Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Attorneys General Suits Against Health Law Politically Based

Just more political grandstanding, more waste of our tax dollars, and of course, most of the media is playing up the controversy instead of telling us the truth:
However, a wide variety of experts and scholars across the political spectrum say opt-out state laws are a political exercise with no legal effect.

"The notion that a state can just choose to opt out is just preposterous," says former Reagan administration Solicitor General Charles Fried. "One is left speechless by the absurdity of it."

Fried says similar attempts at "so-called nullification" led to the Civil War.

Conservative scholar and former federal appeals court Judge Michael McConnell agrees that states' opt-out laws are legally meaningless.

"If the mandate is constitutional," he says, "then the state statutes are pre-empted" — they are trumped by federal law. And "if the federal law is unconstitutional, the state laws are unnecessary." NPR