Barack Obama's Department Of Justice continues to drag its feet in response to the Florida ruling and fast tracking the process to the Supreme Court. Several states, meanwhile, have indicated they will not implement the health care law now that one federal district judge has ruled it void. And the prospect of a repeal brought lawmakers to the Senate floor Wednesday to argue their points on the health care law once more. Image Credit: White House PhotoSenate Democrats Vote To Uphold Voided/Unconstitutional ObamaCare Law
On Monday, January 31, 2011, a federal district court judge in Florida ruled that a key provision in the new health care law is unconstitutional, and that the entire law must be voided.
Roger Vinson agreed with the 26 state-government plaintiffs that Congress exceeded its authority by passing a law penalizing individuals who do not have health insurance.
"I must reluctantly conclude that Congress exceeded the bounds of its authority in passing the Act with the individual mandate," Vinson writes. "Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not sever-able, the entire Act must be declared void."
On Wednesday, February 2, 2011 the United States Senate held a vote to REPEAL the 2,700 page health care law it passed without debate about one year ago (affectionately known as ObamaCare). Senate Democrats fended off a Republican effort to repeal the law overhauling the health care system, voting down the measure, 47-51, submitted as an amendment to an airports construction bill.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's decision to push the House-passed repeal to the Senate floor didn't win a single Democrat vote.
As lawmakers on the Senate floor debated their position, in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, other senators reviewed the constitutionality of the law, a move that comes too late, said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
"Under our system of limited and enumerated powers, the sensible process would have been to have held a hearing on the law's constitutionality before the bill passed, not after," Grassley said.
The hearing came just two days after District Judge Roger Vinson ruled in a lawsuit filed by 26 states that the law had to be thrown out because the individual mandate violates the Commerce Clause of the Constitution because it orders Americans to participate in commerce even if they don't want to do so.
States involved in the lawsuit were Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Maine, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Judge Vinson, in his opinion, stated the following:
"It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place. If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain for it would be “difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power” [Lopez, supra, 514 U.S. at 564], and we would have a Constitution in name only. Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended."
So, the Senate Democrats, in a strict party-line vote, wishes to have all American people ... buy the tea they also tax. Welcome to the will of the Constitution-ignoring Democrat Political party.
