Constitution

The big news story today seems to be that more than a dozen state attorney generals are putting together a legal challenge to the individual mandate in the recently passed health care reform.  Here's what Bill McCollum of Florida said:

"It forces people to do something -- in the sense of buying a health care policy or paying a penalty, a tax or a fine -- that simply the constitution does not allow Congress to do," McCollum said at a news conference in Tallahassee.

McCollum, who is seeking the Republican nomination to run for Florida governor, said the healthcare reforms would add $1.6 billion to Florida's spending on the Medicaid health program for poor people.

I'm no legal scholar, but I cannot see how handling the mandate through the 1040 tax form is any less constitutional than, say, tax deductibility of IRA contributions.  Start from a baseline where everyone is presumed to have contributed to the maximum amount to an IRA.  The IRA deduction operates as:

Presidential signing statements are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.  They first arose when President James Madison proclaimed that he reserved the right under the Constitution to appoint all military officers despite having signed a law a month earlier that prescribed how to reduce the size of the army.  The first controversy over a signing statement arose when President Andrew Jackson declared that despite having signed a law to build a road from Detroit to Chicago, he wouldn't build it beyond the Michigan border.  That was hardly what Congress intended, and so there's the rub.  Who decides?

According to the Congressional Research Service, the Supreme Court has not ruled directly on signing statements, but on numerous occasions it has ruled that the President cannot suspend parts of laws.  Wikipedia has a good article too.