Healthcare reform faces constitutionality disputes

The recent legal developments surrounding the constitutionality of last year’s federal health care reform legislation could have major political implications.

On Feb. 3, a Mississippi Federal District Court judge dismissed a case challenging the constitutionality of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, while a federal district court judge in Florida invalidated the law in its entirety earlier last week.

The litigation means “health care will remain a more salient issue and less clear victory for Democrats and anybody who voted for it,” Penn Law School and political science professor Cary Coglianese said.

“It makes it harder for supporters of health care reform to trumpet it as an unqualified success,” Coglianese added.

Some, however, believe the legal challenges may actually help the Democrats’ electoral prospects for 2012.

“I don’t think that legal action is going to hurt the Democrats,” College junior and Penn Democrats Legislative Director Emma Ellman-Golan said. “When voters go the ballot box in two years, they’re going to be voting between a party that actually passed innovative legislation and a party that’s just been trying to repeal everything.”

Ellman-Golan feels that legal objections to the bill “are basically just political ways to try to repeal it,” noting that the Republicans clearly did not have the votes to actually repeal the bill in Congress.

Many Republicans feel that the litigation is a legitimate constitutional attack and are more confident in how it might hurt the Democrats in the next federal election.

“The individual mandate is not constitutional since the government doesn’t have the right to make an individual purchase something,” Engineering junior and College Republicans President Peter Terpeluk said.

“In many ways, the 2010 election was a repeal against health care,” Terpeluk said.

The legal debate mentioned by Terpeluk focuses on whether or not the Commerce Clause — which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce — permits the individual mandate section of the health care bill that requires all Americans to purchase health insurance.

Political science professor Rogers Smith, who teaches a class on constitutional law, notes the legitimacy of this attack against health care.

“There are no precedents that undeniably require people to engage in particular economic activities,” Smith said, differentiating a universal health care mandate from the law requiring car insurance, which applies only to car owners.

However, Smith feels the bill should be upheld since even abstention from health care can be seen as an economic activity.

Terpeluk hopes that the litigation reaches the Supreme Court by 2012 so that if it is declared unconstitutional, the decision can affect voters’ views on the bill before the election.

Smith predicts the bill will ultimately reach the Supreme Court through the normal appeals process and will be decided upon sometime in 2012 or 2013.

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