Reynolds on Obamacare standing

When the Obama administration unveiled one of its improvisations in Obamacare last week, HHS posted a handy cheat sheet. The cheat sheet summarized regulations promulgated by the Department. In his Forbes column “Government takeover,” Avik Roy posted a link to the regulations (interim final rule) here.

I found the regulations to be a highly questionable exercise in rule by decree. Cloaked in an air of emergency, they strongly urge the provision of coverage by insurers to qualified individuals without compensation at the risk of being excluded from the Obamacare exchanges next year.

I proposed a story idea for local news editors. I suggested that they print out a copy of the regulations and assign a reporter to contact a teacher of administrative and/or constitutional law — Glenn Reynolds, say, who teaches both — to take a look. I thought the reporter should be assigned the task of eliciting his opinion on the latest doings of the Obama administration underway in your hometown. I even noted how he could be reached via email: [email protected].

Glenn has now posted the video of his InstaVision interview with Mickey Kaus on YouTube (below). In the first seven minutes of the interview they discuss recent developments in Obamacare. Glenn wears his learning lightly, but he is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law (Knoxville). Wearing his hat as a teacher of constitutional and administrative law, Professor Reynolds addresses the procedural issue of standing that must be satisfied to get the substantive legal issues resolved by a federal court.

Glenn gives his opinion that the widely alleged difficulty of finding plaintiffs with standing is “crap, crap, crap to the maximum crap power.” He explains that many parties have sustained the harm necessary to ground standing under applicable constitutional doctrine. I infer that Glenn’s indignation on this point arises from his view on the legality of the Obama administration’s decrees (negative), but that story still remains to be written by the inquiring reporter.

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