Tag: Commerce Clause

ObamaCare Falls

By
Michael F. Cannon

Federal Judge Roger Vinson has struck down the entire so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional.  Excerpts from the opinion:

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place…

The individual mandate is outside Congress’ Commerce Clause power, and it cannot be otherwise authorized by an assertion of power under the Necessary and Proper Clause. It is not Constitutional.

[O]n the unique facts of this particular case, the record seems to strongly indicate that Congress would not have passed the Act in its present form if it had not included the individual mandate. This is because the individual mandate was indisputably essential to what Congress was ultimately seeking to accomplish. It was, in fact, the keystone or lynchpin of the entire health reform effort…

Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void.

What’s more, it appears that the Obama administration must seek intervention from a higher court if it wants to keep implementing ObamaCare.  Even though Vinson declined to issue an injunction forbidding the administration to implement the law, he did so because of:

a long-standing presumption “that officials of the Executive Branch will adhere to the law as declared by the court. As a result, the declaratory judgment is the functional equivalent of an injunction”…”declaratory judgment is, in a context such as this where federal officers are defendants, the practical equivalent of specific relief such as an injunction”…Thus, the award of declaratory relief is adequate and separate injunctive relief is not necessary.

In other words, absent intervention from a higher court, HHS must now sit on its hands.

Topics: 
Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

House Vote to Repeal ObamaCare Is More than Mere Symbolism

By
Michael F. Cannon

The symbolism of today’s House vote is striking. Within a year of ObamaCare’s enactment, the House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly to repeal it.

That didn’t happen with Social Security. It didn’t happen with Medicare. Social Security and Medicare did not face sustained public opposition from the moment they were introduced in Congress. They did not pass by one vote, in the dead of night. They were not challenged as unconstitutional by half the states in the union.  They were not struck down as unconstitutional by a federal court within a year of enactment.

The House vote to repeal ObamaCare is just the latest sign that ObamaCare goes too far, that it creates a more intrusive government than the American people are willing to accept.

But the House vote is not mere symbolism, as the Obama administration would have us believe.  This vote has moved the ball forward on repeal.  This and further similar votes in both the House and Senate will reveal where members stand on repealing ObamaCare.  Voters may use that information to replace pro-ObamaCare members with people who will vote to repeal ObamaCare in the next Congress.  That’s how the political system works.

At the same time, this repeal vote makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will strike down ObamaCare. Like it or not, the Supreme Court follows the election returns. This vote shows the Court that it will not pay a price in the public’s esteem if it overturns ObamaCare.

Today’s vote makes it more likely that someone with the power to scrap ObamaCare will do so – and the Obama administration knows it.  Why else would they come out with both guns blazing against a purely “symbolic” act?

When that happens, it will be a good day for America. Real health care reform is impossible while ObamaCare remains on the books.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care

Supreme Court Non-Rulings More Important Than Cases It Actually Hears

By
Ilya Shapiro

While all the hot constitutional action of late, on issues ranging from Obamacare to gay marriage to immigration, has been in the lower courts — or even in Congress! — the Supreme Court still goes about its daily business.  After last year’s blockbuster term, however, this term is pretty low-profile aside from a spate of First Amendment cases (funeral protests, violent video games, school choice tax credits, public financing of election campaigns, etc.).  And so it was yesterday, when Supreme Court arguments over securities law and Western water rights were overshadowed by news of cases on which the Court decided not to rule:

