Today is Florida's US District Court, Judge Roger Vinson has ruled that parts of a lawsuit filed by GOP State Attorneys General will go to trial. The Judge feels that hearing arguments over whether the mandate to buy health insurance and penalties for failure to do are are constitutional.
This lawsuit was filed by the National Federation of Independent Business and 20 GOP State Attorneys General, who complain that the mandate is overstepping it's bounds, and that Congress erred when the penalties for not buying health insurance were not classified as "taxes". Judge Vinson wrote that Congress did that expressly "because it did not want the penalty to be 'scrutinized' as a $4 billion annual tax increase.".
Of course, the GOP AGs are crowing:
Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum praised the ruling. "It is the first step to having the individual mandate declared unconstitutional and upholding state sovereignty in our federal system," McCollum said in a statement.
He filed the lawsuit just minutes after President Barack Obama signed the 10-year, $938 billion health care bill into law in March.
The states who are involved in this lawsuit include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington. If you're living in one of these states, contact your local legislators, your Governor, and your damned AG and let them know that they're barking up the wrong tree.
Other judges have already ruled that the mandate and penalties are legal, as recently as last week. District Judge George Caram Steeh in Detroit already threw out this case.
He said Congress was trying to lower the overall cost of insurance by requiring participation.
"Without the minimum coverage provision, there would be an incentive for some individuals to wait to purchase health insurance until they needed care, knowing that insurance would be available at all times," the judge said.
"As a result, the most costly individuals would be in the insurance system and the least costly would be outside it," Steeh said. "In turn, this would aggravate current problems with cost-shifting and lead to even higher premiums."
U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler noted the ruling "marks the first time a court has considered the merits of any challenge to this law."
Who is Judge Robert Vinson, the Florida federal judge carrying this forward? A Kentuckian, Vinson is a USN Academy graduate, served as a Naval Aviator from 1962-1968. He was nominated to the federal bench in 1983 by Ronald Reagan. He was appointed to serve a seven-year term on the Federal Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, starting in March 2006. In 1985, he convicted four defendants in the bombing of an abortion clinic. In 1993, he ruled against Shoney's in a $134M race discrimination settlement. This judge appears to be a mixed bag in terms of what we could expect to see from this case. Discuss.