Legal News

More States (But Not Taitz) Joining Health-Care Suit

By Ashby Jones

Just because we haven’t written about the big constitutional challenge to the health care law — filed last month down in the Northern District of Florida — doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a little action in the last few weeks.

Let’s get you up to speed. As you might recall, a little thing called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — aka the big health care bill — was passed on March 23. The same day, 13 mostly Republican attorneys general sued, challenging the constitutionality of the bill. Click here for previous LB coverage of the suit.

The latest news: Five more U.S. states are joining the suit, Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum said on Wednesday. Click here for the Reuters story.

“We welcome the partnership of Indiana, North Dakota, Mississippi, Nevada and Arizona as we continue fighting to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens and the sovereignty of our states,” Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum said.

Another state, Virginia, has filed a separate suit, partly arguing the new law’s requirements that most Americans buy health insurance clash with a state law that exempts Virginians from federal fines to be imposed for not owning health insurance.

The Justice Department has said it will fight the lawsuit. At this stage, we’ll likely learn a bit more about the timing of the lawsuit’s early stages at an April 14 scheduling hearing.

So far, there’s at least one party that hasn’t been allowed to join the suit: Orly Taitz, the Orange County, Calif., dentist-and-lawyer who’s filed multiple lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of the Obama presidency on the ground that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. Click here, here and here for earlier LB posts on Taitz.

In attempting to join the suit, Taitz was, in federal judge Roger Vinson’s opinion, attempting to shoehorn her birth certificate arguments into the health-care suit. Wrote Vinson:

The parties to this litigation, and, indeed, the citizens of this country, have an interest in having this case resolved as soon as practically possible. That task will be made exponentially more difficult if all those who have an opinion and an interest in the outcome of the case were allowed to intervene and to join in these proceedings. . . . [W]ith respect to Taitz's motion in particular, I believe the parties to this case and the court should remain focused solely on the legal issues raised by the named plaintiffs, and not concern themselves with collateral issues (such as, for example, whether President Obama has provided sufficient proof of a valid birth certificate).

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 08, 2010 (boomark / email).