Last year’s Supreme Court decision holding that Obamacare imposes a “tax” on people who don’t buy health insurance came as a surprise to most Americans. The law doesn’t call it a “tax,” but a “penalty,” and the law’s authors and supporters never called it a “tax” when it was enacted. But Chief Justice Roberts and the four liberal justices held that unlike the penalty in the 1922 case of Bailey v. Drexel Furniture — which was disguised as a tax — what the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act imposed looked like a penalty but was really a tax.
One of the problems with that — left unaddressed in the NFIB v. Sebelius ruling — is that the Constitution requires “all bills for raising revenue” to “originate” in the House of Representatives. If the PPACA imposes a tax, then it fails this requirement because it originated in the Senate.
That’s the argument being made in the case of Matt Sissel, a veteran and small business owner represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation (including one of us, Sandefur). In a brief filed yesterday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Sissel’s lawyers argue that the Obamacare “tax” originated in the Senate in violation of Constitutional standards.
There’s little case law interpreting the Constitution’s Origination Clause. The leading case is 1911’s Flint v. Stone Tracy Corp., which held that the Clause wasn’t violated when the Senate amended a House‐passed bill to add a tax to it. The Court held that the Senate — which has the constitutional authority to “propose or concur with amendments” to House‐passed revenue bills — was allowed to do this because that Senate amendment “was germane to the subject‐matter of the bill.” It’s hard to see how the “germaneness” requirement was satisfied in the PPACA’s case, though. That law originated in the Senate, which took a House‐passed bill on a completely different subject (providing incentives for veterans to buy their first homes), deleted its entire text, and replaced it with the bill that became Obamacare. This “shell bill” tactic is not uncommon in legislatures, but the Supreme Court has never held that it satisfies the origination requirement. A federal trial court threw Sissel’s case out in June, on the grounds that the Senate’s “amendment” satisfied the “germaneness” rule because the original House bill had something to do with taxes. But if the standard is that lax, the Origination Clause would mean nothing: the Senate could originate taxes at any time when they have some extremely broad similarity with some other bill the House has passed. In an age of boxcar‐sized omnibus bills, that would be easy to do.
That trial court also said that the Origination Clause doesn’t apply to the Obamacare tax anyway, because, while it’s a tax, it isn’t a “bill for raising revenue.” There are precedents that have exempted certain kinds of taxes from the Origination Clause because they’re not revenue measures, but are instead earmarked for some specific fund, or are actually just enforcement penalties meant to ensure compliance with another law. But funds raised by the PPACA aren’t earmarked — they go into the general Treasury, to be spent as Congress chooses. And in NFIB, Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion specifically held that the provision at issue is not a penalty, but only a tax. It’s the reverse of Drexel Furniture.
These are reasons why the judge‐made exceptions to the Origination Clause shouldn’t apply here. But there’s a broader reason why the courts should be reluctant to exempt Obamacare. In their decision last year, the majority of justices expressed a desire to preserve what they saw as democratic lawmaking. “We possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments,” wrote Roberts. “Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” Whatever you might think of this idea, if the courts are concerned about our democratic process, they should not hesitate to enforce a constitutional provision designed to preserve democratic accountability.
The Origination Clause was written to ensure that the power to tax — government’s most pervasive, dangerous, and easily abused power — was kept close to the people’s chamber: the House of Representatives, elected every two years directly by local districts. Had Obamacare been properly proposed in the House as a tax on not buying insurance in the first place, it wouldn’t have survived more than a few days — and as it stands the backlash against the law’s enactment swept out the House majority that supported that law. If the courts are concerned with empowering the will of the voters, that’s all the more reason that procedural requirements like the Origination Clause — that help ensure accountability and transparency, and keep the taxing power as close to the people as possible — are fully enforced.
Live Now
Email Signup
Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!
Topics
Archives
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- Show More