Morning Bell: Another Victory on the Road to Repeal
Conn Carroll /
Last month at a town hall in Hayward, Calif., a constituent asked Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) about Obamacare: “If this legislation is Constitutional, what limitations are there on the federal government’s ability to tell us how to run our private lives? … If they can do this, what can’t they?” Stark, a long-time advocate of government-run health care, gave an honest yet troubling answer: “The federal government can, yes, do most anything in this country.”
Yesterday a federal court in Virginia agreed with the logic, but not the Constitutional understanding, of Stark’s view of federal government power. In the first substantive legal ruling on President Barack Obama’s health regulation law, U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson held that the Commonwealth of Virginia raised a valid substantive theory to challenge Obamacare and that its democratically passed Virginia Health Care Freedom Act provided it standing to challenge the federal individual mandate. On the issue of that mandate, Hudson wrote: “Unquestionably, this regulation radically changes the landscape of health insurance coverage in America. … No reported case from any federal appellate court has extended the Commerce Clause or the Tax Clause to include the regulation of a person’s decision not to purchase a product, notwithstanding its effect on interstate commerce.”
Echoing the court’s ruling, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said: “This lawsuit is not about health care, it’s about our freedom and about standing up and calling on the federal government to follow the ultimate law of the land – the Constitution.” And it is becoming more and more clear that Obamacare makes it next to impossible for Americans to even track, let alone check, federal power. While the Joint Economic Committee released a report showing that the President’s health law created an impenetrable web of at least 47 new bureaucratic entities, a CRS report from earlier in the month drew an even starker conclusion: “The precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created pursuant to PPACA is currently unknowable.” (more…)