  • Without comment, the Court denied an unusual request — a petition for a writ of mandamus — in the Gulf Coast global warming lawsuit, Comer v. Murphy Oil.  This is the case, you may recall, where the Fifth Circuit lost its quorum as it was about to hear the en banc (whole court) appeal of a panel ruling that allowed the suit to proceed, resulting in the odd situation of the appeal being dismissed altogether and the district court decision to dismiss the lawsuit being the law of the case.  Those complicated procedural twists would’ve made for an ungainly case, but the Supreme Court will hear a different global warming–related case, which I also previously discussed and in which Cato filed a brief. 
  • The Court declined to review the constitutionality of a federal ban on felons’ possession of body  armor (e.g., a bulletproof vest) — in a challenge arguing that these are issues properly left to the states, there being no interstate commerce connection.  In ruling for the government, the Ninth Circuit (always them!) had applied a precedent that antedated the seminal cases of Lopez (1995) and Morrison (2000), where — as you know if you’ve been paying attention to the Obamacare lawsuits — the Court struck down the federal Gun-Free School Zones and Violence Against Women Acts, respectively, as beyond Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.  Notably, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia in all but one footnote, filed a trenchant dissent from this cert denial (starts on page 33 here), saying that, ” Today the Court tacitly accepts the nullification of our recent Commerce Clause jurisprudence…. [The lower court’s] logic threatens the proper limits on Congress’ commerce power and may allow Congress to exercise police powers that our Constitution reserves to the States.”  Perhaps more notably, neither the Chief Justice nor Justice Alito joined Thomas’s dissent.  (H/T Josh Blackman)
  • The Court also declined to review the constitutionality of criminal convictions by non-unanimous juries — which are only allowed in Oregon (the place where this case originates) and Louisiana — denying a cert petition filed by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh.  The interesting angle here is that it’s not at all clear whether (1) all the rights protected by the Bill of Rights — here the Sixth Amendment requirement that jury convictions be unanimous — are “incorporated” against the states and (2) whatever incorporation there is goes through the Due Process Clause or the Privileges or Immunities Clause (which is important for courts’ consideration of the scope of constitutional rights).  Recall that in McDonald v. Chicago, the Court extended the right to keep and bear arms to the states but could not agree on the jurisprudential methodology for doing so — yet still hinted that it would be open to revisiting these issues in a case relating to unanimous jury verdicts… but apparently not yet.
  • The Court took off its argument calendar a case regarding the sovereign immunity of Indian tribes, specifically whether that doctrine prevents the enforcement of property taxes against those legally peculiar entities.  This is a huge issue for federalism, state revenues, and a host of other policy matters — and is quite complex legally — but New York’s Oneida tribe, perhaps fearing what would have been an epic loss at the Supreme Court, here decided to waive its immunity claim and thus moot the case.

After all this “active non-action” — which may be how the government next tries to characterize the non-purchase of health insurance in its next attempt to somehow find constitutional authority for the individual mandate — the Court did release one opinion of note today.  The opinion itself, in a technical bankruptcy case regarding the compelling issue of whether a debtor can take a car-ownership deduction if she does not make loan or lease payments, is not particularly noteworthy, but the author — rookie Justice Elena Kagan — is.  And so, with 18 dry pages and over a lone dissent by Justice Scalia, the Kagan era has begun.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Obamacare Reaches Its First Appellate Court

By
Ilya Shapiro

The legal battle against Obamacare has hit the appellate court level.  In October, a district court in Detroit granted the government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Thomas More Law Center and four individuals.  The judge there endorsed the government’s theory that federal power under the Commerce Clause could reach the decision not to buy health insurance because that decision had a substantial effect on interstate commerce.  The plaintiffs have appealed that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and Cato, joined by Georgetown law professor (and Cato senior fellow) Randy Barnett, filed a brief supporting that appeal.

We argue that the outermost bounds of existing Commerce Clause jurisprudence – the “substantial effects doctrine” – prevent Congress from reaching intrastate non-economic activity regardless of whether it substantially affects interstate commerce. Nor under existing law can Congress reach inactivity even if it purports to act pursuant to a broader regulatory scheme. Even the district court recognized that “in every Commerce Clause case presented thus far, there has been some sort of activity. In this regard, the Health Care Reform Act arguably presents an issue of first impression.” What Congress is attempting to do here is quite literally unprecedented. “The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.” Cong. Budget Office, The Budgetary Treatment of an Individual Mandate to Buy Health Insurance 1 (1994).

Nor has it ever said that people face civil penalties for declining to participate in the marketplace. Even in the seminal New Deal case of Wickard v. Filburn, the federal government claimed “merely” the power to regulate what farmers grew, not to mandate that people become farmers, much less to force people to purchase farm products. Finally, even if not purchasing health insurance is considered an “economic activity” – which of course would mean that every aspect of human life is economic activity – there is no legal basis for Congress to require individuals to enter the marketplace to buy a particular good or service. It is no more “proper” under the Necessary and Proper Clause for the federal government to “commandeer” individuals than to “commandeer” state officials.

Just consider our brief an early Christmas present to liberty.

Topics: 
Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

ObamaCare Comes Up against the Constitution

By
Roger Pilon

Today POLITICO Arena askes:

How badly does today’s ObamaCare ruling set back the Democrat’s signature domestic achievement? Should Tenth Amendment enthusiasts take heart that other federal laws with which state officials disagree can be struck down?

My response:

A quick reading of Judge Henry Hudson’s opinion today striking the “individual mandate” provision of ObamaCare gives hope to those of us who have long urged, more broadly, for a restoration of limited constitutional government. As Judge Hudson put in granting summary judgment to Virginia, “the legislative process must still operate within constitutional bounds.”

