Doctors Claim Courts Have No Obamacare Line-Item Veto

Doctors tell SCOTUS – Obamacare harms patients and is unconstitutional in its entirety
by Curtis Coleman, Contributing Author: On August 12th, 2011 the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the mandate to purchase health insurance included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA or “Obamacare”) is unconstitutional.  But unlike Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling that threw out the entire ACA based on the fact that there was no provision for the mandate to be severed from the rest of the law, the 11th Circuit did not find the rest of the law unconstitutional.

In a curious opinion, the 11th Circuit found that, “The individual mandate, however, can be severed from the remainder of the Act’s myriad reforms. The presumption of severability is rooted in notions of judicial restraint and respect for the separation of powers in our constitutional system. The Act’s other provisions remain legally operative after the mandate’s excision, and the high burden needed under Supreme Court precedent to rebut the presumption of severability has not been met.”

Claiming that “judicial line item vetoes are unconstitutional,” the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court on October 25, 2011 in which “physicians inform the Justices why the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should be overturned in its entirety.”

“For the reasons set forth below, Amici believe that the Eleventh Circuit correctly held that Section 1501, the individual mandate to purchase government-controlled health ‘insurance,’ is unconstitutional, but incorrectly severed Section 1501 from the remainder of ACA,” argues AAPS.

The brief continues, “[a]mici believe that ACA undermines, in fundamental and dangerous ways, the practice of medicine and harms patients.”

The Eleventh Circuit erred in allowing for the severability of the Act, states AAPS. “Severance of the individual mandate represents judicial activism at its zenith. It allows the Courts to have a judicial line-item veto and to determine the content of a law after it has been enacted.”

The brief correctly argues that “Our country’s founders and other historically prominent leaders recognized that neither the courts nor the president should be allowed to deconstruct a statute.”

President and former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Taft stated that the President “has no power to veto part of the bill and allow the rest to become a law.” George Washington wrote, “from the nature of the Constitution, I must approve all the parts of a Bill, or reject it in toto.” Senator Robert Byrd lectured his colleagues that ceding the Senate’s power to control the content of a statute is analogous to actions taken by the Roman Senate which ultimately led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

The Supreme Court has not yet announced its decision to accept the case, but given the widely desperate rulings from various federal courts since the ACA’s enactment, the Court’s review is considered to be inevitable.

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Curtis Coleman is the President of The Curtis Coleman Institute for Constitutional Policy and contributing author to the ARRA News Service.

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