Americans for Limited Government Foundation paper warns against state Obamacare nullification

As much as I would like to see Obamacare repealed, I cannot support those who are urging state nullification. Nullification is not a solution. By now, it should be clearly established that the supremacy clause of the constitution trumps nullification.

I am concerned that President Obama is violating the rule of law by arbitrarily delaying implementation of key parts of the Affordable Care Act. A president may delay or change an administrative rule, but should not be allowed to ignore or change a law. If President Obama can arbitrarily say the employer mandate will be delayed for a year, what is to keep a future Republican president from saying the employer mandate or, for that matter, the entire Affordable Car Act is suspended and deferred indefinitely? It would be the same thing.

As much as I dislike what Obamacare is doing to health care and the market economy of this country, I equally dislike what President Obama is doing to the rule of law and the Constitution. Nevertheless, the response to the President for ignoring a law, is not for a State to also ignore a law. The President should be impeached for violating the law. The difficulty in doing that is that those who would like to see the President removed from office for failing to uphold the law, do not like the particular law he is failing to uphold. Another practical reason the President can not be impeached is that Democrats would never vote to impeach America's first Black president, regardless of what law he failed to uphold. Our strategy for defeating Obamacare is to elect a Republican Congress and repeal Obamacare.  Nullification is not a winning strategy for defeating Obamacare or dealing with a President who fails to uphold the law. Nullification itself violates the rule of law.

 Below is a press release from Americans for Limited Government regarding Obamacare nullification:

Dec. 23, 2013, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government Foundation released a paper today by Dr. Bradley Gitz, Arkansas' Bates College's William Jefferson Clinton Professor of Political Science, which found that Obamacare nullification actions pending in the South Carolina state legislature are unconstitutional and will do harm both to the people of the state of South Carolina and to those who oppose the President's signature health care legislation.

Dr. Gitz makes this last point writing, "… at present there is no better way to raise Obamacare from its deathbed than to do what the South Carolina Senate is contemplating doing (and the South Carolina House has already done). Rather than having let Obamacare die from its many self-inflicted wounds, they will have unintentionally aided and abetted its recovery and entrenchment in our national life. The struggle against Obamacare is both important and necessary, and South Carolina appears poised to only make it more difficult."

Americans for Limited Government Foundation president Nathan Mehrens affirmed Gitz's findings saying, "We wanted an independent scholar to review the nullification effort in South Carolina, and Dr. Gitz's findings should be a sobering wake up call to anyone seriously considering pursuing state nullification of the disastrous Obamacare law." 

The full report is available on the Americans for Limited Government website.

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