POLITICO — Liberty University’s challenge to the health reform law will go back before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., on Thursday, with the school focused on getting Obamacare back before the Supreme Court.
Liberty’s lawsuit is the most wide ranging of the outstanding legal challenges to the health law, hitting everything from contraceptive coverage to the employer mandate.
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But Thursday’s oral argument won’t be Liberty’s first trip to the 4th Circuit over Obamacare. The same court ruled in 2011 that a tax law prevented it from hearing Liberty’s case, including its challenge to the individual mandate, until at least 2014. But after the Supreme Court upheld the mandate last year, it told the 4th Circuit to go back and hear Liberty’s other claims.
Liberty’s lawsuit now has several points: that the employer mandate violates the Commerce Clause; that the individual and employer mandates violate the First Amendment’s religious protections as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; and that since the individual mandate’s penalty was ruled a tax by the Supreme Court, the bill should have started in the House — not the Senate.
Read more at Politico.
