Remember when I told you a few days back that “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence?” Our resident constitutional law scholar and senior fellow Professor Rob Natelson agrees with me. As Rob puts it in this insightful article featured in both the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Denver Daily News, the Constitution’s commerce power does not permit ObamaCare. (Nor does anything else in the constitution for that matter). Rob’s article is really worth a read. Even if you think you know everything about our constitution, this article will enlighten you. It’s unfortunate the ObamaCare apologists will close their eyes and plug their ears to all of Rob’s evidence. It’s better when you don’t know these stubborn facts right?

One of the big under-covered stories in this election is the huge shift toward Republicans in state legislatures. The change could portend big changes for national politics, because Republican state lawmakers are more likely to sign onto federalism (“states rights”) initiatives than Democrats are. Even though the U.S. House is now Republican, a liberal President and Senate will block GOP-led efforts to curb federal overreaching — thereby encouraging state action instead.

Look for state-level measures such as –

* Health Care Choice laws like Amendment 63, designed to protect citizens from ObamaCare;

* Formal applications, under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, for a “convention for proposing amendments” — a device the Framers inserted into the Constitution in case the states ever needed to rein in an out-of-control Congress;

* Rejections of federal funds and federal mandates;

* More state lawsuits against federal overreaching; and

* Resolutions claiming sovereignty over land within state boundaries held by the federal government in violation of the Constitution.

My comment on today’s decision, granting the motion to dismiss on some counts, and while allowing other counts to proceed. Like Randy’s comment, my comment is posted on the blog of the site Health Care Lawsuits, which is hosted by the Independent Women’s Forum.

The court entirely rejected the administration’s claim that the penalty for disobeying the mandate is justified under the federal tax power. As the court noted, Congress went out of its way to specify that the penalty is not a tax. Second, the court ruled that it is proper for the plaintiffs to be heard in their challenge to the mandate, which goes into effect in 2014. The court cited extensive precedent showing that when a future harm is certain, courts can act in the present to protect citizens from that harm. The court rejected the argument that the various employer mandates violate the constitutional sovereignty of states; as the court noted, the law simply treats states like other large employers, and so making states provide the same health benefits as other large employers must provide is no different from making states pay the same minimum wage as all other employers.

While federal spending programs may set conditions on grants to states, Supreme Court precedent states that the grants must not be coercive. Here, the court agreed that the states had raised a plausible legal argument which should be allowed to go forward:  the health control presents states with the unacceptable choice of massively increasing their own Medicaid spending on millions of more people, or of losing all funding for the traditional Medicaid program. Finally, the court agreed that the challenge to the individual mandate could go forward, because the mandate was “unprecedented.” Never before has Congress attempted to use its power of regulating interstate commerce to force people to buy a particular product. Because there is no judicial precedent in support of such a mandate, the plaintiffs had raised a plausible constitutional challenge which should be allowed to go forward.

The court’s ruling is not a final decision on the constitutional merits, but it is a solid, meticulously researched, and carefully-reasoned decision declaring that the opponents of the health control law have raised legitimate constitutional objections.

Granted this morning, Bond v. United States. Question presented: “Whether a criminal defendant convicted under a federal statute has standing to challenge her conviction on grounds that, as applied to her, the statute is beyond the federal government’s enumerated powers and inconsistent with the Tenth Amendment.” The circuits are split, and defendant was convicted in the 3d Circuit, which sua sponte used standing as the reason to refuse to consider her the defendant’s constitutional argument.

The underlying issue is whether, pursuant to the Chemical Weapons Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1997, Congress can criminalize any non-peacefu use of a toxic substance. Defendant argues that her particular use (to try to injure her husband’s mistress) was not within the reach of any enumerated congressional power.

Former Solicitor General Paul Clement filed the successful petition for a writ of certiorari.

A key issue in the case is this line from Tennessee Electric Power Corp. v. TVA (1939): that legal persons, “absent the states or their officers, have no standing in this suit to raise any question under the amendment.” Some lower courts have treated this as dicta but others have not. Whether or not it’s dicta, the Supreme Court can repudiate or narrow it, and in my view, the Court should. If an individual is going to spend six years in federal prison, that individual should certainly be considered to have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the law under which she is being imprisoned.

The final event at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools was a Federalist Society panel on the constitutionality of the centralized health control law. Participants were Randy Barnett (Georgetown, VC), Jack Balkin (Yale),  Gillian Metzger (Columbia), and me (Denver, VC). The moderator was  Bradley A. Smith (Capital). Available here. The recording is 93 minutes, although the event itself ran a little longer. While the focus was on the two state suits (Virgina, and the 20-state coalition), we also discussed some of the additional issues raised by the five other suits, such as due process rights to medical privacy and decision-making.

Jack Balkin has an interesting post on today’s two Defense of Marriage Act cases from the federal District of Massachusetts, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, and Massachusetts v. HHS. The latter case found DOMA unconstitutional, as applied to Massachusetts, because DOMA violates the Tenth Amendment by infringing the state’s traditional core sovereign power of defining lawful marriages. The most important parts of the Tenth Amendment analysis are at pages 28–36 of the opinion. Balkin is concerned because the Judge Tauro’s “Tenth Amendment arguments prove entirely too much. As much as liberals might applaud the result, they should be aware that the logic of his arguments, taken seriously, would undermine the constitutionality of wide swaths of federal regulatory programs and seriously constrict federal regulatory power.” In particular:

The modern state depends heavily on the federal government’s taxing and spending powers for many of the benefits that citizens hold dear, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the newly passed provisions of the Affordable Care Act. These programs have regulatory effects on state family policies just as much as DOMA does. If DOMA’s direct interference with state prerogatives is beyond federal power, then perhaps any or all of these programs are vulnerable– and unconstitutional– to the extent they interfere with state policies regarding family formation as well. Put differently, Judge Tauro has offered a road map to attack a wide range of federal welfare programs, including health care reform. No matter how much they might like the result in this particular case, this is not a road that liberals want to travel. 

Well, as my former boss, Colorado Attorney General Duane Woodard once put it, “There’s no liberal constitution or conservative constitution. It’s just the Constitution.” The Tenth Amendment is one of the roads that all conscientious American judges must travel, regardless of whether they personally like all of the places its leads. 

Balkin makes one error in his criticism of Judge Tauro’s Tenth Amendment analysis of congressional interference with traditional state government functions:

(In one of the wildest parts of the Massachusetts v. HHS opinion, Judge Tauro resurrects Chief Justice Rehnquist’s “traditional governmental functions” approach from National League of Cities v. Usery, which was specifically overturned in 1985 in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transportation Company on the grounds that it was completely unworkable. The existence of Supreme Court authority, however, does not stop Judge Tauro; he simply notes that some First Circuit precedents predating Garcia are still on the books, and who knows, maybe the Supreme Court will change its mind!)

 That’s not precisely accurate. Judge Tauro structured his opinion around the 1997 First Circuit case U.S. v. Bongiorno, which post-dates (not pre-dates) Garcia. According to Bongiorno:

a Tenth Amendment attack on a federal statute cannot succeed without three ingredients: (1) the statute must regulate the States as States, (2) it must concern attributes of state sovereignty, and (3) it must be of such a nature that compliance with it would impair a state’s ability to structure integral operations in areas of  traditional governmental functions.

The Bongiorno test comes directly from the 1981 Supreme Court case Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclam. Ass’n, which is still good law. Judge Tauro plausibly found that DOMA had each of the three Bongiorno ingredients. Balkin is right to point out that the new federal health control law could be found unconstitutional by any court which applies the Tenth Amendment as seriously as did Judge Tauro.