’s opinion as “The Dissent”). Back in May, there were rumors floating around relevant legal circles that a key vote was taking place, and that Roberts was feeling tremendous pressure from unidentified circles to vote to uphold the mandate. Did Roberts originally vote to invalidate the mandate on commerce clause grounds, and to invalidate the Medicaid expansion, and then decide later to accept the tax argument and essentially rewrite the Medicaid expansion (which, as I noted, citing Jonathan Cohn, was the sleeper issue in this case) to preserve it?

Scroll down to page 138 of the justices’ opinions to see Ginsburg’s opinion described as a “dissent.” Minor problem with this theory: Her opinion was a dissent. She and the liberals lost on the Commerce Clause argument over the mandate, which is what the conservatives’ joint opinion was addressing when it referred to her view as dissenting. The terminology’s not inaccurate, just a little odd given that it was the conservative side that ultimately ate a big ol’ shinolaburger today.

Ed Whelan’s reason for thinking the conservative opinion was originally a majority opinion is more convincing:

The joint dissent issued by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito certainly reads as though it were written to be the majority opinion. Among other things, the joint dissent’s discussion of the taxing power doesn’t respond to the Chief Justice’s opinion (indeed, I think it never even cites it). Rather, it addresses only the government’s argument. By contrast, the Chief’s opinion repeatedly takes issue with the joint dissent. This strongly suggests to me that the joint dissent was written first, as the proposed majority opinion, but failed to garner the fifth vote from the Chief…

One serious problem with the above theory is that it’s difficult to reconcile with the fact that the Chief would have assigned the majority opinion in the first place. An alternative theory is that the joint dissenters wrote their opinion as they did, after the Chief circulated his draft, in order to signal their deep dissatisfaction with his draft. I now lean towards this alternative theory.

I might have missed something but a quick skim through the conservative opinion has me thinking Whelan’s right: While they do address Ginsburg by name and answer her arguments directly, at no point do they address Roberts — even in the crucial section on the taxing power that ultimately upheld the mandate. (The opinion starts on page 127 in case you want to check our work.) Instead, their arguments are addressed to “the Government,” i.e. the DOJ and the Solicitor General. It strikes me as deeply odd that they wouldn’t tackle the chief head on when discussing the linchpin of the case given that it’s the main point of contention between him and them. And something else is strange too: The conservative opinion goes on to argue in methodical detail why the rest of the law shouldn’t be severable from the mandate. Quote:

The opinion now explains in Part V–C–1, infra, why the Act’s major provisions are not severable from the Mandate and Medicaid Expansion. It proceeds from the insurance regulations and taxes (C–1–a), to the reductions in reimbursements to hospitals and other Medicare reductions(C–1–b), the exchanges and their federal subsidies (C–1–c),and the employer responsibility assessment (C–1–d). Part V–C–2, infra, explains why the Act’s minor provisions also are not severable.

Major provisions of the Affordable Care Act—i.e., the insurance regulations and taxes, the reductions in federal reimbursements to hospitals and other Medicare spending reductions, the exchanges and their federal subsidies, and the employer responsibility assessment—cannot remain once the Individual Mandate and Medicaid Expansion are invalid.

Why would they bother with an intricate analysis of which provisions were severable from the mandate if this opinion was written in the knowledge that the mandate was ultimately being upheld? You only need step-by-step instructions on severability if you’re in the majority and obliged to provide lower courts with guidance on which parts of the statute are still operative and which aren’t. If you’re writing in dissent, that’s a waste of time. Which makes me think … maybe when this was written the author wasn’t in dissent.

So what happened here? Could be that this was written by the four conservative justices as a bizarro-world majority opinion as a sort of middle finger to Roberts on how things should have gone. But in that case, why didn’t they add language attacking his opinion on Congress’s taxing power specifically? It makes more sense to think this was the majority opinion at some point — perhaps written by Roberts himself (since he likely assigned the opinion to himself from the beginning) and then discarded after he switched his vote. The other conservatives then salvaged his opinion, polished it up a bit, and republished it as their own, possibly as a tacit rebuke to Roberts or possibly because Roberts switched so late in the game that there wasn’t time to draft something new from scratch. Or, as yet another alternative, maybe Roberts was on the fence all along, which spurred the conservative bloc and the liberal bloc to each write their own “majority” opinions in hopes of persuading him to join them as the fifth vote. When the conservative bloc ended up being disappointed, they left their opinion more or less as is, whether due to time constraints or pique or both.

