By now, it should be clear to the meanest intelligence that the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to delay the day of reckoning on ObamaCare’s constitutionality.
The DOJ claims to be confident that the law will pass muster, but it has gone through all manner of legal contortions prevent the various legal challenges to PPACA from getting anywhere near the Supreme Court.
The Obama administration told the Supreme Court on Monday night it should stay away from a high-profile challenge to the 2010 health care law until after a lower court has had a chance to review the case.
That’s what the DOJ said in its brief in opposition to Virginia’s request that the U.S. Supreme Court take up its challenge immediately rather than allow it to languish for another year in the labyrinthine appellate process.
Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal wrote, ‘there is no basis for short-circuiting the normal course of appellate review.’
The DOJ knows the individual mandate is a goner, but it wants to get the other provisions of ObamaCare so firmly embedded in the health system that the Supreme Court will be loathe to strike down the entire law.
And, unlike Judge Vinson, the Supremes will probably sever the individual mandate from the rest of the law. The lack of a severability clause didn’t prevent them from doing that with a provision of Sarbanes-Oxley.
Comments 2
Why is telling the Supreme Court that it should stick to its normal procedures and not skip over the appellate process an example of “delay”?
Posted 16 Mar 2011 at 4:00 am ¶The answer should be blindingly obvious. Legal scholars (and the judges who have ruled on the major cases) all acknowledge that Ocare’s Orwellian interpretation of the commerce clause virtually guarantees that this will be decided by the high court in the end.
As to “normal” procedures, the Supreme Court can and (occasionally) does allow a case to bypass the laborious appellate process where there is a clear national interest in getting the litigation out of the way. This is OBVIOUSLY one of those cases.
The Obama DOJ obviously knows these things, and also that they will probably lose on the individual manate. Thus their consistent attempts to put off that inevitable day of reckoning is a delay tactic.
Posted 16 Mar 2011 at 5:33 am ¶Post a Comment