Looking Out for YOU, whether you want them to, or not!
If you are the HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the answer is apparently “No.”, or at least so she asserts in a motion to dismiss responding to Virginia’s suit against the Great HealthCare Takeover of 2010:
Commerce Clause, Commerce Clause. How we love thee. You can make every issue a federal one. Even when that nasty old Tenth Amendment says that it isn’t a federal issue.
Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Richmond less than eight hours after Congress enacted the law. It argues that requiring people to buy health coverage or pay a fee exceeds federal powers limited by the Constitution’s 10th Amendment.
Well gee. Buying something is commerce, and eventually all commerce somehow has a national impact right? Therefore it must be a federal issue.
More than a dozen state attorneys general have sued over the legislation on broadly similar grounds in cases that are likely be determined by the Supreme Court.
The conservative attorney general sued in defense of a Virginia law enacted this winter that exempts state residents from being required to have health coverage.
Sebelius argues in her dismissal motion, however, that Virginia lacks the standing to sue.
“A state cannot … manufacture its own standing to challenge a federal law by simple expedient of passing a statute purporting to nullify it,” read the motion. “Otherwise, a state could import almost any political or policy dispute into federal court by enacting its side of the argument into state law.”
Sebelius also contends that the new law, passed solely by the ruling Democrats in Congress and signed by a Democratic president, is constitutional.
“Even if Virginia could surmount this jurisdictional barrier, its claim still would fail because Congress, in adopting the minimum coverage provision, acted well within its authority under the Commerce Clause,” the motion says.
The mandate for most U.S. residents to carry health insurance starting in 2014 is at the heart of the federal law’s goal of medical coverage for all. Without it, the Justice Department explains in the filing, the new law – and its efforts to contain costs – becomes moot.
“When accidents or illnesses inevitably occur, the uninsured still receive medical assistance, even if they cannot pay. As Congress documented, such uncompensated health care costs – $43 billion in 2008 – are passed on to the other participants in the health care market: the federal government, state and local governments, health care providers, insurers, and the insured population,” the motion says.
It is as elegant as an M.C. Escher drawing. The Feds pass laws requiring that hospitals provide emergency care, then, because of the cost of the care they mandate, decide that every American must pay for coverage that it approves of in order to help defray the costs of the care that they mandated…and all with nary a serious thought to their authority to be involved in mandating the care to begin with. Logic like that isn’t worthy of characterization as a mobius strip…no, no…it is better than that. It is an Escher drawing!
Government Logic...Don't Fight It, Peasant!
It obviously takes a peculiar warp of mind to work in the present administration, one that only a select few have (thank God!). To be able to say such things with a straight face must require years of training and immense self control; most of us would burst out with the giggles in the middle of such absurd statements.
Much like rabid animals, I think there is only one way to deal with these folks; they must be put down. They cannot be salvaged. Their minds are destroyed and cannot be put right. They are a great danger to all of the rest of society. They are clearly beyond the reach of reason, argument, logic, any sort of way we can pull them back from this dangerous inverted world in which they live. But we cannot risk letting them continue.
Irrespective of Ms. Sebelius’s way of looking at things. There are other peoples views involved. Who really believes that the Founders really believed that the government can force anyone to purchase anything?
Outside the current administration that is.
Of course the founders intended no such thing.
The way I have always understood the commerce clause is that it essentially created a free trade zone among the sovereign states by taking away those state abillty to impose tariffs on each other.
They presume this power from any number of egregious misinterpretations of the commerce clause by the Supreme Court. No fair reading of the commerce clause in the rubric that the founders laid out; i.e. limited enumerated powers would lead one to believe that the government has the power to make you expend any money except for taxes. Unless of course their reading comprehension was formed in the post-modernist school of obfuscation.
That’s how they argued Social Security by the way, they claimed in front of the Supremes that contributions to S.S. were taxes while publicly claiming they were insurance premiums. It was the only possible way to pass muster.
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