Any other theories? I don’t buy the idea that Roberts flipped at the last minute because of all the liberal hacks screeching at him on MSNBC and in the New Republic. That was always a fait accompli. If he was going to vote to uphold for that reason, he would have been a solid yes from day one and the conservative opinion here would have looked very different. Exit quotation from Romney’s website: “As president, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.”

[Geor!]

Say, doesn’t the Constitution require tax bills to originate in the House?

Just a quickie post to debunk an argument that we’re already seeing in threads and e-mails: Namely, doesn’t Article I, section 7 of the Constitution say that all bills that raise revenue must originate in the House? And didn’t ObamaCare pass the Senate before it passed the House? And doesn’t that in turn mean that our nifty new health care “tax” was passed according to unconstitutional procedures?

Unless I’m missing something, no. The bill that passed the Senate wasn’t technically a Senate bill. Reid took a bill that had already passed the House, stripped out the provisions to turn it into a “shell bill,” and then inserted the text of ObamaCare to get around this requirement. The bill that passed the Senate was H.R.3590, which initially had to do with tax breaks for military homeowners. And yes, they’ve used the “shell bill” strategy before. In fact, the conservative opinion today specifically mentioned Article I, section 7 at one point while raising no objection to Reid’s sleight of hand. Quote:

For all these reasons, to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling. Taxes have never been popular, see, e.g., Stamp Actof 1765, and in part for that reason, the Constitution requires tax increases to originate in the House of Representatives. See Art. I, §7, cl. 1. That is to say, they must originate in the legislative body most accountable to the people, where legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election, which is never more than two years off. The Federalist No. 58 “defend[ed] the decision to give the origination power to the House on the ground that the Chamber that is more accountable to the people should have the primary role in raising revenue.” United States v. Munoz-Flores, 495 U. S. 385, 395 (1990). We have no doubt that Congress knew precisely what it was doing when it rejected an earlier version of this legislation that imposed a tax instead of a requirement-with-penalty. See Affordable Health Care for America Act, H. R. 3962, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., §501 (2009); America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009, S. 1796, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., §1301. Imposing a tax through judicial legislation inverts the constitutional scheme, and places the power to tax in the branch of government least accountable to the citizenry.

The Court tolerates the “shell bill” procedure, I think, because the Seventeenth Amendment has somewhat undermined the Framers’ intent of making sure that tax bills begin in the chamber that’s more accountable to the people. The House is still more accountable, but less so now that the Senate is also popularly elected. And in the case of O-Care, which passed a deep blue House at the time and a barely filibuster-proof Senate, there’s no doubt that the tax-mandate would have passed the House easily even if it had originated there. I suppose O-Care opponents could sue anyway and claim that “shell bills” in tax matters should be deemed unconstitutional because they violate the spirit of Article I, section 7, but c’mon: How likely do you think Roberts would be to say, “You’re right, I totally spaced on the origination clause in my earlier landmark ruling. Decision overturned”?

The silver lining here procedurally is that, now that the mandate’s officially a “tax,” it falls squarely within the parameters of budgetary matters than can be dealt with in the Senate via reconciliation. That means the GOP will only need 51 votes to get rid of it, not 60.

Update: While we’re at it, one more bit debunkery. Some people on Twitter this morning were speculating about whether it’d be legal now to tax guns or abortion in order to regulate them. The problem with those examples is that each involves a constitutional right, which makes taxing them a lot trickier legally. Eugene Volokh wrote a bit about it a few years ago over at his site. You can impose some sort of minimal fees, but once your tax is onerous enough that it’s deemed to have imposed a “substantial” burden on the right in question, it’s unconstitutional.

[CJ]

ObamaCare: Was the conservative dissent on the mandate originally a majority opinion?

There’s a fair reason to think so and a not-so-fair reason. First, the not-so-fair:

Scalia’s dissent, at least on first quick perusal, reads like it was originally written as a majority opinion (in particular, he consistently refers to Justice Ginsburg’s opinion as “The Dissent”). Back in May, there were rumors floating around relevant legal circles that a key vote was taking place, and that Roberts was feeling tremendous pressure from unidentified circles to vote to uphold the mandate. Did Roberts originally vote to invalidate the mandate on commerce clause grounds, and to invalidate the Medicaid expansion, and then decide later to accept the tax argument and essentially rewrite the Medicaid expansion (which, as I noted, citing Jonathan Cohn, was the sleeper issue in this case) to preserve it?

