Justice Breyer: Health Care Reform Could Appear Before Supreme Court (VIDEO)

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer
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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said today that he thinks health care reform legislation may be a good candidate for review by the court.

Speaking to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science about next year’s funding, Breyer suggested the legislation could come before the court in the coming years.

Asked about the court’s relatively light caseload, he said that will probably change.

“Every word in a bill is subject for an argument in court,” Breyer said. “You have passed a law with 2,400 pages. It probably has a lot of words. And I would predict, as a test of my theory, that three or four years from today, no one is going to ask us again why we have so few cases.”

He didn’t mention the legislation by name.

Watch:

Opponents of health care reform have called the bill unconstitutional throughout the health care debate. Republican attorneys general and governors from more than a dozen states have filed a lawsuit against the federal government alleging that the bill, specifically the individual mandate, violates the Constitution.

Breyer was appointed to the court by President Clinton in 1994.

Editor’s Note: This post has been revised since it was first published.

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