The administration had argued that Congress had authority to enact and enforce the individual mandate to buy health insurance under its power to regulate interstate commerce. But Judge Hudson responded that “Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market.” Indeed, he noted, the administration’s reasoning could apply to “transportation, housing, or nutritional decisions. This broad definition of economic activity [to include inactivity] subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation.” The federal government remains, in short, one of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers, notwithstanding the leviathan that surrounds us today.

This is a significant setback for the administration, not least because Judge Hudson cites to a similar argument set forth by federal district Judge Roger Vinson in Vinson’s October 14 opinion denying the administration’s motion to dismiss the ObamaCare suit brought against it by 21 states, with more to follow. There will be more litigation on these issues, of course, but for today, at least, the Tenth Amendment and the limited government it implies are alive and well.

Topics: 
General, Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

Yes, Virginia, There Are Limits on Federal Power

By
Ilya Shapiro

Yes, Virginia, there are limits on federal power.

Today is a good day for liberty.  And a bad day for those who say that Congress is the arbiter of Congress’s powers.  By striking down the individual mandate, Judge Hudson vindicated the idea that ours is a government of delegated and enumerated – and thus limited – powers.  Even if the Supreme Court has broadened over the years the scope of Congress’s authority to legislate under the guise of regulating interstate commerce or to tax for the general welfare, “the constraining principles articulated in this line of cases… remains viable and applicable to the immediate dispute.”

In short, we have come far from the days when pundits dismissed the lawsuits challenging the new health care law as frivolous political gimmicks. This is just one district court – whose opinion is not binding on the judges who will now consider the government’s appeal – but we can now see the day where this unprecedented assertion of federal power is definitively rejected as fundamentally contrary to our constitutional order.

As Judge Hudson said, “Despite the laudable intentions of Congress in enacting a comprehensive and transformative health care regime, the legislative process must still operate within constitutional bounds.  Salutatory goals and creative drafting have never been sufficient to offset an absence of enumerated powers.”

Topics: 
Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

Obamacare and the Drug War

By
David Rittgers

I wrote an op-ed for National Review (Online) last week showing how conservative exploitation of the Supreme Court’s broad misreading of the Commerce Clause to reach intrastate medical marijuana facilitated liberal exploitation of the same to create the individual mandate in Obamacare.

A principled stand on the limits of federal power does not begin and end with health care. The Commerce Clause is a double-edged sword: Conservatives cannot wield it in the drug war without making it a useful tool for advancing progressive visions of federal power.

I’m happy to see Barton Hinkle, winner of the 2008 Bastiat Prize for Journalism, pick up on my writing and drive the point home in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch:

So far, many conservatives outraged over Obamacare do not seem to have reconsidered their enthusiasm for national drug prohibition. Whether they do so could provide a good indication as to whether they’re standing up for a principle — or merely against the president.

Hinkle points to a recent Heritage Foundation paper opposing Prop. 19, California’s referendum on marijuana legalization. The Commerce Clause makes a prominent appearance:

In 2006, the Supreme Court held in Gonzales vs. Raich that the Commerce Clause confers on Congress the authority to ban the use of marijuana, even when a state approves it for “medical purposes” and it is produced in small quantities for personal consumption. Many legal scholars criticize the Court’s extremely broad reading of the Commerce Clause as inconsistent with its original meaning, but the Court’s decision nonetheless stands.

Yes, the decision “nonetheless stands.” That doesn’t make it right. Several prominent conservative drug warriors signed on to an amicus brief in Raich endorsing an expansive use of the Commerce Clause. Copy, paste, and replace the word “marijuana” with “health insurance,” and you just wrote a Department of Justice brief for any of the suits defending Obamacare across the nation.

Or, for a good laugh, go read former Oklahoma congressman Ernest Istook, now working for Heritage, who frames the health care debate as “Obamacare vs. Limited Government.” As he puts it: “Straining to find a constitutional basis for mandating that everyone must buy health insurance, Obama’s lawyers resorted to the all-purpose Interstate Commerce Clause.” Istook signed on to the drug warrior brief in Raich.

There’s no good reason for this inconsistency. State attorneys general from both sides of the aisle opposed the federal intrusion in Raich. Deep red Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana touted their drug warrior prowess but argued against an overly broad Commerce Clause reading on federalism grounds. True blue California, Maryland, and Washington argued that the Controlled Substances Act did not bar states from regulating intrastate markets.

I make many of these points in a Cato Podcast, Conservatives, Obamacare, and the Commerce Clause. For some more Cato work on the drug war, check out how Portugal decriminalized drugs without the social ills that conservatives forecast, and how ending the war on drugs would save billions annually.

Topics: 
Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

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