Still hope for legal challenge to ACA
If you think the Supreme Court settled the matter, don’t count your chickens just yet.
Article 1 Section 7 of the Constitution states “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; ... the Senate may propose ... Amendments.” Section 5 states “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”
Faced with how to drive their widely unpopular, Republican-opposed proposal through both legislative bodies, Democrats used Section 5 to subvert Section 7. The scheme consisted of slipping a non-controversial “revenue measure” past an unsuspecting Republican House minority, then entirely replacing it with ACA language in the Senate.
Immediately upon arrival of HR3590 in the Senate, Democratic leadership renamed the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act” to the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” and replaced all 6 House-written pages lowering taxes on military service members with 2,600 Senate-written, tax-raising, IRS-empowering pages.
With their “House-originated revenue bill” in hand, Senate Democrats employed procedural manipulation and pork-laden political maneuvers to force Senate passage of this “amendment” with no Republican votes.
They “returned” the 100 percent rewritten bill to the House where rules allowed it to pass on another Democrat party-line vote. As Kate Leone, counsel to Sen. Reid, A Nevada Democrat, emailed, “It wasn’t more complicated than that.”
Cases challenging the ACA’s “origination” are making their way through the courts. They focus on “the unconventional legislative process through which the ACA originated and was enacted.”
Irrefutable violations of long-standing constitutional and court precedent include the fact that the original House bill was to lower taxes, not raise revenue as was the final result. Moreover, the Senate “amendment” had not even a remote relationship to the original bill’s subject, with not a single reference to any original bill language.
Begs the question, wouldn’t a president who’s a former constitutional professor have known this?
John Kauck
Grayslake