I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The U.S. government responded late Wednesday to legal challenges to the federal health care law brought by several states’ Attorneys General in a Florida state court, the Wall Street Journal tells us.
While filed in Florida, the government’s response aims to answer nearly 20 Attorneys General, mostly Republican, who have challenged the law in court in recent months. New Mexico’s Attorney General Gary King is not challenging the law, although some urged him to file a court challenge. Colorado’s Attorney General John Suthers, however, has challenged the law.
In its filing, the U.S. Justice Department invoked the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce to defend the law’s mandate that nearly all legal residents without health insurance will pay a penalty starting in 2014 that “gradually increases to at least $695 per person annually or 2.5% of income,” according to the Journal.
The government’s filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida argued that the penalties “were justified because people’s decisions about how to pay for health care in the aggregate affect interstate commerce.”
Opponents of the new health care law have argued that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t give the federal government the power to require citizens to have health insurance.
