Political Quotes

“in a few minutes, the Supreme Court will be addressing four issues in connection with the constitutionality of the Obama health care law. Previously, I spoke about the unconstitutionality of the individual mandate. Today, I wish to discuss the second issue of four: how much of the law must be struck down if the Court finds the individual mandate to be unconstitutional. This legal question is called severability. When a court rules a law is unconstitutional, it can strike down only those parts it considers unconstitutional. It can strike down the parts that are intertwined with the unconstitutional provision or it can strike down the whole law. Its action will depend upon whether the remainder of the law can function as Congress intended when it passed it. There are rules governing severability. Normally, when only parts of a law are held to be unconstitutional, only those parts of the law are struck down by the Court. But when a statute's unconstitutional provisions are severed, the whole law falls when Congress would not have passed the constitutional provisions without the unconstitutional ones being in it as well. It is not enough that some of the remaining provisions are constitutional. The Supreme Court has asked whether the remaining provisions ``would function in a manner consistent with . . .…”