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The Presentment Clause Meets The Suspension Power: The Affordable Care Act’S Long And Winding Road To Implementation, Mitchell Widener

Mitchell Widener

The presentment clause MEETs the Suspension Power: The Affordable Care Act’s Long and Winding Road to Implementation

Mitchell J. Widener

Abstract

To enact a law, the Presentment Clause of the Constitution mandates that both Houses of Congress present a bill to the President who either signs it into law or vetoes it. The Founders included this provision to prevent presidents from emulating King James II, who would routinely suspend Parliament’s laws to favor political constituents. Additionally, the Presentment Clause served to enhance the separation-of-powers principle implied in the Constitution.

Within the past year, President Obama has suspended multiple portions of …

"Health Care For All:" The Gap Between Rhetoric And Reality In The Affordable Care Act, Vinita Andrapalliyal

Vinita Andrapalliyal

The rhetoric of “universal health care” and “health care for all” that pervaded the health care debate which culminated in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s passage. However, the ACA offers reduced to no protections for certain noncitizen groups, specifically: 1) recently-arrived legal permanent residents, 2) nonimmigrants, and 3) the undocumented. This Article explores how the Act fails to ensure “health care for all,” demonstrates the gap between rhetoric and reality by parsing the ACA’s legislative history, and posits reasons for the gap. The ACA’s legislative history suggests that legislators’ biases towards these noncitizen groups, particularly with respect …

“Health Laws Of Every Description”: John Marshall’S Ruling On A Federal Health Care Law, David B. Kopel, Robert G. Natelson

David B Kopel

If John Marshall, the greatest of Chief Justices, were to hear a challenge to the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, how would he rule? Would the nationalist justice who, according to the New Deal Supreme Court, “described the Federal commerce power with a breadth never yet exceeded,” agree that federal control of health care was within that power?

In the fictional opinion below, Marshall rules on the constitutionality of a bill similar to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

We constructed this opinion chiefly from direct quotation and paraphrases of Marshall’s own words, …