New health care case next week
on Oct 5, 2011 at 8:06 pm
Lawyers for Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA, will file the next case in the Supreme Court to challenge the key feature of the new federal health care law. Matthew D. Staver, who heads the public interest law firm of Liberty Counsel in Maitland, FL, said in a brief telephone message that the petition was nearly in final form, and would be filed at the Court early next week.
That case would put before the Court an issue not directly raised so far in the five other cases already at the Court: whether all of the challenges to the new law’s insurance-purchase mandate are barred by a federal law (the Anti-Injunction Act) that forbids a lawsuit to stop the collection of any federal tax. In its ruling last month, the Fourth Circuit Court concluded that the insurance mandate and the penalty attached to it are a part of tax law, and thus the Anti-Injunction Act forbids the lawsuits against it.
The U.S. Solicitor General, in filing the government’s own appeal to the Justices last month, said the Court might wish to raise the Anti-Injunction Act issue on its own, or added that it could await the Liberty University case and address it in that litigation.
