Thomas More Law Center Files First Appeal Of Constitutional Challenge To ObamaCare

From The Thomas More Law Center and Alliance Defense Fund:

Thomas More Law Center Files First Appeal of Constitutional Challenge to ObamacareDecember 15, 2010




ANN ARBOR, MI – This afternoon, the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), a national, public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, along with co-counsel, David Yerushalmi, filed its opening brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in its first in the Nation challenge to the constitutionality of Obamacare. TMLC is challenging the Obamacare mandate that requires all legal residents to purchase “minimum essential” healthcare coverage under penalty of federal law.



In this appeal, TMLC is asking the court to reverse the ruling by U.S. District Court Judge George Caram Steeh, the first federal judge to rule on the merits of Obamacare, which upheld the constitutionality of the new federal health law on the unprecedented grounds that pursuant to the Commerce Clause, Congress can regulate not only economic activity, but economic decisions as well. Consequently, according to Judge Steeh, Congress can regulate a private citizen’s decision to not purchase healthcare by penalizing that decision as a matter of federal law.



Click here to read entire brief



In its brief, TMLC argued that the district court erred as a matter of law when it upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate provision of Obamacare. TMLC pointed out “that while the court below recognized that the Individual Mandate is unprecedented in that it penalizes the mere status of being uninsured (in fact, it punishes the mere status of ‘being’), the lower court took it upon itself to extend the Supreme Court’s extant Commerce Clause jurisprudence beyond its current limits of commercial or economic activity.” TMLC argued that “the lower court has created a new kind of Commerce Clause power not previously known to the jurisprudence, which effectively grants the federal government state police power, thereby rendering any notion of the constitutionally mandated federalism dead letter law.”



Robert Muise, Senior Trial Counsel for TMLC who is handling the case, stated, “Contrary to the district court’s ruling, there is no enumerated power in the Constitution that permits the federal government to regulate ‘decisions.’ No matter how convinced President Obama—or even the American public in general, which it is not—may be that the new healthcare law is in the public interest, the president’s political objectives can only be accomplished in accord with the Constitution. We are a Nation of laws, not a Nation of men.”