ORLANDO, FL — Sanford City Commissioner Velma Williams is concerned that George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin last month but has not been arrested or charged with any crime, may try to leave the country. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Williams said that Zimmerman’s checkered history make his actions unpredictable. Speaking about the possibility that Zimmerman could leave the country to avoid arrest, Williams said “he might do that.”

Williams met several times with former Sanford City Police Chief Bill Lee, who “temporarily” stepped down yesterday, to discuss her concerns about the investigation. But these meetings left her unsatisfied. As an elected official, she says she has not been properly apprised of the conduct of the investigation, even as more problems came to light. Williams said she received no indication from Lee that the police knew of Zimmerman’s whereabouts or that any that any steps had been taken to prevent him from fleeing to avoid arrest.

There are “mothers and grandmothers” throughout Sanford who are concerned their children “are in danger” with Zimmerman still a free man, according to Williams. They tell her “when my son goes out, I’m worried he might not come back.” Williams added that she was personally concerned for the safety of her 11-year old grandson.

These concerns extend beyond Sanford. The president-elect of the National Bar Association, John E. Page, wrote in a letter sent to Attorney General Eric Holder today: “We join the call for the immediate arrest of Mr. Zimmerman to avoid additional harm to the public.”

Today, Sanford City Manager Norton Bonaparte Jr. announced that two police captains, including one who led the Trayvon Martin investigation, would act as interim co-chiefs. Williams said she advised Bonaparte to replace Lee a week after Trayvon’s death, but her advice was “not embraced.”

The following is the fourth in a four part series previewing the four issues facing the Supreme Court in next week’s Affordable Care Act arguments.

In challenging the Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage requirement, the law’s opponents seek an unprecedented expansion of judicial power that would eradicate all limits on what the nine unelected judges on the Supreme Court can do. Because their entire legal argument has, in the words of conservative judge Laurence Silberman, no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent,” it eliminates any bounds on what judges can do to impose their will on the American people. If the Supreme Court has the power to strike down the individual mandate, there is nothing preventing it from forcing you to eat broccoli.

And yet, the assault on the mandate is only the second scariest thing the law’s opponents want the Supreme Court to do. To date, no judge has invalidated in ACA’s expansion of Medicaid to ensure that it covers everyone who earns up to 133 percent of the poverty rate. And yet anti-health care attorney Paul Clement is now asking the justices to take away this important expansion of health care to the most vulnerable Americans. If the justices take him up on this offer, it could threaten the very existence of Medicaid as well as numerous other programs funding education, low-income housing and countless other services for low-income Americans and children. Although Clement denies, it, his arguments threaten the very existence of numerous programs that millions of American depend upon.

Like several other federal programs, Medicaid is partnership between the federal government and the states. Under Medicaid, the feds offer funding to the states to enable them to provide health services to the poor. The states are free to take this money or to leave it on the table, but if they accept it they are required to comply with certain conditions. Thus, everything about Medicaid is voluntary. States can always reject Medicaid funds outright if they don’t want to comply with federal Medicaid law.

Clement, however, claims that the recent expansion of Medicaid is unconstitutional because it somehow “coerces” the states into taking Medicaid funds, but this is no more true than it would be true that someone who accepts a job that pays them $1 million a year to do very little work has been “coerced” into taking it. Medicaid is a very good deal for the states, and this is only more true after it was expanded by the ACA, as the federal government picks up 90 percent of the costs of the Medicaid expansion under the ACA. There is no coercion when someone takes a good deal.

To get around this problem, Clement offers a series of increasingly complex arguments, the most distressing of which threatens the very existence of Medicaid itself:

Federal spending is not a product of Congress’ “generosity,” in disbursing funds that materialize out of thin air. Federal funding is overwhelmingly composed of tax dollars collected from the States’ own residents. Accordingly, when the federal government makes conditional funding offers to the States, it is “impos[ing] its policy preferences upon the States by placing conditions upon the return of revenues that were collected from the States’ citizenry in the first place.” Were a State to refuse to comply with Congress’ conditions, “federal taxpayers in [that State] would be deprived of the benefits of a return from the federal government to the state of a significant amount of the federal tax monies collected.” The larger the amount of the funds conditioned, the less realistic the State’s purported option of turning down the funds. Its practical ability to ask residents, already taxed by the federal government to provide health insurance elsewhere, to contribute additional taxes to supplant the declined federal program is all but nil.

