To the editor:

Monday, I heard that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the legality of the purchase mandate and other parts of the Affordable Health Care Act next spring.

As a person who knows the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution verbatim I wonder what leg these states’ rights people think they have to stand on. Both states and Indian tribes are sovereign to govern themselves but dependent on the federal government for protection. This isn’t my opinion. This is the opinion of one U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in his rulings in the Worcester v. Georgia and Cherokee v. Georgia rulings of the 1830s in response to the state rights position of one President Andrew Jackson.

These people think that the Articles of Confederation is the valid constitutional document the way they sound. Sorry, the U.S. Constitution replaced it in 1787 and gave the U.S. Congress that passed the health care law plenary power to regulate commerce. This isn’t federal overstepping. It’s Republicans having a temper tantrum fighting the U.S. Civil War all over again, which was lost by states’ rights governments.

I went to Constitution Day at the Lied Center. The anti-health care bill attorney was full of inferences and no facts. Legal cases are won with facts, not inference and smear tactics. This bill should be intact unless those justices who support smear tactics and inference bow to their corporate lackeys and pull another Gore v. Bush travesty.