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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (742561)	9/29/2013 2:13:29 AM
From: i-node	2 Recommendations Recommended By FJB TideGlider Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578294

The Constitution clearly and unequivocally requires legislation that raises revenue to originate in the House. The point was specifically to guarantee that the House would have control of the money because the House was "closer to the people." The House passed a piece of legislation that then went to the Senate, HR 3590, the "Service Members Home Ownership Act". Harry Reid then stripped every word of the legislation from the bill and replaced it with text of his own for Obamacare. Including the title. HR 3590 did not pass the House as a bill for raising revenue. While the so-called "gut-and-amend" practice has been used before, it is has never been used to impose new taxes, which according to the Supreme Court, Obamacare does. Thus, Obamacare is in direct violation of the Origination Clause, making the legislation invalid. One argument against would be that increasing taxes wasn't the primary intent of the legislation. OTOH, it raises close to 500 Billion over ten years, which seems substantial. Another is that the Court may just say, "Fuck it. We've dealt with it." But they're going to be dealing with Obamacare challenges for a decade; it is almost certainly going to come before the court one way or the other. In fact, the dissent of Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito specifically referred to the origination clause problem: For all these reasons, to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling. Taxes have never been popular, see, e.g., Stamp Act of 1765, and in part for that reason, the Constitution requires tax increases to originate in the House of Representatives. See Art. I, §7, cl. 1. That is to say, they must originate in the legislative body most accountable to the people, where legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election, which is never more than two years off. The Federalist No. 58 “defend[ed] the decision to give the origination power to the House on the ground that the Chamber that is more accountable to the people should have the primary role in raising revenue.” United States v. Munoz-Flores, 495 U. S. 385, 395 (1990). We have no doubt that Congress knew precisely what it was doing when it rejected an earlier version of this legislation that imposed a tax instead of a requirement-with-penalty. See Affordable Health Care for America Act, H. R. 3962, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., §501 (2009); America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009, S. 1796, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., §1301. Imposing a tax through judicial legislation inverts the constitutional scheme, and places the power to tax in the branch of government least accountable to the citizenry." So, it isn't out of the realm of possibility that the Supreme Court will hear one of the numerous challenges on this basis. We already know four justices question it, so the question is whether Roberts sees it as a follow-up to his original wing-ding decision which limited the Commerce Clause. Back to the point, Reid's actions were clearly corrupt, even by your definition. Whether the Court will choose to right the wrong I don't know, but there is no question that four justices believe it was corrupt.