Lawyer Fears the Beast in Successful Challenge to Obama Health Care Law
The Pennsylvania lawyer who successfully challenged the Obama health care law cited the Book of Revelation in his suit against the federal government.
Lawyer Paul Rossi represents Barbara and Gregory Bachman, Lancaster Online reports. The York County couple say they want to finance a new car, but they are reluctant to take out a five-year loan because they will have to pay for health insurance beginning in 2014 as a result of the new law.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner of Harrisburg ruled for the Bachmans on Tuesday, holding that Congress had no authority to enact the individual mandate under the commerce clause, report the Legal Intelligencer and the Associated Press. Conner said his ruling was based on constitutional jurisprudence rather than some of the “hyperbolic rhetoric” of plaintiffs lawyers who predicted America would evolve into a socialist state. “These suggestions of cataclysmic results … are both unproductive and unpersuasive,” Conner wrote.
Lancaster Online quotes from Rossi’s complaint. “If Congress has the power to command individuals to engage in commerce (rather than merely regulate commerce) such a power would harken far beyond Orwellian prose but, rather, to some of the darkest passages of the Book of Revelation and the Beast’s control over all commerce,” he wrote.
Three federal appeals courts have weighed in on the law. The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the individual mandate in June, while the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found it was unconstitutional in August. In a decision earlier this month, the Richmond-Va.-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the state of Virginia lacked standing to challenge the law.
