Put aside the individual mandate for a moment. The Congressional Research Service – showing up with some information that would have been really helpful a couple months ago – says that health-care reform might violate the Tenth Amendment:
Here's the problem: The law imposes fines on employers whose employees take advantage of the bill's available subsidies. In theory, that could include some state governments. The question the report attempts to answer is: If those fines do indeed apply to state governments, would the imposition of those fines "run afoul of the Tenth Amendment?"It's a little inside baseball, but it has something to do with the "commandeering" doctrine and intergovernmental tax immunity. More directly, it's another example of stuff we had to find out about after the bill was passed.
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In theory, it could include agencies that (if included) might run afoul of the Constitution, assuming such fines are imposed in the future, and further assuming that it is not possible to pass a corrective law in the next 4+ years to account for this particular hypothesis.
In other words, America is dead.
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