Judge follows Constitution on health care law

To the editor:

In his Jan. 31 ruling, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson sided with 26 states that challenged the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He found that not only is the individual mandate — which would have forced people to buy insurance or pay a fine — unconstitutional, but because the individual mandate is not severable, the entire act must be declared void.

The federal government cannot defy a federal judge’s ruling. It has only one option, and that is to appeal the decision. If the federal government continues to implement provisions of the health care law, one of the litigants needs to go in front of Judge Vinson with a “draft for a contempt order” to force the government’s compliance.

In his ruling, Judge Vinson made numerous mentions of the Federalist Papers. In The Federalist No. 62, James Madison said, “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”

This statement is most certainly true of the health care bill — 2,700 pages is certainly “voluminous,” very few have actually read it and even fewer completely understood it. Mr. Madison was certainly thinking legislation such as this is an affront to our Constitution and an attack on our liberties.

Assuming the federal government appeals Judge Vinson’s ruling, it will go to the U.S. Supreme Court. I hope the court will follow the Constitution, which especially in this case, is very clear.

Dean Meek

Henderson

Good info

To the editor:

Thank you for two more very informative articles in Thursday’s Review-Journal regarding public union abuses (Jane Ann Morrison column and “No action on sick leave abuse”). The firefighters and police supervisors union abuses go on and on.

Both of these unions do seem to have the public by the throat, and just keep squeezing and squeezing. The unions bend over backward in protecting their members, even when obvious crimes such as embezzlement occur, or by outright theft of taxpayer funds in the case of firefighter sick-leave abuses. Thank you for bringing our attention to these abuses.

The public’s trust in both these unions can be restored only if the present policies are reviewed and changed. The culture of “anything goes” and “let’s get as much as we can” must be brought to a screeching halt.

As many of our elected officials largely depend on the support of the unions for their election, they are often too tolerant of union abuses because of their fear of losing union support.

The forgotten taxpayer’s voice is often not heard, but the voice of the press is heard, and the common people rely on the press for information provided by Review-Journal columnists and reporters.

Lew Spitzer

Las Vegas

They’re illegal

To the editor:

In response to the Sunday op-ed by the ACLU of Nevada’s Rahul Sharma, “Program Has Problems”: This screed just screamed out for rebuttal because of the complete lack of logic the writer uses to support his argument.

Mr. Sharma excoriates the Las Vegas police program that turns any illegal alien arrested for a “serious crime” over to immigration authorities, hopefully for eventual deportation.

This is bad, according to Mr. Sharma, on a number of different levels.

Bad because Metro, it seems, is “assuming that everyone arrested for a serious crime is guilty.” Mr. Sharma accuses the police of acting as judge and jury, “playing a role long reserved for a jury of one’s peers.” Say what? Is Mr. Sharma saying we need to have a jury of illegal aliens decide whether or not the arrestee should be turned over to immigration?

Then Mr. Sharma addresses the woeful plight of an illegal arrested for a minor offense who has a long, serious rap sheet. “Someone arrested for, say, stopping a few inches over the line at a stop sign …” Those poor souls, Mr. Sharma opines, are being denied the chance to rehabilitate themselves, because this act by Metro “sends a message of ‘once a criminal, always a criminal.’ ” Again, say what?

In conclusion, Mr. Sharma drags out the tired old argument that increased police enforcement in the illegal community will cause people to clam up and not cooperate with them, out of fear that they or their loved ones will face deportation.

What Mr. Sharma fails to recognize is that, regardless of their guilt or innocence at initial arrest, regardless of their rehabilitation potential and regardless of whether or not the illegal community will or will not cooperate with police, these illegal aliens are, by definition, criminals because they broke the law in coming here and continue to break the law by living and working here.

While they are not all “bad” people, per se, they have no right to be here, and Las Vegas police should be doing all they can not only to turn over any serious offender, but every illegal it arrests, to the immigration authorities.

DAVE DOWNER

HENDERSON