Law center asks high court to hear reform case

Seeking to curtail what it sees as an unbridled expansion of congressional power, the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

More than two dozen such lawsuits are pending in federal courts across the U.S., but the conservative law center's challenge of the law on Wednesday became the first to reach filing clerks with the high court. The Supreme Court accepts only a small fraction of petitions each year for oral arguments, but observers on all sides of the controversy say they expect the nine justices will stand in ultimate judgment of the reform law.

The central issue in Thomas More Law Center v. Barack Hussein Obama (PDF), on appeal from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, is whether the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to force citizens to buy a product on the private market. The reform law forces nearly all U.S. residents to buy healthcare insurance by 2014 or face an income-tax penalty.

Drafters of the reform law intended this individual mandate to offset financial losses of insurance companies, since the law also took away insurers’ ability to deny coverage for health reasons. Critics say Congress does not have the power to impose the mandate, no matter how laudable its goals.

“If the act is understood to fall within Congress’ Commerce Clause authority, the federal government will have absolute and unfettered power to create complex regulatory schemes to fix every perceived problem imaginable and to do so by ordering private citizens to engage in affirmative acts, under penalty of law,” the law center’s petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court says.

The court has not yet announced which cases it will hear during it next term, which starts in October.