Posted on 09/25/2013 11:28:15 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
Minutes after midnight on Wednesday, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) rose to give his colleague Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) a breather from what was already a marathon speech warning of the “train wreck” that is resulting from the collision of the American economy with the oppression of ObamaCare.
While the remarks delivered by both men were eloquent, engaging, and educational, Senator Lee’s impromptu descant on the unconstitutionality of the Supreme Court’s rewriting of the original healthcare legislation was particularly noteworthy.
For nearly an hour and without a teleprompter, Senator Lee rightly accused the Supreme Court of having “rewritten” ObamaCare, converting it from a penalty into a tax, thus placing it, as Senator Cruz said, “in a different stream of jurisprudence.”
Parenthetically, one wonders if “former law professor” Barack Obama could have stood for nearly an hour in the middle of the night and delivered an unrehearsed lecture on the Constitution without the use of a teleprompter.
Speaking of the court’s ruling last year on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, Senator Lee said, “Those five lawyers wearing black robes, who we call justices, were no more empowered than the queen of England to impose a tax on the American people.”
“This was a lawless act,” he added.
It was indisputably a lawless act of unconstitutional lawmaking on the part of the black-robed oligarchy.
Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the court, held while the “individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause,” it is valid as an exercise of the taxing power granted the federal government by the Constitution.
In her partial dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg disagrees with the Chief Justice’s interpretation of the constitutional limits of the Commerce Clause. Ginsberg writes:
(Excerpt) Read more at thenewamerican.com ...
For all these reasons, to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling. Taxes have never been popular, see, e.g., Stamp Act of 1765, and in part for that reason, the Constitution requires tax increases to originate in the House of Representatives. See Art. I, §7, cl. 1. That is to say, they must originate in the legislative body most accountable to the people, where legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election, which is never more than two years off. The Federalist No. 58 “defend[ed] the decision to give the origination power to the House on the ground that the Chamber that is more accountable to the people should have the primary role in raising revenue.”
Senator Lee called it correctly, saying that it was an open and hostile violation of the Constitution's separation of powers for the U.S. Supreme Court to not only rewrite ObamaCare, but to simultaneously unite the power of making and interpreting law into their own unelected hands.
“This was a sad, shameful moment when the Supreme Court of the United States took upon itself the mantle of a super-legislative body, which it is not!” the senator declared.
Mike Lee bump
Great points by Scalia and Lee!!
Bump!
Senator Lee was amazing to listen to last night. So much so, I could not turn it off and go to sleep. His knowledge of our Constitution, the Founders of this country, our history and his ability to communicate “teach” that to all viewers was amazing. No uh umms.. no pauses... no faulty desperate clinging to a teleprompter. This many KNOWS of which he speaks! Very inspiring. I taped it to share with my Grand nephew.
Mike Lee; we need more like him.
Nullification!
“Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the court, held while the “individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause,” it is valid as an exercise of the taxing power granted the federal government by the Constitution. “
Taxes are supposed to originate in the house. Obamacare originated in the Senate.
Not one day of law school yet I know the law better than the supreme court Justice.
I keep hearing the government is lawless, but then they keep telling me every election that I have to play ball within that system.
47 Minutes
Blowing a Hole a Mile Wide in the Enumerated Powers Doctrine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6fvMf65Fv8
Sen. Mike Lee: Why John Roberts Was Wrong About Healthcare
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3050522/posts
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/sen-mike-lee-why-john-roberts-was-wrong-about-healthcare
Video on the page with transcript
Roberts probably knows that too, but he was grasping at straws. He was probably threatened.
Pelosi was bragging that she definitely knew that the Supreme Court was going to uphold Obamacare way before the ruling came down.
Only a fool did not how the ruling on obamacare would come out beforehand. The only mystery was how many voted against upholding it.
The clue was in Obama being so agreeable to get it to the Supreme Court. He already had the fix in. If he had one iota of doubt what the ruling would be, he would have delayed as long as possible.
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