Scroll down to page 138 of the justices’ opinions to see Ginsburg’s opinion described as a “dissent.” Minor problem with this theory: Her opinion was a dissent. She and the liberals lost on the Commerce Clause argument over the mandate, which is what the conservatives’ joint opinion was addressing when it referred to her view as dissenting. The terminology’s not inaccurate, just a little odd given that it was the conservative side that ultimately ate a big ol’ shinolaburger today.

Ed Whelan’s reason for thinking the conservative opinion was originally a majority opinion is more convincing:

The joint dissent issued by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito certainly reads as though it were written to be the majority opinion. Among other things, the joint dissent’s discussion of the taxing power doesn’t respond to the Chief Justice’s opinion (indeed, I think it never even cites it). Rather, it addresses only the government’s argument. By contrast, the Chief’s opinion repeatedly takes issue with the joint dissent. This strongly suggests to me that the joint dissent was written first, as the proposed majority opinion, but failed to garner the fifth vote from the Chief…

One serious problem with the above theory is that it’s difficult to reconcile with the fact that the Chief would have assigned the majority opinion in the first place. An alternative theory is that the joint dissenters wrote their opinion as they did, after the Chief circulated his draft, in order to signal their deep dissatisfaction with his draft. I now lean towards this alternative theory.

I might have missed something but a quick skim through the conservative opinion has me thinking Whelan’s right: While they do address Ginsburg by name and answer her arguments directly, at no point do they address Roberts — even in the crucial section on the taxing power that ultimately upheld the mandate. (The opinion starts on page 127 in case you want to check our work.) Instead, their arguments are addressed to “the Government,” i.e. the DOJ and the Solicitor General. It strikes me as deeply odd that they wouldn’t tackle the chief head on when discussing the linchpin of the case given that it’s the main point of contention between him and them. And something else is strange too: The conservative opinion goes on to argue in methodical detail why the rest of the law shouldn’t be severable from the mandate. Quote:

The opinion now explains in Part V–C–1, infra, why the Act’s major provisions are not severable from the Mandate and Medicaid Expansion. It proceeds from the insurance regulations and taxes (C–1–a), to the reductions in reimbursements to hospitals and other Medicare reductions(C–1–b), the exchanges and their federal subsidies (C–1–c),and the employer responsibility assessment (C–1–d). Part V–C–2, infra, explains why the Act’s minor provisions also are not severable.

Major provisions of the Affordable Care Act—i.e., the insurance regulations and taxes, the reductions in federal reimbursements to hospitals and other Medicare spending reductions, the exchanges and their federal subsidies, and the employer responsibility assessment—cannot remain once the Individual Mandate and Medicaid Expansion are invalid.

Why would they bother with an intricate analysis of which provisions were severable from the mandate if this opinion was written in the knowledge that the mandate was ultimately being upheld? You only need step-by-step instructions on severability if you’re in the majority and obliged to provide lower courts with guidance on which parts of the statute are still operative and which aren’t. If you’re writing in dissent, that’s a waste of time. Which makes me think … maybe when this was written the author wasn’t in dissent.

So what happened here? Could be that this was written by the four conservative justices as a bizarro-world majority opinion as a sort of middle finger to Roberts on how things should have gone. But in that case, why didn’t they add language attacking his opinion on Congress’s taxing power specifically? It makes more sense to think this was the majority opinion at some point — perhaps written by Roberts himself (since he likely assigned the opinion to himself from the beginning) and then discarded after he switched his vote. The other conservatives then salvaged his opinion, polished it up a bit, and republished it as their own, possibly as a tacit rebuke to Roberts or possibly because Roberts switched so late in the game that there wasn’t time to draft something new from scratch. Or, as yet another alternative, maybe Roberts was on the fence all along, which spurred the conservative bloc and the liberal bloc to each write their own “majority” opinions in hopes of persuading him to join them as the fifth vote. When the conservative bloc ended up being disappointed, they left their opinion more or less as is, whether due to time constraints or pique or both.

Any other theories? I don’t buy the idea that Roberts flipped at the last minute because of all the liberal hacks screeching at him on MSNBC and in the New Republic. That was always a fait accompli. If he was going to vote to uphold for that reason, he would have been a solid yes from day one and the conservative opinion here would have looked very different. Exit quotation from Romney’s website: “As president, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.”

