Amid the recent attempts by collectivists to curtail the right to keep and bear arms, something very important has been done by officials in 20 states on another issue.
It's so important, in fact, that it should not be overlooked. As Michael Tennant writes for The New American, on Monday, the Attorneys General for Texas and Wisconsin led the way to file suit against the federal government to literally overturn Obamacare.
They have one central argument -- and if it doesn't win, health insurance costs are going to rise faster than the already mind-boggling rates we have seen since the implementation of Obamacare in 2014.
Here's the gist:
In late 2009 and early 2010, when President Obama and his gang were pushing their fascistic unconstitutional mandates on insurance businesses and consumers, they denied that the penalty for not buying insurance was a "fine." Instead, they claimed that this penalty for trying to be free from government coercion was a "tax" administered by the IRS.
But in 2012, when the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Obamacare, they realized they were running into what is called the "Anti-injunction Act," which stipulates that no American citizen can bring suit against a federal tax before he has paid it. He or she can only sue after the damage has been done.
Since at that time no one had yet paid the "tax," this would have blocked the case from the SCOTUS. So, like magic, the justices reached into their hats and changed what Obama had said was a tax into... a fine!
Then, upon issuing their bizarre ruling to say Obamacare was perfectly constitutional, they reversed themselves again and claimed that the newly termed "fine" was, in fact, a "tax" after all, and everything was, as David Bowie might have said, hunky dory.
As convoluted as that sounds, that's what happened, and we got stuck with another terrible Supreme Court ruling that curtailed our rights and misread important parts of the U.S. Constitution.
The second key part of this story is what Donald Trump recently did to the individual mandate itself. Prior to Christmas, Trump signed the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017," which repealed the IRS penalty for not buying a policy. Some folks celebrated -- if they didn't understand that the mandates on insurance companies were still on the books -- and this has led to the current suits from these 20 states.
Their core argument is simple, as Mr. Tennant explains:
Given that the individual mandate can no longer be justified as an exercise of the taxing power of Congress and that it cannot be excised from the law, the states are asking the court to overturn the entire ACA.
Indeed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's suit requesting “injunctive relief” filed Monday in the Fort Worth Division of the Federal District Court spells it out very clearly. Let me offer you two sections as we close things off so that you have the information, right up front.
First:
NFIB v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012), held that in enacting the ACA, Congress sought to do something unconstitutional: impose a mandate to obtain health insurance by requiring that most Americans “shall” insure that they are “covered under minimum essential coverage.” 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(a). “Congress [wrongly] thought it could enact such a command under the Commerce Clause[.]” NFIB, 567 U.S. at 562 (Roberts, C.J.). The Supreme Court, however, interpreted the mandate to be part-and-parcel of a tax penalty that applies to many (but not all) of those to whom the mandate applies. Thus, even though Congress sought to do something unconstitutional in enacting the mandate under the Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court salvaged its handiwork as a lawful exercise of the taxing power. But things changed on December 22, 2017.
Here is the other key portion of the filing:
On December 22, 2017, the President signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. This new legislation eliminated the tax penalty of the ACA, without eliminating the mandate itself. What remains, then, is the individual mandate, without any accompanying exercise of Congress’s taxing power, which the Supreme Court already held that Congress has no authority to enact. Not only is the individual mandate now unlawful, but this core provision is not severable from the rest of the ACA—as four Justices of the Supreme Court already concluded. In fact, Congress stated in the legislative text that the ACA does not function without the individual mandate.
This tells us precisely what SCOTUS did to twist interpretations in order to hear the case in 2012 and eventually rule everything A-O.K. for the trampling of our rights. And it reveals how the so-called "tax" was explicitly made inseparable (a.k.a., "non-severable") from the rest of the "Affordable Care Act," thus causing a total shut-down of the entire law! It's impeccable logic, based on the wording of the law itself, and stands a very good chance of winning -- if the justices act without their ideological biases getting in the way.
That’s a big “if.”
Indeed, if folks want to stop the chess game that leftists have been playing to push Americans into a centralized health system, they might want this lawsuit to prevail. See, President Trump and Congress did nothing to repeal the patently unconstitutional mandates on the insurance companies themselves.
Most egregious among these are what are termed "Guaranteed Issue" mandates that force insurance companies to accept people with pre-existing conditions. While many folks see such government orders as good, thinking it’s terrible that sick people either can't get insurance or have to pay high premiums, the federal mandates destroy the concept of insurance -- which is a hedge against future liability. If you are already ill and ask for coverage, that's not insurance. It's like demanding a home insurance plan when your house is already on fire.
The practical effect of this is to inspire young, relatively healthier, people to wait until they get ill before they buy health insurance. This leaves older, relatively sicker people in the insurance pool, and drives up costs without that clean, "healthy young person money" coming in premium payments. This forces the insurance companies to have to hike policy rates, and people complain -- which is precisely what happened in numerous states where the mandates were applied in the mid-‘90s, and is what will happen on overdrive if the Obamacare Guaranteed Issue mandate is not lifted.
Don't count on that to happen. The mandate is based on a ridiculous interpretation of the Constitution's "Interstate Commerce Clause" never intended to give Congress power to control anything that goes over state borders, and if the politicians did recognize the original meaning of the Constitution, their nearly unlimited power over us would be emasculated.
Instead, watch this series of lawsuits. If the Supreme Court eventually hears this, and the Justices are honest -- a big, big "if" -- we might finally see the total repeal of so-called Obamacare.
(Photo Credit: TaxRebate.org.uk)