Judicial activism for me, not for thee
0 Comments | Roanoke Times & World News, Mar 28, 2010 | by Dan Radmacher
As promised, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli filed a lawsuit challenging health care reform legislation moments after President Obama signed the historic bill.
In the lawsuit, Cuccinelli says that in passing an individual mandate requiring all Americans to purchase health care insurance or pay a fine, Congress overstepped the bounds of the Constitution’s commerce clause.
As he said in a statement released by his office, “We contend that if a person decides not to buy health insurance, that person – - by definition — is not engaging in commerce, and therefore, is not subject to a federal mandate.”
I’ll admit to having some reservations about this aspect of health care reform myself. Though the mandate is an integral part of any meaningful health care reform effort, I initially wondered whether, as Cuccinelli put it, the federal government could have “the authority to require citizens to buy goods or services” from a private business.
Obviously, Medicare and Social Security settled the issue of whether the federal government can force citizens to pay for government-provided services.
That’s just one reason I would have been more comfortable if the reform had included a public option, something akin to Medicare that individuals could choose to enroll in at any age if they did not have access to group insurance.
But I’m not a lawyer, much less a constitutional expert. Cuccinelli is a lawyer, and you’d think he would have checked the case law before embroiling Virginia in what will likely be a time- consuming and expensive legal case that could well go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — and which he almost certainly will lose
buying individual health insurance