11th Circuit Court Of Appeals Rules ObamaCare Individual Mandate Unconstitutional :: Political News and commentaries

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August 12, 2011

11th Circuit Court Of Appeals Rules ObamaCare Individual Mandate Unconstitutional

Topics: Political News and commentaries

This is an important opinion on a case involving 26 states. The 11th Circuit of Appeals has ruled that the mandate was unconstitutional, but did not throw out the entire law; instead, they found that the mandate could be severed.

From Reuters:

An appeals court ruled on Friday that President Barack Obama's healthcare law requiring Americans to buy healthcare insurance or face a penalty was unconstitutional, a blow to the White House.

From the opinion via Legal Insurrection:

We first conclude that the Act's Medicaid expansion is constitutional. Existing Supreme Court precedent does not establish that Congress's inducements are unconstitutionally coercive, especially when the federal government will bear nearly all the costs of the program's amplified enrollments.

Next, the individual mandate was enacted as a regulatory penalty, not a revenue-raising tax, and cannot be sustained as an exercise of Congress's power under the Taxing and Spending Clause. The mandate is denominated as a penalty in the Act itself, and the legislative history and relevant case law confirm this reading of its function.

Further, the individual mandate exceeds Congress's enumerated commerce power and is unconstitutional. This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives. We have not found any generally applicable, judicially enforceable limiting principle that would permit us to uphold the mandate without obliterating the boundaries inherent in the system of enumerated congressional powers. "Uniqueness" is not a constitutional principle in any antecedent Supreme Court decision. The individual mandate also finds no refuge in the aggregation doctrine, for decisions to abstain from the purchase of a product or service, whatever their cumulative effect, lack a sufficient nexus to commerce. [fn omitted]

The individual mandate, however, can be severed from the remainder of the Act's myriad reforms. The presumption of severability is rooted in notions of judicial restraint and respect for the separation of powers in our constitutional system. The Act's other provisions remain legally operative after the mandate's excision, and the high burden needed under Supreme Court precedent to rebut the presumption of severability has not been met.

While I have to admit to having no legal expertise whatsoever, I don't believe that Conservatives have much to celebrate here ... this is a very small victory that is, should the rest of Obamacare continue to hold up, is more likely than not to result in a single-payer system. In other words, the Left gets what it wanted all along - government run healthcare with the private insurers folding their tents and going out of business.

Dodd Harris writes at Outside the Beltway (emphasis mine):

... the bill's proponents would be just fine with the PPACA without the mandate. The bill's defenders in these lawsuits have been at pains to stress its centrality to the overall regulatory scheme (that is, in large part, why Judge Vinson struck down the entire act below, given the lack of a severability clause).

But if the mandate is truly necessary for the scheme to work (and that much at least is probably true, given the perverse incentives to wait until one needs it to buy insurance without it), then the all-but-inevitable result of stripping it out but leaving the rest of the law in place will be to render private insurance prohibitively unprofitable. And then the real goal will be reached: Single payer (federal government) health care will become a reality by default. The destructive consequences of striking only the mandate are thus a feature not a bug to the government health care crowd.

In other words, the end result of this decision, should it hold, could be what the Left really wanted all along - private insurers out of business and the government running all of our healthcare. Again, I'm no legal expert, but as I see it this ruling is by no means a victory for Conservatives. I hope I'm dead wrong ... but I'm not alone in my concern.

Onward to SCOTUS.

By the way, the judge that tipped ruling was a Clinton appointee.

Posted by Hyscience at August 12, 2011 1:37 PM

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