Justice Roberts has brought the dark veil of tyranny over the people of the United States.

[Forever_frost]

Say, doesn’t the Constitution require tax bills to originate in the House?

Just a quickie post to debunk an argument that we’re already seeing in threads and e-mails: Namely, doesn’t Article I, section 7 of the Constitution say that all bills that raise revenue must originate in the House? And didn’t ObamaCare pass the Senate before it passed the House? And doesn’t that in turn mean that our nifty new health care “tax” was passed according to unconstitutional procedures?

Unless I’m missing something, no. The bill that passed the Senate wasn’t technically a Senate bill. Reid took a bill that had already passed the House, stripped out the provisions to turn it into a “shell bill,” and then inserted the text of ObamaCare to get around this requirement. The bill that passed the Senate was H.R.3590, which initially had to do with tax breaks for military homeowners. And yes, they’ve used the “shell bill” strategy before. In fact, the conservative opinion today specifically mentioned Article I, section 7 at one point while raising no objection to Reid’s sleight of hand. Quote:

For all these reasons, to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling. Taxes have never been popular, see, e.g., Stamp Actof 1765, and in part for that reason, the Constitution requires tax increases to originate in the House of Representatives. See Art. I, §7, cl. 1. That is to say, they must originate in the legislative body most accountable to the people, where legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election, which is never more than two years off. The Federalist No. 58 “defend[ed] the decision to give the origination power to the House on the ground that the Chamber that is more accountable to the people should have the primary role in raising revenue.” United States v. Munoz-Flores, 495 U. S. 385, 395 (1990). We have no doubt that Congress knew precisely what it was doing when it rejected an earlier version of this legislation that imposed a tax instead of a requirement-with-penalty. See Affordable Health Care for America Act, H. R. 3962, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., §501 (2009); America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009, S. 1796, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., §1301. Imposing a tax through judicial legislation inverts the constitutional scheme, and places the power to tax in the branch of government least accountable to the citizenry.

The Court tolerates the “shell bill” procedure, I think, because the Seventeenth Amendment has somewhat undermined the Framers’ intent of making sure that tax bills begin in the chamber that’s more accountable to the people. The House is still more accountable, but less so now that the Senate is also popularly elected. And in the case of O-Care, which passed a deep blue House at the time and a barely filibuster-proof Senate, there’s no doubt that the tax-mandate would have passed the House easily even if it had originated there. I suppose O-Care opponents could sue anyway and claim that “shell bills” in tax matters should be deemed unconstitutional because they violate the spirit of Article I, section 7, but c’mon: How likely do you think Roberts would be to say, “You’re right, I totally spaced on the origination clause in my earlier landmark ruling. Decision overturned”?

The silver lining here procedurally is that, now that the mandate’s officially a “tax,” it falls squarely within the parameters of budgetary matters than can be dealt with in the Senate via reconciliation. That means the GOP will only need 51 votes to get rid of it, not 60.

Update: While we’re at it, one more bit debunkery. Some people on Twitter this morning were speculating about whether it’d be legal now to tax guns or abortion in order to regulate them. The problem with those examples is that each involves a constitutional right, which makes taxing them a lot trickier legally. Eugene Volokh wrote a bit about it a few years ago over at his site. You can impose some sort of minimal fees, but once your tax is onerous enough that it’s deemed to have imposed a “substantial” burden on the right in question, it’s unconstitutional.

Thank you. Reading through it closer and while it's a chicken shit move, they're right. Reid gutted a Veteran's housing bill

[Geor!]

Pricey for a t-shirt, but probably worth it.

http://glennbeck.shop.musictoday.com/Product.aspx?cp=29940&pc=BXCT094

[brandon01rt]

https://webservices.sos.state.tx.us/vrapp/index.asp

[Vertnut]

You actually think this is racially motivated? Are you that fucking pathetic? So in spite of the 15 unconstitutional examples I've given, you think the TRUE reason he's on his way to a one term presidency is because he is black? It's pretty sad when this is what you're left with when everything is said and done. The last refuge of a scoundrel.

Gotta love it when a bleeding-heart whiteboy serves up the "plight of the black man" as an excuse for wanting this socialistic weasel out of office. Funny how I sent money earlier this year to Allen Wests' campaign and sent Mia Love a few dollars a week ago. Yeah. I'm all about race.

[Forever_frost]

I got pissed and sent Romney money tonight