In essence, Clement is arguing that the ACA’s Medicaid expansion is unconstitutional because it is funded from tax revenues that come from the residents of the several states. But the same can be said about Medicaid as a whole. Or about federal education funds. Or about federal housing funds. Or about any other federal spending program. Clement’s argument would wipe out much of America’s safety net and leave millions of Americans to fend for themselves.

This is why Clement’s anti-Medicaid argument is the scariest thing in this litigation. The Supreme Court is unlikely to accept his argument, but if they do, America will become a far crueler nation overnight.

The following is the third in a four part series previewing the four issues facing the Supreme Court in next week’s Affordable Care Act arguments.

When the Supreme Court strikes down one provision of a larger statute, it applies an extremely strong presumption in favor of keeping the rest of the law intact. In the Court’s words, it will not remove any constitutional part of a law unless it is “evident” that Congress would have preferred no law to some law. For this reason, in the highly unlikely event that the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to carry insurance is struck down, it is all but certain that the lion’s share of the law will remain in effect.

Nevertheless, the law’s challengers insist that the entire law must fall if just one piece is removed, a position that no judge has accepted except for the guy who included an explicit shout-out to the Tea Party in his opinion. They will regret this decision. In overreaching so severely, the law’s challengers also managed to concede that their entire lawsuit is without merit.

To understand why, it is important to understand how the ACA functions. Currently, insurance companies routinely deny care to persons with preexisting conditions — a practice which can render someone unable to receive coverage for conditions as severe as cancer, as routine as hay fever, or even because they are a rape survivor. The Affordable Care Act ends this practice, but this long overdue regulation does not come without a price. The ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions cannot function without a requirement that people obtain insurance before they become ill or injured. This is because, if patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, leaving nothing left for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

This necessary link between the insurance coverage requirement and the ACA’s insurance regulations doesn’t just make the requirement good policy; it also makes it constitutional. As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia explained, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”

Which brings us to the consequences of the plaintiffs’ overreach. In their brief claiming the whole law must go away, several of the plaintiffs outright concede that the insurance coverage requirement is necessary to make the ACA work effectively:

The mandate was intended to be a direct subsidy to insurance companies, as compensation for requiring them (in the guaranteed-issue provision) to insure against “risks” that have already come to pass and forbidding them (in the community-rating provision) from using actuarially sound insurance premiums. The mandate thus works to counteract the powerful inflationary impacts of these other provisions, which would otherwise make premiums in the individual insurance market prohibitively expensive, thereby frustrating Congress’ goal of affordable health insurance. And Congress further viewed the mandate as necessary to prevent “adverse selection” to “game” the new insurance rules, which proponents warned would spark a “death spiral” in insurance.

In light of this concession that Justice Scalia’s rule controls the case, the justices really don’t even need to bother with oral argument — since both sides apparently agree that the law is constitutional.

The following is the second in a four part series previewing the four issues facing the Supreme Court in next week’s Affordable Care Act arguments.

The highest profile issue in this lawsuit is unquestionably the challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that nearly all Americans carry insurance or pay slightly more income taxes. No one, however, should confuse the fact that the law’s opponents have run an effective PR campaign touting the idea that this provision is unconstitutional with the reality that it is both clearly and unambiguously constitutional. In the words of Judge Laurence Silberman, a leading conservative judge who once received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush, the case against the Affordable Care Act has no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”

Given that there really isn’t a case that the ACA violates our actual Constitution, attorney Paul Clement’s brief attacking the law pursues an unusual strategy — trying to convince the justices that neither our real Constitution nor the nearly 200 years of precedent interpreting Congress’ power to regulate actually exist. As a new Center for American Progress issue brief (written by an author familiar to the readers of this blog) explains, Clement’s entire case falls apart unless the justices accept several entirely fabricated claims about the Constitution and longstanding precedent. Here are just two examples:

Bad Textualism

The Constitution permits Congress to “regulate commmerce . . . among the several states,” and that’s really all you need to know about why the Affordable Care Act is constitutional — the ACA regulates 1/6 of the nation’s economy, and it concerns a nationwide commercial market for health care. Clement tries to get around this problem by asking the justices to read the word “regulate” very narrowly to not allow Congress to to require “individuals to engage in commercial transactions,” but his reconception of the Constitution runs head long into text and history.

