Possible violation of the 10th ammendment

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The Taxation and Spending Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution) reads:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

The Supreme Court held the understanding of the General Welfare Clause contained in the Taxing and Spending Clause adheres to the construction given it by Associate Justice Joseph Story in his 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. Justice Story concluded that the General Welfare Clause is not a grant of general legislative power, but a qualification on the taxing power which includes within it a federal power to spend federal revenues on matters of general interest to the federal government.

The proposed legislation for establishing a Medical Corps is focused on providing healthcare benefits for the individual. As such, it may be an overreach of the Federal Government.

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In Helvering v. Davis 301 U.S. 619 (1937), the U.S. Supreme Court found that the Social Security Act was constitutional. The Roosevelt administration argued that collecting the Social Security payroll tax and paying Social Security checks were completely independent operations. The first lies within Congress’s taxing power, and the second lies within its power to spend for the "general welfare." Because Medicare was an amendment to the Social Security Act, it is also constitutional, according to this reasoning.

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In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius 567 U.S. 519 (2012), the Supreme Court upheld Congress' power to enact most provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA), including a requirement for most Americans to have health insurance by 2014.

The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld by a vote of 5 to 4 the individual mandate to buy health insurance as a constitutional exercise of Congress's taxing power. A majority of the justices, including Chief Justice Roberts, agreed that the individual mandate was not a proper use of Congress's Commerce Clause or Necessary and Proper Clause powers, though they did not join in a single opinion. A majority of the justices also agreed that another challenged provision of the Act, a significant expansion of Medicaid, was not a valid exercise of Congress's spending power as it would coerce states to either accept the expansion or risk losing existing Medicaid funding.

The Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3) describes an enumerated power listed in the United States Constitution:

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

The significance of the Commerce Clause is described in the Supreme Court's opinion in Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005):

The Commerce Clause emerged as the Framers' response to the central problem giving rise to the Constitution itself: the absence of any federal commerce power under the Articles of Confederation. For the first century of our history, the primary use of the Clause was to preclude the kind of discriminatory state legislation that had once been permissible. Then, in response to rapid industrial development and an increasingly interdependent national economy, Congress “ushered in a new era of federal regulation under the commerce power,” beginning with the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

The Necessary and Proper Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 18) states:

The Congress shall have Power ... To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

This clause, as justification for the creation of a national bank, was put to the test in 1819 in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland, wherein the state of Maryland had attempted to impede the operations of the Second Bank of the United States by imposing a tax on out-of-state banks, of which the Second Bank of the United States was the only one. The court ruled against Maryland, and Chief Justice John Marshall, Alexander Hamilton's longtime Federalist ally, wrote the opinion, which stated that while the Constitution did not explicitly give permission to create a federal bank, it conferred upon Congress an implied power to do so under the Necessary and Proper Clause so that Congress could realize or fulfill its express taxing and spending powers. The case reaffirmed Hamilton's view that legislation reasonably related to express powers was constitutional. Marshall wrote:

We admit, as all must admit, that the powers of the Government are limited, and that its limits are not to be transcended. But we think the sound construction of the Constitution must allow to the national legislature that discretion with respect to the means by which the powers it confers are to be carried into execution which will enable that body to perform the high duties assigned to it in the manner most beneficial to the people. Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consistent with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional.

The court in McCulloch v. Maryland held that federal laws could be necessary without being "absolutely necessary", and noted that "The clause is placed among the powers of Congress, not among the limitations on those powers." At the same time, the court retained the power of judicial review established in Marbury v. Madison, declaring that it had the power to strike down laws that departed from those powers: "Should Congress, in the execution of its powers, adopt measures which are prohibited by the Constitution, or should Congress, under the pretext of executing its powers, pass laws for the accomplishment of objects not intrusted to the Government, it would become the painful duty of this tribunal, should a case requiring such a decision come before it, to say that such an act was not the law of the land."

As Chief Justice Marshall put it, the Necessary and Proper Clause "purport[s] to enlarge, not to diminish the powers vested in the government. It purports to be an additional power, not a restriction on those already granted." Without this clause in the Constitution, there would have been a dispute about whether the express powers imply incidental powers, whereas this clause resolved that dispute by making the incidental powers express instead of implied.

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There is a precedent for doing almost exactly what is being proposed in this bill!

The Cadet Nurse Corps was established by the U.S. Congress on June 15, 1943, and signed into law by president Franklin D. Roosevelt on July 1, 1943. Its purpose was to ensure the country had enough nurses to care for its citizens at home and abroad during World War II. The Corps was supervised by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), whose duty was to train young women as nurses during the war.

The program was open to all women between the ages of 17 and 35, in good health, who had graduated from an accredited high school. Successful applicants were eligible for a government subsidy, paying for tuition, books, uniforms, and a stipend. In exchange, they were required to pledge to actively serve in essential civilian or federal government services for the duration of World War II. All state nursing schools were eligible to participate in the program. However, they needed to be accredited by the accrediting agency in their state, and connected with a hospital that had been approved by the American College of Surgeons.

The unique feature of the program was its accelerated training curricula. The nursing schools were required to compress the traditional nursing program of 36 months to 30 months. Of the 1,300 schools of nursing in the country, 1,125 participated in the program. The Corps operated from 1943 until 1948, and during this period 179,294 student nurses enrolled in the program and 124,065 of them graduated from participating nursing schools.The federal government spent $160,326,237 on the nursing program.

On March 29, 1943, Representative Frances P. Bolton of Ohio introduced H.R. 2326, a bill that would "provide for the training of nurses for the armed forces, government and civilian hospitals, health agencies, and war industries through grants to the institutions providing the training". The act also stated that the nurses trained by its funding would be a uniformed body. An amendment by the Senate prohibited discrimination against race, creed, or color. The Nurse Training Act, also called the Bolton Act, was passed unanimously by Congress on June 15, 1943, and became Public Law No. 74 on July 1, 1943. The Division of Nurse Education of the USPHS was established to supervise the program and was answerable to the U.S. Surgeon General, Thomas Parran, Jr. He appointed Lucile Petry, a registered nurse (RN), as director of the corps; she was the first woman to head a division in the USPHS.

In January 1945, the Surgeon General, Thomas Parran, Jr., appeared before the House Committee on Military Affairs and said, "In my opinion, the country has received and increasingly will receive substantial returns on this investment. We can not measure what the loss to the country would have been if civilian nursing service had collapsed, any more than we could measure the cost of failure at the Normandy beachheads."