Liberty’s Obamacare Challenge Provides Glimmer of Hope

Townhall.com ^ | March 12, 2013 | Robert Knight

In 1919, back when the United States was a constitutional republic, Congress passed a child labor law imposing a 10 percent excise tax on companies that violated it.

A North Carolina furniture maker challenged the law and won. In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture that although child labor laws have a noble purpose, the means – Congress using taxing power as a penalty – was unconstitutional.

This was before Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing threat in1937 ended the Supreme Court’s resistance to grandiose expansions of federal power. The child labor issue, by the way, was resolved when states enacted laws prohibiting exploitation.

The Drexel decision resurfaced as precedent last year at the Supreme Court in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sibelius. That’s where the Roberts court upheld the individual mandate to buy health insurance as an indirect “tax,” and thus upheld Obamacare as constitutional.

The Court ruled that Congress can’t make people buy a product, but that it can tax people who choose not to buy it. Yes, it’s as wacky as the 1942 Wickard v. Filburn ruling, in which a farmer was fined under interstate commerce regulations for raising grain for his own cows. And you wonder how the federal government got so big?

In the Obamacare case, the majority justified the “tax” ploy by saying that the individual mandate didn’t rise to the level of a “punitive penalty” as rejected in Drexel.

The Roberts court also ruled that the employer mandate to provide employee health insurance could not be justified under the Taxing and Spending Clause that the court used to justify the individual mandate, because it involves a severe penalty like the one that Drexel struck down.

This brings us to a glimmer of hope that the Court will right the massive wrong of finding Obamacare constitutional. They can do this by ruling for Liberty University, which has sued to overturn the employer mandate on religious freedom grounds. The independent Christian college has several reasons for challenging the employer mandate, but it boils down to the fact that the penalty is so severe that it would bankrupt the college.

In January 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued an order implementing Obamacare by requiring employers that have 50 or more employees to provide “minimum essential coverage” for employees and dependents. The “minimum” includes abortifacients, contraceptives and sterilization. After a public uproar, HHS gave Catholic hospitals and faith-based colleges like Liberty a year to figure out how to violate their consciences. Not even that was offered to businesses like the craft chain Hobby Lobby, whose Christian owners are also refusing to comply and are challenging the law.

In an amicus brief filed on March 6 at the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, American Civil Rights Union General Counsel Peter Ferrara notes that:

“If Liberty University complies with the employer mandate...it will violate fundamental religious beliefs that life begins at conception, and that abortion is consequently murder of pre-born children in their mothers' wombs. The PPACA consequently mandates that the University violate its religious beliefs.”

Founded in 1971 by the late evangelist Jerry Falwell, Liberty is the largest Christian college in America, with 12,000 on-campus students and another 62,000 pursuing degrees online. In fact, it’s the largest private, nonprofit university in the country. Mr. Ferrara’s brief explains why the university’s refusal to embrace Caesar’s immoral mandate would be crushingly expensive.

If even a single employee finds the insurance “unaffordable,” defined as when an employee’s portion of the premium exceeds 9.5 percent of his or her household income, fines would be imposed based on all university employees.

“An employer mandate violation can very easily result under the PPACA,” Mr. Ferrara explains. “A family of four with a single income-earner will easily make the employer’s coverage for his entire work force ‘unaffordable.’ … If the health insurance for each person in the household costs only $2,500, then the single income earner would need to make over $100,000 to meet the PPACA employer mandate requirements for an ‘affordable’ plan. These penalties will quickly become “massive,” even “destructive,” which qualifies them as unconstitutional punitive penalties rather than permissible taxes under Drexel Furniture.”

Here’s more from the brief: "In 2012, Liberty University employed 6,900 people, with net claims for its self-insured health insurance of $14,214,000. Yet Liberty University would be fined $20,700,000 ($3,000 times 6,900) if only one employee meets the 9.5 percent "unaffordable" criterion.

“That penalty would be on top of the additional penalty of $2,000 per employee ($13,800,000) that Liberty University would have to pay for providing coverage excluding abortifacients, for a total combined penalty of $34,500,000. That would be in addition to the $14,214,000 that Liberty University paid in claims for its health insurance coverage in 2012.”

Result? This would “tax or penalize Liberty University out of existence.”

For the same reasons of conscience cited by Liberty, the individual mandate is an unconstitutional violation of the freedom of religion, the brief contends.

Congress declined to include a severance clause, which would have left Obamacare in place if portions were declared unconstitutional. All parties agreed that without the mandate, the system would collapse. Without it, people would not buy insurance until they needed it.

“This Court should declare the employer mandate and individual mandate unconstitutional,” the ACRU’s brief concludes, “and, since those provisions are not severable, should declare the entire Act unconstitutional."

The Supreme Court will eventually hear this case. America’s health care system is hanging on a wing and a prayer.