Featured Content
Appeal Filed In Sixth Circuit Challenging Lower Court Dismissal Of Challenge To Reform Law
Featured content from: American Health Lawyers Association
Published on: December 17, 2010
The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) on December 15 filed its opening brief with the Sixth Circuit in its challenge to the constitutionality of the minimum essential coverage provision in the healthcare reform law.
The first in the nation to reach the appellate level, TMLC is asking the appeals court to reverse the ruling by U.S. District Court Judge George Caram Steeh in the Eastern District of Michigan that upheld the constitutionality of the reform law and its individual mandate. Thomas More Law Center v. Obama, No. 10-11156 (E.D. Mich.).
Steeh concluded that Congress had the power under the Commerce Clause to enact the PPACA and that the penalty imposed by Congress for failing to comply with the minimum coverage provision is incidental to that power.
In its brief, 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 said in a statement on the group’s website: “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,” Muise added.
