President Barack Obama

by Jeremy Leaming

As time quickly approaches for the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the highly politicized challenges to the Obama administration’s landmark domestic accomplishment, health care reform, anxieties are rising among supporters over the strategy used to craft and defend the law.

Simon Lazarus, an expert on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA, writes in a new piece for Slate that such concern is misplaced, at best.

Lazarus, author of an ACS Issue Brief on the constitutionality of the ACA’s minimum coverage provision, which requires certain people to purchase health care coverage starting in 2014 or pay a penalty via their income tax return filings, notes that some preeminent health policy experts, such as Paul Starr, argue that lawmakers would have been smarter to root the minimum coverage provision in Congress’s power to tax, instead of both in its power to regulate commerce and to levy taxes.

Acknowledging that Starr’s “stature is beyond question,” Lazarus, public policy counsel for the National Senior Citizens Law Center, maintains that “on this matter of legal strategy, his certitude seems naïve. Indeed, especially in light of the ACA mandate’s actual track record in court to date, his take seems downright backward.”

First, Lazarus notes that opponents of the administration were itching to scuttle its health care reform law -- regardless of what constitutional power the mandate was rooted.

He writes, “The steam powering their opposition sprang from two sources: 1) partisan politics, part Tea Party zeal and the desire to discredit Barack Obama and obstruct his agenda; and 2) a hope, animating the libertarian legal advocates who staffed the lawsuits, of replacing existing law with pre-New Deal, so-called ‘Lochner Era’ doctrines that would invalidate substantially all 20th–century regulatory, civil rights, and safety net legislation.”

Next Lazarus defends the administration’s case for the ACA, saying before the current high court it looks best in the “Commerce-Clause format.”

Lazarus concludes, in part, that a string of “eminent conservative appellate judges have blown off opponents’ demands to overturn this allegedly ‘unprecedented’ federal power-grab. On the contrary, Republican appointees have concluded that upholding the ACA mandate is compelled by the text of the Commerce Clause and Supreme Court precedent, that it is no more ‘coercive’ than other measures, such as dedicated taxes and tax write-offs undergirding major existing health-insurance laws, and even, that the ACA’s approach could be a valuable model for conservative designs to privatize other components of the social safety net.”

On Jan. 6, the Department of Justice filed a brief with the high court defending the ACA.

By Rena Steinzor, President of the Center for Progressive Reform and Professor, University of Maryland School of Law

A series of catastrophic regulatory failures in recent years has focused attention on the weakened condition of regulatory agencies assigned to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. The failures are the product of a destructive convergence of funding shortfalls, political attacks, and outmoded legal authority, setting the stage for ineffective enforcement and unsupervised industry self-regulation. From the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed eleven and caused grave environmental and economic damage, to the worst mining disaster in 40 years at the Big Branch mine in West Virginia with a death toll of 29, the signs of regulatory dysfunction abound. Peanut paste tainted by salmonella, lead-paint-coated toys, sulfur-infused Chinese dry wall, oil refinery explosions, degraded pipes at U.S. nuclear power plants: At the bottom of each well-publicized event is an agency unable to do its job and a company that could not be relied upon to put the public interest first.

Although everyone should be able to agree that these events are intolerable to the extent they are preventable, thoughtful analysis is too often sidetracked by the nation’s polarized debate over the role of government in our daily lives. Conservative commentators argue that accidents like the Gulf spill are the inevitable byproducts of industrialization, daunting in the best of times but having little to do with government failure. They say that over-regulation is a far more serious problem than under-regulation because bureaucrats run-amok are hobbling the country’s long-delayed recovery from a devastating world-wide recession. Progressive commentators  respond that one of the government’s most important jobs is to prevent industry from trading safety for profit, by compelling manufacturers to install redundant, fail-safe mechanisms to protect public health and the environment. Spills, explosions, unchecked carbon emissions, tainted drugs, and unhealthy air pollution represent chronic failures by government to forbid conduct that lies in the mainstream of business as usual. 

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama seemed to subscribe to the progressive view, declaring that the role of government is to help people when they cannot help themselves and raising the strong expectation that he would sponsor affirmative reform to prevent the damage produced by the sharper edges of a capitalist economy.