by Brian Darling
BigGovernment.com
12/10/2009
The Senate is debating the future of American health care, yet one very important issue has yet to get a full and fair debate. Is the individual mandate that forces citizens to purchase health care insurance a constitutional power of the federal government? When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) was asked this question, she answered with the non sequitur “are you serious?” Conservatives who respect the idea that the constitution maps out a federal government with limited powers would answer with a loud — “Hell No.”
The Heritage Foundation and the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ) recently released legal analysis calling into serious question the constitutionality of the Congress’s plan to force all citizens to purchase health insurance. These conservative institutions argue that the unprecedented idea, a mandate that all Americans be forced into a contractual agreement with a private party for health insurance, is not a constitutionally permissible activity by the federal government. My sources tell me that this issue will be raised during the Senate debate on ObamaCare very soon and may open another front in the war against ObamaCare.
The Heritage Foundation argues that the federal government has never required all Americans to buy any good or service. The individual heath insurance mandate is truly unprecedented.
An individual mandate to enter into a contract with or buy a particular product from a private party, with tax penalties to enforce it, is unprecedented — not just in scope but in kind — an unconstitutional as a matter of first principles and under any reasonable reading of judicial precedents.
One of the goals of our Founding Fathers was to set up a federal government with limited powers. Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress powers and some powers “remain beyond Congress’s reach.”
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