Posted on 09/17/2012 3:36:25 PM PDT by WilliamIII
They're baaack.
You probably thought that once the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act last June, the Act's constitutionality would be settled.
Not a chance.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm, has opened up a new front in conservatives' never-ending struggle to wipe Obamacare off the books. Their secret weapon? The Origination Clause of Article I, section 7, which states that "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." The key idea is that the Supreme Court recently upheld the individual mandate as a tax. But if the mandate is a tax, the PLF argues, then it is a bill for raising revenue. That means that the Affordable Care Act must have begun in the House of Representatives. And it did not.
The House passed a version of health care reform on November 7, 2009, and sent it to the Senate. Senators wanted to produce their own bill. The Origination Clause, however, requires that all bills for raising revenue must begin in the House, and health care reform included many new taxes, including the individual mandate. So the Senate amended another tax bill that the House had recently passed: H.R. 3590, which changed the taxation rules for servicemen and women buying new homes. It struck out the text of the existing bill, and inserted its new proposal as an amendment. This procedural maneuver is called using a "shell bill." This version of health care reform passed the Senate 60-39 on December 24, 2009.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
“bullied” is probably putting it mildly.
Someone he cares about was threatened with lethal retaliation, by someone too powerful to expose.
What do you mean by that?
That direct pay will result in people dying, or that this is the talking point the left will use?
I would assert that more people would die unnecessarily under the mandates of the board that decides who gets what than under direct pay.
-- James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
http://www.constitution.org/jm/18170303_veto.htm
Veto of federal public works bill
March 3, 1817
To the House of Representatives of the United States:
Having considered the bill this day presented to me entitled “An act to set apart and pledge certain funds for internal improvements,” and which sets apart and pledges funds “for constructing roads and canals, and improving the navigation of water courses, in order to facilitate, promote, and give security to internal commerce among the several States, and to render more easy and less expensive the means and provisions for the common defense,” I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution of the United States to return it with that objection to the House of Representatives, in which it originated.
The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation with the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States.
“The power to regulate commerce among the several States” can not include a power to construct roads and canals, and to improve the navigation of water courses in order to facilitate, promote, and secure such commerce without a latitude of construction departing from the ordinary import of the terms strengthened by the known inconveniences which doubtless led to the grant of this remedial power to Congress.
To refer the power in question to the clause “to provide for common defense and general welfare” would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them, the terms “common defense and general welfare” embracing every object and act within the purview of a legislative trust. It would have the effect of subjecting both the Constitution and laws of the several States in all cases not specifically exempted to be superseded by laws of Congress, it being expressly declared “that the Constitution of the United States and laws made in pursuance thereof shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges of every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” Such a view of the Constitution, finally, would have the effect of excluding the judicial authority of the United States from its participation in guarding the boundary between the legislative powers of the General and the State Governments, inasmuch as questions relating to the general welfare, being questions of policy and expediency, are unsusceptible of judicial cognizance and decision.
A restriction of the power “to provide for the common defense and general welfare” to cases which are to be provided for by the expenditure of money would still leave within the legislative power of Congress all the great and most important measures of Government, money being the ordinary and necessary means of carrying them into execution.
If a general power to construct roads and canals, and to improve the navigation of water courses, with the train of powers incident thereto, be not possessed by Congress, the assent of the States in the mode provided in the bill can not confer the power. The only cases in which the consent and cession of particular States can extend the power of Congress are those specified and provided for in the Constitution.
I am not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the improved navigation of water courses, and that a power in the National Legislature to provide for them might be exercised with signal advantage to the general prosperity. But seeing that such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution, and believing that it can not be deduced from any part of it without an inadmissible latitude of construction and reliance on insufficient precedents; believing also that the permanent success of the Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the General and the State Governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherishing the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort for the necessary powers to the same wisdom and virtue in the nation which established the Constitution in its actual form and providently marked out in the instrument itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest.
James Madison,
President of the United States
You betcha.
James overlooked the Good and Plenty Clause, that was hidden in there.
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