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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (52061)	7/1/2011 12:14:46 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

Conservative jurist makes case for ObamaCare 9:35 am July 1, 2011, by Jay blogs.ajc.com (From Politico): Ever since the early days of the health-care reform law, its supporters have argued that there is a “conservative” argument to be made for the constitutionality of the law. And they think they need just one of the Supreme Court’s four conservatives, or swing vote Anthony Kennedy, to take it up. Now, a conservative federal appeals judge has gift-wrapped that argument — and legal experts say his decision to uphold the constitutionality of the health care overhaul could make it easier for one of the conservative Supreme Court justices to do the same. Judge Jeffrey Sutton (AP photo) The judge in question is Jeffrey Sutton, who sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. He clerked under Justice Antonin Scalia and was nominated to the court by President George W. Bush. His appointment was initially blocked by Senate Democrats because they feared he was too conservative. Last week, however, Sutton was part of the 2-1 majority on a Sixth Circuit panel to uphold the health-care law. Sutton himself wrote on the crucial question of whether the individual mandate can be justified under the Constitution’s commerce clause, and more importantly on whether doing nothing — i.e., not buying health insurance — is an act of commerce: He concludes (pg. 27): “Congress found that providing uncompensated medical care to the uninsured cost $43 billion in 2008 and that these costs were shifted to others through higher premiums. Based on these findings, Congress could reasonably conclude that the decisions and actions of the self-insured substantially affect interstate commerce…. Faced with $43 billion in uncompensated care, Congress reasonably could require all covered individuals to pay for health care now so that money would be available later to pay for all care as the need arises. Call this mandate what you will — an affront to individual autonomy or an imperative of national health care — it meets the requirement of regulating activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.” I once thought that the odds of the Supreme Court overturning the health-care law were very slim. But having watched how political the court has behaved recently and how the decisions of lower-court judges on the subject have broken along partisan lines, I’m far less certain. Critics are correct: Approving the law would mean approving an extension of our current understanding of the commerce clause. However, that extension would also be consistent with a long line of commerce-clause precedent, as Sutton acknowledges. Overturning it, on the other hand, would require overturning that long line of Supreme Court precedent, and thus throwing the modern legal understanding of the commerce clause into doubt: As Sutton again notes: “The Court has upheld other federal laws that involved equally substantial, if not more substantial, incursions on the general police powers of the States and the autonomy of individuals. If, as Wickard shows, Congress could regulate the most self-sufficient of individuals — the American farmer — when he grew wheat destined for no location other than his family farm, the same is true for those who inevitably will seek health care and who must have a way to pay for it. And if Congress could regulate Angel Raich when she grew marijuana on her property for self-consumption, indeed for self-medication, and if it could do so even when California law prohibited that marijuana from entering any state or national markets, it is difficult to see why Congress may not regulate the 50 million Americans who self-finance their medical care. So we’ll see. The decision of the 11th Circuit Court here in Atlanta on another case challenging the constitutionality of the health-care law is expected soon. The Supreme Court will in turn probably take up an appeal of a circuit-court case in its session that begins in October. Its final decision would then be released sometime in 2012, just as the presidential campaign is heating up. Fun times ahead. – Jay Bookman