Health Care BS

In the future, it may be prudent for the crooks who run Congress to actually read the laws they pass. They famously declined to do so in the case of Obamacare, of course, which left a lot of fodder in the bill for court challenges. So, it’s not surprising that the Congressional Research Service has discovered yet another constitutional problem:

A just-released memo from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) raises fresh constitutional concerns about a provision in President Obama’s health-care law that could impose tens of millions of dollars in fines on Congress, state and local governments … those fines may be unconstitutional under Supreme Court precedents on federalism.

I guess Obama’s headlong rush to get a bill (any bill) on his desk prevented his congressional accomplices from “suit-proofing” the bill:

Specifically, the CRS memo says the health-care law may be unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment under two legal doctrines the Supreme Court has developed under that constitutional amendment: the “commandeering� doctrine and intergovernmental tax immunity.

But it’s hard to know what will happen if the bill is challenged on these grounds. The Supremes haven’t been consistent on the Tenth Amendment:

While this [Tenth Amendment] language would appear to represent one of the clearest examples of a federalist principle in the Constitution, the Supreme Court has been inconsistent in deciding how the Amendment limits Congress’s ability, through the regulation of interstate commerce, to influence the states’ exercise of their own powers,� the [CRS] memo says.

So, there’s no telling how this will turn out. One thing is crystal clear, however. Not only did Obama and Congress break their pledges to put Obamacare on the internet so every one could read it before passage, neither they nor their staff bothered to read the thing themselves.  The “most ethical Congress in history” obviously just wanted to get something on the board.