Among the state officials who have said they plan to fight the bill are Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, as well as attorneys general from Alabama, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Louisiana and Virginia, the Times reports.
According to legal experts cited in the story, their arguments are likely to focus on the scope of the requirement that individuals buy health insurance and the expansion of the federal government’s powers at the expense of the states’ authority.
While some constitutional experts have characterized these arguments as serious and potentially threatening to the reform measure, others told the Times that the legislation would be protected because the mandate was structured as a tax, and that the federal government’s ability to tax citizens is nothing new. Nor is its ability to regulate interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which has been repeatedly upheld in the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, other states have begun challenging the legislation in another way, through proposed amendments to individual state constitutions intended to exempt their citizens from the mandate. In Georgia, for example, the state House voted 111-61 to amend the state constitution to provide that no citizen, employer or healthcare provider of the state may be forced to buy health insurance, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle. However, because the measure was a proposed constitutional amendment, it would have required 120 votes, a two-thirds majority, to pass.
Georgia is one of at least 34 states considering similar legislative efforts to assert their rights under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, according to the Business Chronicle.
Another such state is Kansas, where a preliminary House vote to advance a proposed amendment to the state constitution received a 76-44 vote but failed to get the two-thirds, or 84 votes, ultimately necessary to put the measure to the state’s voters, according to a report in the Kansas City Star.
Read The New York Times story about state challenges to healthcare reform.
