Howard: Health care lawsuits keep Constitution at forefront

The legislative battle over health care reform is over. Through procedural tricks, the Obama… The legislative battle over health care reform is over. Through procedural tricks, the Obama administration succeeded in passing historically intrusive legislation.

Recognizing that Congress failed to protect individual freedoms, Americans must now turn to the states and the courts to defend our constitutional liberties.

Appropriately, 13 states filed suit against the federal government last Tuesday asserting that, “the Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.”

Over the past week, other states continued to join the fray, either by filing independent suits or by joining the original lawsuit. As a Pennsylvanian, I am proud that Pennsylvania state Attorney General Tom Corbett was one of the original 13 plaintiffs. A candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary, Corbett said he is pursuing the suit as “a 10th Amendment issue” and that he would be doing so whether he were running for governor or not.

Predictably, Corbett’s critics on the left — many of whom are possible opponents in the gubernatorial election — refused to accept this explanation. Notably, Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato said that the suit was “a taxpayer-funded political stunt” and Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel compared Corbett to Civil War-era Sen. John C. Calhoun, a legislator from South Carolina who argued that states could nullify federal laws.

Most egregiously, state Rep. and Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Dwight Evans, D-203rd, said that he would cut funding from the attorney general’s office in order to prevent Corbett from proceeding with the suit. Not to be left out, Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell joined the leftist ridicule of Corbett when he said that the suit would fail “because any lawyer worth their salt will tell the governors that there’s something called the federal Supremacy Clause.”

Regrettably, Rendell’s education appears to have failed him because, as any worthy former district attorney should understand, Corbett and the other 12 attorneys general are filing a suit alleging that the 10th Amendment precludes the federal government from mandating that citizens purchase a product.

Whatever Rendell thinks, Corbett has a point. The 10th Amendment reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Since nowhere in the Constitution did the Founders give the United States the power to require that citizens purchase anything, it is logical that such a power is reserved either to the states or — more likely — the people.

In this way, Corbett and his co-plaintiffs clearly have the Constitution on their side. It is, after all, a document dedicated to limited government and created by the Founders with the goal of protecting the people and the states from burdensome intrusions into their respective spheres.

The reason that so many legal scholars pronounced that the suit has little chance is that precedent demonstrates that the courts are unwilling to use the Constitution — and especially the 10th Amendment — to limit federal powers. Instead, over the last 100 years, courts interpreted the Commerce Clause as a sort of blank check for federal power that justifies everything from wheat quotas to the War on Drugs.

Importantly, the Roberts Court is positioned to turn the page on this era of government expansion and redefine federal power through a more faithful reading of both the Constitution and the intent of the Founders.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott best represented such hopes when he said, “No public policy goal — no matter how important or well-intentioned — can be allowed to trample the protections and rights guaranteed by our Constitution.” No matter the arguments in favor of health care reform, no matter how many millions of Americans such legislation is poised to cover, we must not set aside our Constitution in order to materially enrich the lives of some citizens.

There is a slim chance that the Roberts Court will heed such arguments, and it is sadly the best chance we have of breathing new life into our Constitution. Corbett should be lauded for attempting to restore the balance of power between the people, the states and the federal government.

Continue the conversation at Giles’s blog, http://www.gilesbhoward.com/blog/, or e-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.