Not constitutional, ergo, not law — from a previous post:
c. Since this is a direct tax, via the Court, this has another Constitutional ground to lose on or for Congress to overturn on. That is this:
Article 1, Section 3, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution [Apportionment of Representatives; Direct Taxes]: Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union…
Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution, Paragraph 1 [Bills of Revenue Originate in House]: 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.
d. BECAUSE it is a tax, reconciliation can be used to repeal the law.
Now Breitbart
One of the big Democrat talking points about ObamaCare is to bleat that it’s “constitutional,” blessed by the Supreme Court, and is the “settled law of the land.” They never explain how this is supposed to intimidate the nominally free people of the Republican from changing or repealing it – presumably it is meant to be taken as the first law in history that must be obeyed without question, forever, more powerful and permanent than the Constitution itself
But it’s not true anyway. Andrew McCarthy at National Review reminds us that, contrary to Democrat rhetoric, ObamaCare was not held constitutional by the Supreme Court. Sorry, lefties, but it just wasn’t. The bill as written would have been struck down. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts rewrote the bill on the fly to make it constitutional.
One of the ideas we occasionally hear floated to make the ruling class suffer the full pain of the law they inflicted upon the rest of us is to pass a bill requiring the enforcement of ObamaCare precisely as it was passed, since it has never legally been amended. An orthodontist in Florida teamed up with Judicial Watch to file a lawsuit along these lines recently, with an eye to countering President Obama’s flagrantly illegal rescheduling of the employer mandate. If such a suit was successful, it should logically lead to the Supreme Court striking down ObamaCare, since it was not constitutional as passed by Congress and signed by the President.
But the Affordable Care Act should have died the moment it left the Supreme Court anyway. As McCarthy points out, the Roberts-rewritten law might have been (barely) held constitutional, at the cost of making Obama a shameless liar during all the years he claimed it wasn’t a tax… but that also made the ACA illegal, because it’s a tax bill, and those must originate in the House, while ObamaCare originated in the Senate.
Now the National Review:
…We now know Obamacare was tax legislation. Consequently, it was undeniably a “bill for raising revenue,” for which the Constitution mandates compliance with the Origination Clause (Art. I, Sec. 7). The Clause requires that tax bills must originate in the House of Representatives. Obamacare did not.
[….]
…Obamacare originated in the Senate.
It was introduced in Congress in 2009 by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who called it the “Senate health care bill” (a description still touted long afterwards on Reid’s website). Employing the chicanery that marked the legislation through and through, the Democrat-controlled Senate turned its 3,000-page mega-proposal into a Senate amendment. The Senate attached its amendment to a nondescript, uncontroversial House bill (the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009”) that had unanimously passed (416–0) in the lower chamber.
Thanks to the Supreme Court, it is now undeniable that Obamacare was tax legislation. It was also, by its own proclamation, a bill for raising revenue. Democrats maintained that the Senate proposal would reduce the federal budget deficit by $130 billion. More to the point, the bill contained 17 explicit “Revenue Provisions” — none of which was remotely related to the House bill to which the Senate proposal was attached.
Therefore, Obamacare is revenue-raising tax legislation, originated in the Senate in violation of the Constitution.