Hatch, Blackwell and Klukowski: Why the Health-Care Bills Are Unconstitutional

OPINION
JANUARY 2, 2010

Why the Health-Care Bills Are Unconstitutional
If the government can mandate the purchase of insurance, it can do anything..


By ORRIN G. HATCH, J. KENNETH BLACKWELL AND KENNETH A. KLUKOWSKI

President Obama's health-care bill is now moving toward final passage. The policy issues may be coming to an end, but the legal issues are certain to continue because key provisions of this dangerous legislation are unconstitutional. Legally speaking, this legislation creates a target-rich environment. We will focus on three of its more glaring constitutional defects.

First, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to require that Americans purchase health insurance. Congress must be able to point to at least one of its powers listed in the Constitution as the basis of any legislation it passes. None of those powers justifies the individual insurance mandate. Congress's powers to tax and spend do not apply because the mandate neither taxes nor spends. The only other option is Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.

Congress has many times stretched this power to the breaking point, exceeding even the expanded version of the commerce power established by the Supreme Court since the Great Depression. It is one thing, however, for Congress to regulate economic activity in which individuals choose to engage; it is another to require that individuals engage in such activity. That is not a difference in degree, but instead a difference in kind. It is a line that Congress has never crossed and the courts have never sanctioned.

In fact, the Supreme Court in United States v. Lopez (1995) rejected a version of the commerce power so expansive that it would leave virtually no activities by individuals that Congress could not regulate. By requiring Americans to use their own money to purchase a particular good or service, Congress would be doing exactly what the court said it could not do.


Please continue to read the rest of the article for the second and third points that the authors make:

Hatch, Blackwell and Klukowski: Why the Health-Care Bills Are Unconstitutional - WSJ.com


I certainly DO agree that this bill is unconstitutional for many of the same reasons that are given in this article. But I would add at least one more. This bill will require ME, a taxpayer, to pay for abortion, which is totally repugnant to me as a citizen and as a human being. To cause me to in any way pay for the murder of an innocent unborn baby goes against everything I have ever stood for! As a health care professional, it goes against my conscience to in ANYWAY PARTICIPATE in abortion, including the use of my tax money. As a woman, it goes against everything that is in me; this is true for me also, as a mother, grandmother. As a Catholic, it violates every belief I have that Life is sacred and to be cherished from conception to natural death. And that infringes on my rights as a Catholic to my freedom of religion.

Abortion is NOT health care.
True, it consists of an ELECTIVE surgery, and that is key. ELECTIVE surgeries are not necessary surgeries.

Sadly, in this particular elective surgery, an innocent baby is murdered, sometimes moments before it is born.

I do not want to pay for it... ever.

It is the taking of an innocent life, and that individual has the same rights as I have to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness that is inalienable, God-given.

God bless, and Lord, have Mercy!