Another court challenge for Obamacare

Breitbart:

On November 8, Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) and thirty-nine other Republican members of the House of Representatives filed a "friend of the court" brief in support of a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") based on the Origination Clause that will be heard by the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals in early 2014.

The case, Sissel v United States Department of Health and Human Services, was filed in the Washington, D.C. District Federal Court by the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of Matt Sissel, an Iraq war veteran who lives in Iowa, where he owns a small business, on July 26, 2010.

The Origination Clause of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 7, Clause 1 states "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." Not a word of the Affordable Care Act originated in the House of Representatives. Instead, using a legislative trick, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) took an innocuous bill that had passed the House unanimously on October 8, 2009 by a 416-0 vote, the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009, removed every word of its text following the first sentence, and replaced it with the Affordable Care Act language.

On June 28, 2013, Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointee, ruled against Sissel, dismissing his complaint using reasoning that required a rejection of Chief Justice John Roberts' controversial and even ridiculed majority opinion in the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in the 2012 NFIB v Sebelius case. In that opinion, Roberts declared Obamacare constitutional based upon his opinion that the law's individual mandate was, in fact, a tax.

Judge Howell ruled that the type of revenue raised by the act that Justice John Roberts deemed to be a tax was not the type of revenue that constituted a tax under the Origination Clause.
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Even though Justice Roberts declared that the individual mandate was a tax in NFIB v Sebelius, Judge Howell ruled that the revenue raised by Affordable Care Act was "incidental" to the law, and therefore was not covered by the Origination Clause.

Equally baffling, Judge Howell ruled that the tactic of "gutting and replacing" a bill, which Majority Leader Reid used to push the Affordable Care Act through, was in fact merely the issuing of an amendment, despite the fact that not a single word of the original bill was kept in the so-called "amendment."

On July 9, 2013, the Pacific Legal Foundation appealed Judge Howell's dismissal of Sissel v United States Department of Health and Human Services to the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals. On filing the appeal, Timothy Sandefur, one of the two principal attorneys on the case for Pacific Legal Foundation, said "[t]he district court wrongly held that the individual mandate is not a 'bill for raising revenue.' " The district court's ruling "misses the point of what the individual mandate is and what it does," he argued.
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Either the mandate is a tax which should originate in the House or it is not a tax and is unconstitutional.   This is just one of numerous legal challenges to this monstrosity.  The Democrats really screwed up when they jammed it through without building a political consensus and against the wishes of the voters.