In 1824, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in the very first case to interpret Congress’ power over Congress that there is “no sort of trade” that the words “regulate Commerce” do not apply to. Moreover, Marshall explained, the power to “regulate” something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated.” The Affordable Care Act regulates trade in health care services, and under Marshall’s rule, Congress has “full power” over all forms of trade—including the power to require people to take certain actions within the health care market. Simply put, Marshall was one of the ratifiers of the Constitution itself, so he has far more credibility to tell us what it means than a conservative advocate like Clement.

Hyperbolic Claims

Unsurprisingly, Clement also revives the plaintiffs’ false claim that, if the Affordable Care Act is upheld, that somehow means that Congress can do whatever it wants. The truth is that the Supreme Court has long maintained that nationwide economic regulation — such as a law regulating the entire national health care market — fits comfortably within Congress’ power, but non-economic laws are far more suspect. This is why the United States lists “family law, general criminal law, or education” as examples of laws that exceed Congress’s power to regulate commerce in its brief. Unlike the Affordable Care Act, these laws are not economic in character, and thus fall beyond Congress’ authority over commerce.

In other words, Clement’s hyperbole has little basis in reality. There are all kinds of laws that exceed Congress’ authority — it’s just that none of them are called the Affordable Care Act.

To learn more about the wild departures Clement wants the justices to make from the Constitution’s text and longstanding Supreme Court precedent, read the entire issue brief here.

The following is the first in a four part series previewing the four issues facing the Supreme Court in next week’s Affordable Care Act arguments.

The Affordable Care Act’s opponents want to read a whole lot into the fact that the Supreme Court will hear six hours of oral argument in next week’s health care case, but the real reason for this is that the justices are effectively hearing four completely unrelated cases. Unlike most Supreme Court hearings, which focus on a single, narrow question of law or on a few closely related questions, the four issues now facing the justices involve wholly separate doctrines, wholly unrelated precedents, and — at least in one case — a statute that few people have ever even heard off. For this reason, it makes sense that the Court agreed to give each of these four issues a lengthy hearing, rather than requiring each issue to compete against the others for a few minutes of oral argument.

The least sexy of these four issues is the Tax Anti-Injunction Act, yet it could also wind up being the most consequential. If the Court decides that this obscure law applies to the Affordable Care Act, it would mean that no one would be able to challenge the law’s most targeted provision in court until 2015 — long after the law provided tens of millions of Americans with health insurance and, in doing so, gained a constituency that would solidly entrench the law’s support.

In short, the Anti-Injunction Act does not permit anyone to bring a lawsuit trying to block the collection of a tax — taxpayers must first pay their taxes and then, if they believe that they were forced to pay too much, they are allowed to sue for a refund. This distinction matters because the most significant challenge to the Affordable Care Act targets its provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes. Because this provision does not take effect until 2014 — and 2014 tax returns will not be filed until 2015 — the Anti-Injunction Act provides a strong argument against allowing any court to weigh in on the ACA for another two and a half years.

To date, three of the twelve court of appeals judges to consider the law have agreed that the Anti-Injunction Act applies here — including the very influential conservative Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh, a former law clerk to conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy who is widely viewed as a likely Supreme Court nominee in a Republican administration, appeared highly skeptical of the constitutional challenge to the ACA when he heard oral arguments in this case. Yet, by voting to dismiss the case on Tax Anti-Injunction grounds, avoided lending his significant right-wing street cred to the Obama Administration’s extremely persuasive legal arguments.

It is, of course, possible that Kavanaugh simply reached a good faith decision that the Anti-Injunction Act applies here, regardless of the political battle at state. Nonetheless, if there are conservative members of this Court who aren’t willing to embrace an attack on the ACA which, in the words of conservative Judge Laurence Silberman, has no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent,” but at the same time would prefer not to give a political boost to the ACA, Judge Kavanaugh may have shown them the way forward.