WASHINGTON -- The health care debate, defined for years by partisan howling, entered the marble halls of the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, and it was enough to render Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens awestruck.
Olens attended oral arguments in the court for the first time to represent Georgia, one of 26 states suing to strike down the 2-year-old health care law’s mandate that all individuals purchase health insurance.
“The room is very formal; the architecture is very formal; it gathers immediate respect and awe,” Olens said. “That is our judicial system at its highest level. ...
“One of the things we ought to remember is that when certain people view this issue politically, this is a legal discussion. And when you’re in that courtroom, it is clear that it is a legal discussion, and the decision will be based on the Constitution -- as it should be -- rather than partisanship.”
The court is hearing three days of arguments -- the most time spent on one case in 45 years -- on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. It’s a case and a law that touches most Americans, and the partisan passions were on display on the street outside, if not inside the courtroom.
Demonstrators on both sides of the issue chanted outside the court, which is only a few yards from the steps of the Capitol, where a group of House Republicans led by Rep. Tom Price of Roswell gathered for a news conference to bash the law.
An orthopedic surgeon who now heads the messaging effort for the House GOP caucus, Price recalled that similar protests encircled the Capitol two years ago when Democrats narrowly passed the law.
The law was intended to provide health insurance for all Americans through a series of requirements and subsidies while employing centralized measures to bring down costs in the long run. Republicans insist it is an unprecedented federal power grab that will doom health care as we know it; most Democrats claim it is an unprecedented step toward saving a system that has trampled too many under rising costs.
Price accused Democrats of passing “under the guise of health care, a law that expands the scope and reach of our federal government in unprecedented ways, forcing the will of an ever-expansive and oppressive central government on the governed.”
Price also attended the arguments, which focused Monday on whether the Supreme Court had standing to hear the case before the mandate goes into effect, a question hinging on whether the mandate is a tax. Olens said even the more liberal justices in their questions seemed to cast doubt on the issue, and he was confident the plaintiffs “passed the jurisdictional bar.”
Rep. Hank Johnson, a DeKalb County Democrat, in an interview defended the law on the merits and on its constitutionality, saying that Congress has the power to compel a purchase of health insurance because the act of not having insurance affects interstate commerce as health systems are burdened with costly emergency care for the uninsured.
Johnson added that he is glad to see President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign embrace the term “Obamacare,” which was long used by Republicans to attack the law as overly partisan.
“It denotes a historic piece of legislation,” Johnson said, a notion that partisans on both sides could agree with, for good or for ill.
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