Does the court have the authority and power to strike down Federal laws passed by the Congress and signed by the President?
They do if the laws are unconstitutional, imho.
It isn't just an opinion. it is their constitutional duty to strike down and overturn laws that are unconstitutional- NOT to try and figure out how to bypass and ignore the Constitution. They were right when they said this law would permanently change the relationship of the citizen with government, empowering government to control the individual in a manner the system was never designed to do. It essentially turns the individual from a citizen who gives his consent to be governed -to a subject who is ruled over who must do whatever the ruling elite orders them to do -or else. This would immediately nullify the Constitution and throw wide open the door for establishing the authority of government to order citizens to spend their money the way overnment orders them to for ANYTHING since the commerce clause can be perverted to include everything that can be bought. It would essentially strip people of control of their lives and establish us all as government owned property with only the privileges government ALLOWS us to have. And the Bill of Rights just a bad joke.
I'm still waiting for a liberal to explain government's sudden claim to a new power insisting the individual must forfeit control of his own health care decisions, even against his will -when the individual actually has a right to keep total control by cutting out the middleman insurance entirely? In other words, if I choose to pay for my own medical care directly instead of paying far more to a third party than I would choose to pay if paying directly -then where does government get off ordering me to forfeit control of MY health care decisions to a third party against my will? To say nothing of the idiocy of the left pretending eliminating competition would not only lower costs, but moronically insist quality would not only not be negatively affected, it would improve! Really? Name ONE industry where eliminating competition results in lower costs and better quality -and remind me again why we have laws against monopolies? Government regulated monopolies given to utility companies is not done because it results in lower costs and higher quality -it provably does neither. They are given for a different reason that would never apply to medical care.
No way they uphold the mandate and probably throw out the entire law since government argued the mandate could not be severed from the law. In addition, they didn't seem inclined to go through tens of thousands of pages members of Congress who passed it hadn't bothered to read -to try and figure out line by line what could stand without that mandate.
More than 40 years ago a lawyer told me the legal profession had set its sights on medical care as being vulnerable to a take over by lawyers who would gladly destroy the entire system if it meant empowering lawyers. Especially after seeing how quickly power was diverted from both patient and doctor in the UK and believed the same could be one here nearly as fast. We live in a country where the legal profession is ridiculously over represented and can only justify their bloated, useless numbers and spitting out enormous numbers more every year by shifting power to themselves as a "natural" ruling elite and convincing Americans they cannot survive, they cannot provide for hems elves, cannot succeed in life and cannot even be trusted to self govern -unless attorneys are running the show. Their most important success in that was convincing Americans that the founders were wrong and that the common citizen cannot and should rarely hold elected government office and to leave it to lawyers instead. This enabled them to then use the force and power of government to expand their powers from there. I propose an Amendment limiting the number of lawyers allowed to serve in government at any given time along with term limits on every elected office. No one group has done more harm to this nation than career politicians, 98 percent of whom are lawyers. Nothing special about lawyers whatsoever -the fact they are the most over represented occupation tells you how easy it is to get a law degree. Much easier than it is to get any number of other degrees but they are arrogantly convinced they can do anyone's job better than those who do it for a living. That lawyer was off on how long he thought it would take but said it was inevitable because lawyers have no natural predators and no self monitoring or self control, ethics are given meaningless lip service and state bars look for ways to avoid enforcing any notion of holding to ethical practice. The lawyers are the predators who see themselves at the top of the food chain and will be satisfied with nothing less than the power to go with it.
