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Okay. So, Obamacare is Funded with a “Tax”. Then, it Originated in the Wrong House…

By: conservativecurmudgeon (Diary)  |  June 28th, 2012 at 11:50 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Umm. Er. Ah…

Does anyone recall their recent history?

1) Nancy Pelosi’s House in 2009 takes up two versions of a “Health Care Reform” bill. Both versions have squirreled away within their byzantine idiocy, what the libs refer to as the “Public Option” .

2) Both plans are rejected by the Senate, in especial by Senator Joe Lieberman, who threatens to filibuster any bill with the “Option” in it (-thus earning the everlasting scorn of the Radical Unshowered Left). The Senate writes its own version with what they call the “Individual Insurance Requirement”. It passes in late 2009.

3) Knowing that the House would have to write it’s own version of the Senate Bill, and then send THAT version back to the Senate for ratification, Scott Brown runs for the Massachusetts senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy, vowing to be the “40th vote against Obamacare”.

4) The House cannot send another bill back to the Senate now that their filibuster is broken, so they simply take up the Senate bill as-is. Scott Brown never has to threaten to filibuster, because the original Senate version is what the House finally passed. It only comes back to the Senate in a final version after a Kangaroo Conference.

5) The House affirms the Senate version, with a few insignificant amendments in the early spring of 2010. THE SENATE VERSION STANDS.

Is it me, or are we now, truly, a lawless nation? We are penalized –er, excuse me, “taxed”, if we don’t purchase insurance– but foreign national aliens are not penalized for sneaking across our boarder? Lawless, indeed…

The United States Constitution, Article One, Section. 7:

 

Clause 1: All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

 

…You know, since were busy re-writing the Constitution on the fly, let’s re-write the Oath of Office, too; something along the lines of “I solemnly swear (or promise) to faithfully execute the Laws of the United States of America, and will, to the best of my ability, ignore, re-write, and shred the Constitution of the United States. So help me Gaia. ”

 

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  • Xasteius

    http://hotair.com/archives/2012/06/28/say-doesnt-the-constitution-require-tax-bills-to-originate-in-the-house/

  • runner12

    It was a “shell bill” see the Hot Air reference in the above comment. It was purposefully done by Reid as a sneaky trick to get around the Constitution.

    There is a question of whether or not this could be challenged in court, that is “does the shell bill qualify as a bill that orginated in the House?” But it would take awhile to get there and we would be relying on Roberts again to reverse his own ruling. Still, it is could qualify as a last remaining option if, God forbid, this bill is not repealed.

    • ohiohistorian

      Curmudgeon, I KNOW you were around and active at that time. However, the Senate did use a shell bill to do this. Here is the legislative HISTORY of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act. I was really disappointed to see that this article was written this way and that conservativecurmudgeon had it wrong. Runner12, thanks again for keeping history straight.

      http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d111:1:./temp/~bdmJ1w::|/home/LegislativeData.php?n=BSS;c=111|

      • conservativecurmudgeon

        The above scenario of the chronology, while being somewhat of a Readers Digest Condensed Version, is correct. It is also why Pelosi was fully prepared to embrace the Slaughter Rule, and was prepared to “deem” the senate version passed. while only voting for the supposed pasted-on amendments.

        We all know what was going on here. I won’t play Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s game, and if we were doing pre-trial discovery, I think my accounting of events would be borne out.

        • runner12

          That is why I said yes and no :) . We all know this was a trick to get around the Constitutional fact that any bill dealing with revenue must originate in the House. Now that it has been deemed a “tax”, it calls into question the legitimacy of the practice of using a “shell bill.” Maybe even the Constitutionality of such a measure on a bill involving revenue.

          I am no lawyer, but the door is still open on that grounds to mount another challenge. The problem, as the Hot Air piece pointed out, is that by the time it got to SC it may be repealed. Additionally, we would be relying on the CJ, which we all know how that went the first time. Still, I think it it could be a “nuclear option” if we had to use it.

    • acat

      to tell a co-equal branch that they’re no longer able to decide their own internal processes.

      That seems .. not only pretty unlikely, but remarkably stupid .. like McDonalds telling Burger King how to prepare french fries.*

      It’s not bloody likely, and it would cause all kinds of long-term problems, given the inherent institutional vanities at play.

      Mew

      * not that BK couldn’t use some help .. their fries are pathetic!

  • audax

    Now what is to be done about it? What can conservative-nouns do? Who has standing to pursue this in a court? Do we just have to wait until November and then see what happens?

  • Dave_A

    It was passed as an appropriations bill, by gutting a house bill & inserting the Senate language as amendments…

    Common trick, been done for years…

  • http://hughcpeconjrs.blogspot.com/ hughpecon

    Can’t blame SCOTUS alone with this. The intellectually bankrupt voters fault too.
    “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free. It expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson

  • tedpomeroy

    The SCOTUS majority read tax into the law.

    So Justice Roberts. what do we have here?

    Is it an Excise tax? Direct Tax? or an Income Tax?

  • independentmike

    True, and that’s another reason that Roberts’ defection is so outrageous. Never mind that the bill was never called a tax; never mind that an earlier version of the bill that was a tax was rejected because it was a tax; but, yes, if the justification for finding this constitutional is that it’s a tax, then it’s unconstitutional from the get-go because, according to the Constitution, it should have originated in the House.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    All your verbiage can’t get around those 6 characters.

    Get OVER the whining. Still mad? Get to WORK.

    • conservativecurmudgeon

      And, since we are now to believe everything thus labeled by Speaker Pelosi’s House are things to be trusted beyond reproach, they also called it “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”, so, it stands to reason we have nothing to fear, and all of this angst is unwarranted;

      —For we are all now protected, and everything will be affordable, correct?

      And, historical analysis is now called “whining”, too, I see. I suppose, just like Chief Justice Roberts said, we must all stop getting so hung up on words and definitions. “Final Solution”, “Holocaust”. What’s the big dif, right?

      History=Whining, Just like Penalty=Tax. I guess I understand.

      • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

        The House passed HR 3590.

        The Senate amended it (gutted it, and inserted Obamacare, really) and passed it.

        The House did their thing and passed the Senate amendments.

        All the forms were obeyed. The problem is that the Constitution didn’t account for amendments changing the entire nature of a bill, such that a bill could originate in the House as an unrelated bill.

        • http://www.flaliberty.org scorpio0679

          Figure I won’t repeat what you just said. This is exactly what I was going to comment. It unfortunately did originate in the House.

      • Bill S

        .

  • http://teresainfortworth.wordpress.com/ Teresa in Fort Worth, TX

    http://www.boston.com/business/personalfinance/managingyourmoney/archives/2010/03/tax_implication.html

    (That includes the employer penalty, and lowers the individual penalty)

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