I'm confused why WA's AG is signing on to fight the health insurance bill. Since I am a nerd, I like a little context with my facts, so I give you:
stuff that happened with the passing of the Social Security Act. Not only will you find three full-length legal opinions from 1937 at that link, you'll also find a "brief historical essay" that is only brief in comparison to full-length legal opinions.
The 10th amendment, which provides the grounds for the seemingly crackpot AGs to be filing the lawsuits. Just for reference, I'm sure you all know all of them by heart. As it always does with our constitutional arguments, it comes back to Hamilton. It's interesting--and not that unusual--that GOP like to play kissy face with Hamilton's theories except when, you know, they don't. Then, as we are currently witnessing, they wig out and break up with Hamilton over facebook. That's the interesting thing about the implied powers doctrine: it can be as flexible as you need it to be. It may or may not be useful to consider that the doctrine was authored by a guy considered by many of the government founders to be too elitist. Defining government powers as relating to the general good of the populace seems great on the surface. It's the questions about who's doing the defining, and figuring out what might reasonably fall under the category that makes it complicated. It'd be great if we could safely say "if we elect them, we can trust them to act in our best interests." But. You know. Bush. For starters. (I mean, let's not forget Andrew Johnson. Or the other crackpot Andrew. Ask the Cherokee about crackpot Andrew and the "general good.")
And then, a brief, much less nerdy, thing from NPR about who doesn't have to buy health insurance, and how you get out of it. (A pretty dinky annual fine.)
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