The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” or whatever Obamacare’s undercover name was when it was smuggled into the books, was passed using legislative sleight of hand. Alluding to the broad consensus that gives law imprimatur, I quipped in “What If The Media Were Moral?” that Obamacare (unlike the Constitution) was not the law of the land.
More about the concept from Gerard Magliocca (in the WaPo):
The Affordable Care Act is not settled law because the public remains deeply divided over it: More than half of Americans are opposed. But even more critically, congressional Republicans have withheld their stamp of approval. Many Republican lawmakers refuse even to call it a law; they keep referring to it as a “bill.”
Republicans offer several explanations for their rejection of the act’s validity. Most often, they note that the law was passed entirely with Democratic votes. This is in contrast to other major legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support and thus became settled much more quickly.
Republicans also cite the unusual procedures used to pass the health-care act — most notably, the budget reconciliation process that avoided a filibuster while moving the final legislation through the Senate. This tactic left many Senate Republicans feeling cheated.
Felt cheated? They were cheated. Via Michelle Malkin: The “procedural maneuver called ‘reconciliation,’ used to pass Obamacare, allows a bill to pass with 51 votes instead of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. It is not intended for comprehensive and contentious pieces of legislation.
More from Prof. George Reisman on the House:
In 2010, a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, without a single Republican vote, passed “ObamaCare” by a margin of 219 to 212. In a staggering act of misfeasance, hardly a single member had read, let alone studied, the 1,900 page law (2,700 pages according to some authorities), which had been dumped into the House only days earlier. The 219 members of that House who voted for ObamaCare were willing to impose massive, and massively expensive, legislation on the American people without any real idea of what they were doing. Had those members been members of the board of directors of a private corporation, their complete and utter lack of due diligence would almost certainly have exposed them to enormous law suits and, quite possibly, criminal penalties.