Opinion: Defending Obamacare, state capital edition
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A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog post, then the Times editorialized, about state attorneys general (predominantly Republicans) who challenged the new healthcare reform law. This afternoon I ran across a piece on the Washington Post’s website about attorneys general (all Democrats) who were defending Obamacare. In the interest of equal time, albeit at the risk of provoking yet another constitutional law debate about non-lawyers, here’s a quote from the first two paragraphs of the article:
In states such as Georgia and Kentucky, Democratic attorneys general who support reform are now at loggerheads with state governors bent on joining the lawsuit against the federal government over its constitutionality. But there are pro-reform state officials who are becoming even more aggressive about getting out front and defending the bill.
On Friday, Politico published an op-ed by Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray and Iowa’s attorney general, Tom Miller, explaining why they refused to file anti-reform lawsuits and why Congress ‘has ample power’ to legislate under health care. And they don’t shirk from defending the constitutionality of the mandate: ‘We live under mandates every day. Without them, society as we know it would disintegrate.’
A better quote from the Politico op-ed is this one:
Nobody can seriously argue that the health care industry operates only in “intrastate” commerce and that the mandate provisions in this bill cannot be effectively disentangled from the comprehensive economic approach that Congress adopted to fix the deep flaws in our current health insurance system.
Alas, I think that Cordray and Miller may have tripped over their own complex syntax. I believe they meant to say that no one can seriously argue that the mandate can be disentangled from the larger regulation of insurance. But then, IANAL.
-- Jon Healey
