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Oklahoma City, OK – The Oklahoma House of Representatives, by a vote of 72-20, passed a bill that looks to protect its citizens from Obamacare. If the bill makes it through the State Senate and is signed by the governor, it would ensure that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act stops at the borders of the state of Oklahoma.
State Representative Mike Ritze (Rep.), a board-certified family practice physician and surgeon, is the bill’s primary proponent. Ritze commended the speaker of the State House of Representatives, T.W. Shannon (Rep.) for resisting political pressure and allowing the bill to be voted on by the body of the House.
Proponents of the bill see its passage a matter of Constitutional law and personal freedom. “There is no provision in Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution where the states delegated to Congress the authority to make a citizen purchase health care or pay a fine,” said Ritze. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is an example of federal overreach and my legislation will authorize the state via the will of the People to ignore it and ban the enforcement of it.”
“They fail to understand how the country is supposed to operate,” Ritze added. “As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, No. 33: ‘It expressly confines this supremacy to laws made pursuant to the Constitution.’ Alexander Hamilton got it right. Congress and the Supreme Court got it wrong.”
Ritze recognizes that the states retain many rights under the Constitution, including the responsibility to block unconstitutional federal usurpation of state sovereignty. “When the federal government exceeds its delegated authority, as it has done with the passage of Obamacare, it is the duty of every state representative to defend the unalienable rights of the people of the great State of Oklahoma. I and others in the House and Senate intend to do just that with this legislation,” avowed Ritze.
The division between Federalist and Anti-Federalist is still active, at least in state legislatures like Oklahoma’s. Supporters of federalism are heartened to see state legislators asserting their right to restrain the federal government through application of the very powerful and very constitutional principle of nullification. Nullification is a concept of constitutional law that recognizes the right of each state to invalidate any federal measure that exceeds the limited and defined powers allowed the federal government as enumerated in the Constitution.
The concept of nullification is based on the assertion that the sovereign states formed the union, and as creators of the compact, they hold ultimate authority as to the limits of the power of the central government to enact laws that are applicable to the states and the citizens thereof. Several state legislatures are waking up to their duty to exercise their 10th Amendment right to rule as sovereign entities by enacting state statutes that nullify the healthcare law.
