Oops! Might want to rethink that!
The Miami Herald looks at the origins of the mandate even as Florida's Attorney General (running for governor ... as a Republican) files a suit calling the mandate an ""unprecedented encroachment on the liberty of individuals."
It states the Constitution doesn't authorize such a mandate, the proposed tax penalty is unlawful and is an "unprecedented encroachment on the sovereignty of the states."
"The truth is this is a Republican idea," said Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association. She said she first heard the concept of the "individual mandate" in a Miami speech in the early 1990s by Sen. John McCain, a conservative Republican from Arizona, to counter the "Hillarycare" the Clintons were proposing.
McCain did not embrace the concept during his 2008 election campaign, but other leading Republicans did, including Tommy Thompson, secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush.
Seeking to deradicalize the idea during a symposium in Orlando in September 2008, Thompson said, "Just like people are required to have car insurance, they could be required to have health insurance." ...McClatchy
Mitt Romney was another mandate supporter.
Meanwhile, challenges to the new health care reform law coming from other states seem a little weak, too.
Sanford Levinson, a University of Texas Law School professor, said that Americans who choose not to purchase health insurance can pay a fine under the new law. Congress, he said, clearly has the authority to levy taxes and fines."As a technical matter, it's been set up as a tax," Levinson said of the penalties under the health-care law. "The argument about constitutionality is, if not frivolous, close to it," he said."You'd have to imagine that the five conservative Republicans on the Supreme Court will be willing to invalidate the most important piece of social legislation in 50 years on the basis of a highly tendentious and controversial reading of the Constitution." ...McClatchy
Of course, this Supreme Court has shown itself capable of unlimited treachery. "Treachery" and "treason" have the same root and meaning. Is there a way of dealing with treason coming from that direction?
