“The most comprehensive assault on the Separation of Powers Doctrine, in the history of American law”

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Dec. 11, 2014) — The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) is the “most authoritarian and anti-democratic institution in the history of American law, since slavery,” says a brief submitted by the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) on Dec. 10 to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Written by ACRU General Counsel Peter Ferrara in support of a challenge to Obamacare brought by an Arizona orthopedic surgeon and an Arizona businessman, the brief notes that, once appointed, the 15 ”unelected bureaucrats not personally accountable to the public ” have virtually dictatorial powers that could even be vested in a single person.

The IPAB was created ostensibly to adopt cuts to Medicare to pay for Obamacare. But the wording of the ACA could give it effective control over all costs associated with health care.

“Under the ACA, the IPAB’s ‘proposals’ are not proposals at all,” the brief, in Coons and Novack, et al v. Lew and Burwell, et al, states. “The ACA provides for them to automatically become law without Congressional action, Congressional approval, meaningful Congressional oversight, or possible subjection to a presidential veto.”

In fact, the law is written to assure that a future Congress could never alter the board’s powers, an unprecedented limitation on Congress’s legislative power, the brief notes:

“IPAB involves the most extreme Delegation of Powers violation, and the most comprehensive assault on the fundamental Constitutional Separation of Powers Doctrine, in the history of American law.”