Supporters Slow to Grasp Health Law’s Legal Risks

With the Supreme Court likely to render judgment on President Obama’s health care law this week, the White House and Congress find themselves in a position that many advocates of the legislation once considered almost unimaginable.

In passing the law two years ago, Democrats entertained little doubt that it was constitutional. The White House held a conference call to tell reporters that any legal challenge, as one Obama aide put it, “will eventually fail and shouldn’t be given too much credence in the press.”

Congress held no hearing on the plan’s constitutionality until nearly a year after it was signed into law. Representative Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, scoffed when a reporter asked what part of the Constitution empowered Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance. “Are you serious?” she asked with disdain. “Are you serious?”

Adversaries said the law’s proponents had been too attentive to liberal academics who shaped public discussion. “There’s very little diversity in the legal academy among law professors,” said Randy E. Barnett, a Georgetown University law professor and a leading thinker behind the challenge. “So they’re in an echo chamber listening to people who agree with them.”

“It was so absurd a concept that the court would do this,” Mr. Waldman recalled. “Nobody thought it was unconstitutional until quite recently.” Even now, Mr. Waldman considers the law “plainly constitutional” based on decades of doctrine. “It’s just that you do have this increasingly activist court,” he said.

Read that again, and be shocked.

Either one of two things (and possibly both) are in play:

1. The Democrats/Media/Marxists are monumentally stupid (there goes that 'I am Liberal And I Have A Higher IQ Than Conservatives' argument that is all over the net

and/or

2. The Democrats/Media/Marxists knew this was unconstitutional, and tried to get away with it

Either way, we are dealing with truly Evil people.

"Are you serious? Are you serious?"

Nancy Pelosi when asked by a reporter what part of the Constitution gave them the authority to force citizens to purchase something.

In response to a message regarding why the severability clause was removed from Obamacare, I replied as follows:

I don’t think it was removed. The House passed its version of the bill first, then the Senate acted shortly before Xmas on a different version of the bill that did not happen to include a severability clause. “An earlier version of the legislation, which passed the House last November, included severability language. But that clause did not make it into the Senate version, which ultimately became law. A Democratic aide who helped write the bill characterized the omission as an oversight.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/us/politics/27health.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

I think at the time, no one was sweating the details, so to speak, since eventually the final version of the bill was to come out of conference committee (which is tasked with reconciling differing versions of the bill passed by each chamber so that the final law can be then passed again by each chamber in identical form to be signed by the president). But Scott Brown’s election in January bollixed that plan because the Senate Dems no longer had 60 votes to pass a conference committee version of the bill. So instead, the House voted to pass (barely) the Senate version of the bill and then they used budget reconciliation to pass a shorter bill that “fixed” the pieces of the Senate bill that the House didn’t like etc.

I’m no congressional expert: I don’t know whether it would have been possible to include a severability clause in the reconciliation bill, since I view such a clause as referring to the legislation its embedded in (i.e., “if any part of THIS statute is found to be unconstitutional, the remaining parts will stand”). It seems somewhat illegitimate to pass a separate bill after the fact that says “if any part of THAT statute (that was signed into law 3 days ago) is found to be unconstitutional, the remaining parts will stand.” The point being, if it were hypothetically possible to have included a severability clause in the reconciliation version of the bill, then failure to do so was an oversight/mistake. But if this were not legal, then the explanation for the failure to include such a clause in the final legislation was due to the unanticipated chaos created by Scott Brown’s election that I described earlier. Hope this helps.

I’m posting this here in case some other Freeper can offer a more knowledgeable explanation.

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