Passing the Buck

Those of our readers who watched the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, October 13 concerning the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court heard a great deal of political campaigning aimed at electing Democrats to Congress and defeating President Trump. Very little time was actually spent concerning Judge Barrett’s qualifications as a justice. The most common campaign theme concerned the alleged threat to Obamacare posed by a case pending before the Supreme Court. Prominent in the challenges aimed at Judge Barrett was a question about “severability.”

One of our readers, a lawyer apparently, wrote an email explaining the concept since all of the Senators either knew or thought they knew what it meant and so did not bother to explain to the rest of us. Here is the text of the email:

“Dear Ratcatcher: Since the Senators do not want to explain what “severability” means, I am writing to offer this insight for whatever benefit it may provide. Lawyers writing contracts and leases, and careful legislators writing laws, generally include a provision that is actually entitled “Severability.” Those provisions usually read something like this: “The provisions of this Agreement/Lease/Act are intended to be severable. If any term or provision hereof is illegal or invalid for any reason whatsoever, such illegality or invalidity shall not affect the validity of the remainder of this Agreement/Lease/Act.” Such provisions are included so that if a court determines that part of the document is illegal or invalid (or unconstitutional), he rest of the instrument will remain in full force.”

So why do we care about severability and Obamacare? Simple. The Democrats, in their headlong rush to enact it in March, 2010, without any input from Republicans, and adhering to Nancy Pelosi’s dictate that they must pass it first to then learn what was in it, forgot to include a severability clause! Democrat Senators, all of whom voted for Obamacare and who forgot to include the important clause, now want to push the problem they created onto the Supreme Court and, in particular, Judge Barrett. Par for the Democrat course. We screwed up but it is your job to save us. Chief Justice Robert has already done that once for the Dems when he wrote the majority opinion upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare in 2012 by inventing the rationale that it was really a tax despite the fact that President Obama, himself, and all of the Democrat leaders in Congress repeatedly assured the American public that Obamacare was not a tax. So today (and probably tomorrow) the Democrats have hammered Judge Barrett, hoping to intimidate her into committing to uphold Obamacare; making a commitment in advance that no Democrat-appointed justice has been willing to make on any issue. Typical buck passing.

Ratcatcher cannot resist confessing how we would have replied to the Senators, albeit conceding that it would probably ignite a firestorm of condemnation for a judge who had the temerity to speak back to a United States Senator. Ratcatcher would have been tempted to say, “Senator, you and your fellow Democrats wrote Obamacare; you prevented anyone, including Republicans from reviewing the Act before you voted on it. You failed to include a severability clause in the Act. You made the bed; now lie in it!

NOTE: If you have found this post interesting or helpful, please refer Ratcatcher.net to your friends. Ratcatcher invites you to leave a Comment or send an email to catcher@ratcatcher.net. Ratcatcher will respond to all civil emails.