TCGOP

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott today urged a federal appeals court to strike down the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional. In a legal brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, Texas and 25 other states asked the appellate court to affirm an earlier decision holding that the Act’s individual mandate provision violated the U.S. Constitution.

“The individual mandate poses a significant threat to individual liberty,” Attorney General Abbott said. “By requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance, Congress is violating the U.S. Constitution. The federal government simply does not—and cannot—have that power.”

On Jan. 31, 2011, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled that the individual mandate violates the U.S. Constitution and issued an order striking down the federal health care law. The U.S. Department of Justice appealed that ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Atlanta, GA. Oral arguments are set for June 8.

Under the federal health care law, for the first time in the nation’s history, the federal government is attempting to force individual Americans to enter into contracts and purchase services from private companies – in this case, insurance companies – or face a penalty. The 26-state coalition is challenging the individual mandate requirement because it exceeds Congress’ authority and violates Americans’ constitutional rights. According to the States’ legal brief, the Act also unconstitutionally forces state governments to spend billions of additional dollars on expanded entitlement programs.

The bipartisan 26-state coalition includes Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Washington, Colorado, Michigan, Utah, Alabama, South Dakota, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Maine. The states are joined in this lawsuit by the National Federation of Independent Business, and individual plaintiffs Mary Brown and Kaj Ahlburg.

Attorney General Abbott and 12 other state attorneys general filed their legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shortly after President Barack Obama signed the bill into law. The States’ legal action specifically challenges the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and names the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Treasury and Labor as defendants because those federal agencies are charged with implementing the Act’s constitutionally impermissible provisions.

Key Quotes From Today’s Filing
“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is an extraordinary bill that rests on unprecedented assertions of federal power. In at least two respects, the Act pushes even the most expansive conceptive of the federal government’s constitutional powers past the breaking point.”

“The individual mandate is an unprecedented assertion of a power Congress simply does not possess. Congress has substantial power to regulate interstate commerce, but it may not compel individuals to enter into such commerce so that Congress may better regulate them. In the more than 200 years that the Constitution has been in place, Congress has never before attempted to exercise its Commerce Clause power in this manner. That is not the product of remarkable restraint; Congress has not exercised such a power because it does not exist.”

“Permitting Congress to force citizens to engage in commerce all the better to regulate them is simply not compatible with a system of enumerated and limited powers or a system of dual sovereignty. Sanctioning such a power would eliminate all meaningful limits on Congress’s authority and be the death knell for our constitutional structure and individual liberties.”

“The absence of historical precedent for the exercise of such an extraordinary authority is revealing; if Congress actually possessed this power, it is doubtful that it would have taken two centuries to exercise it.”

“…the government claims that the individual mandate is actually a regulation of future commercial or economic activity in which, the government presumes, most individuals subject to the mandate will ultimately engage. This argument finds no support in precedent and has astonishing implications for federalism and individual liberty.”

“The Court has never held commercial regulation justified based on a mere likelihood of economic activity at some unknown, perhaps distant, point in the future.”

“Every individual would be at all times subject to federal regulation of his or her private decisions related to health care or anything else that substantially affects interstate commerce (which it to say, almost anything else). There is no logical reason why such regulation would have to be limited to the decision whether to purchase health insurance. Congress could regulate other decisions bearing on an individual’s supposed “active participation in the health care market,” such as whether to have an annual physical or to undertake certain courses of treatment. The federal government’s interest in controlling the cost of health care would likewise give Congress authority to order individuals to eat more vegetables and fewer desserts, to exercise at least 45 minutes per day, to sleep at least eight hours per day, and to drink one glass of wine a day but never any beer.”