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Florida AG Bill McCollum today filed a suit in the ND FL seeking to have the new health care reform bill declared unconstitutional.

It's a hodgepodge of overheated rhetoric for the most part, though buried in there is a somewhat plausible 10th Amendment and Commerce Clause challenge.

As noted barrister Vincent Gambini once asked, "does this argument hold water"?

Writing for the conservative Federalist Society last year, former HHS officials Peter Urbanowicz and Dennis G. Smith said it might:

If Congress were to invoke its Commerce Clause authority to support legislation mandating individual health insurance coverage, such an action would have to contend with recent Supreme Court precedent limiting unfettered use of Commerce Clause authority to police individual behavior that does not constitute interstate commerce: United States v. Lopez,10 invalidating the application of the Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990 to individuals and United States v. Morrison,11 invalidating certain portions of the Violence Against Women Act. In the case of a mandate to purchase health insurance or face a tax or penalty, Congress would have to explain how not doing something ? not buying insurance and not seeking health care services ? implicated interstate commerce.
While most health care insurers and health care providers may engage in interstate commerce and may be regulated accordingly under the Commerce Clause, it is a different matter to find a basis for imposing Commerce Clause related regulation on an individual who chooses not to undertake a commercial transaction. The decision not to engage in affirmative conduct is arguably distinguishable from cases in which Commerce Clause regulatory authority was recognized over intra-state activity: growing wheat (Wickard v. Filmore)12 or, more recently, growing marijuana (Gonzales v. Raich).13 Reliance on the Commerce Clause to justify the constitutionality of an individual mandate might be susceptible to an ?as applied? challenge from individuals who (1) never access the health care system or (2) are able to pay for their health care without using insurance, because the government could not claim an impact on interstate commerce of providers and insurers as a result of uncompensated care.
An individual mandate also presents issues under the First Amendment?s Free Exercise Clause and the Fifth Amendment?s Taking Clause. Given the uncertainty with how an individual mandate would comport with religious beliefs regarding health care choices, the Senate Finance Committee policy outline suggests creating an exception to the health insurance mandate for ?religious reasons.? It still leaves open, however, the question of whether the compelled purchase of health insurance constitutes the ?taking? of private property under the Fifth Amendment. Given the novel nature of the individual health insurance mandate, a Fifth Amendment challenge can be expected. Requiring a citizen to devote a percent of his or her income for a purpose for which he or she otherwise might not choose based on individual circumstances could be considered an arbitrary and capricious ?taking? no matter how many hardship exemptions the federal government might dispense.

On the other hand, Simon Lazarus, writing for the liberal American Constitution Society last year, said the Constitutional issues are seriously overblown:

Opponents' arguments to the contrary express philosophical objections to the concept of mandatory health insurance in principle, without regard to the practical issues the Supreme Court has always used to evaluate laws challenged as outside Congress' interstate commerce authority: the practical impact of the mandate on commerce or the public welfare or the welfare of affected individuals, or the rationality of Congress' judgments about its impact on statutory goals. No doubt, in some quarters, opponents' libertarian views are deeply felt. But they have no basis in law, neither in the grants of authority to Congress in Article I nor in limitations on that authority in the Bill of Rights, nor in the case law interpreting these provisions. Opponents' real grievance is with the law in its current state. Their hope is that a majority of the Supreme Court will seize on a challenge to mandatory health insurance as an occasion to make major changes in current law. But their arguments appear unlikely to gain traction with the current Supreme Court, and, indeed, represent approaches and theories that have been repudiated by justices across the Court's ideological spectrum.

Given that the individual mandate does not kick in until 2014, is there a ripeness problem as well?

Oh well, while we cogitate on all this it is time to fete the judges (again).

Put on your best schmooze-face and I'll see you tonight!

Full post as published by South Florida Lawyers on March 23, 2010 (boomark / email).