Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announces that he has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Labor, alleging the healthcare reform bill is unconstitutional, Tuesday, in Tallahassee, Fla.
We still live in a nation of laws and the federal government has no right to usurp the rites of states without challenge.
The Christian Science Monitor reports:
A lawsuit filed Tuesday in Florida includes 13 states and charges that the new healthcare reform law in unconstitutional. Virginia's attorney general filed a separate lawsuMiami
State attorneys general wasted no time filing legal challenges to President Obama’s healthcare reform law, swinging into action with legal filings in Florida and Virginia within minutes of the White House signing ceremony on Tuesday.
In Tallahassee, Fla., 12 attorneys general joined Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum in a 22-page complaint filed in federal court, charging that the new healthcare reform package exceeds Congress’s powers to regulate commerce, violates 10th Amendment protections of state sovereignty, and imposes an unconstitutional direct tax.
“This lawsuit should put the federal government on notice that Florida will not permit the constitutional rights of our citizens and the sovereignty of our state to be ignored or disregarded,” Attorney General McCollum said.
A second suit in Virginia
Virginia filed a similar lawsuit simultaneously in federal court in Richmond. That suit is slightly different in that it focuses in part on the clash between a recently enacted state law protecting the right of Virginia residents to refuse unwanted health insurance and the new federal law that imposes penalties on anyone who seeks to defy the national government’s command to purchase health insurance.
“Congress lacks the political will to fund comprehensive health care … because taxes above those already provided [in federal healthcare programs] would produce too much opposition,” the Virginia lawsuit says.
“The alternative, which was also a centerpiece of the failed Clinton administration health care proposal, is to fund universal health care in part by making healthy young adults and other rationally uninsured individuals cross-subsidize older and less healthy citizens,” the suit says.
Full story
Via Christian Science Monitor
Via Memeorandum
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