New York Times: Conservatives See Silver Lining in Health Ruling
With the landmark Supreme Court ruling on Thursday, conservatives and libertarians lost their legal battle to overturn the Obama administration’s signature health care legislation. But they may have won a bigger war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/us/conservatives-see-silver-lining-in-health-ruling.html?_r=1&hp
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ruled that the health care legislation passed constitutional muster, but only under Congress’s broad power to tax. He rejected the widely held expansive view of the commerce clause of the United States Constitution, ruling that it doesn’t give Congress the power to make people buy health insurance — or, for that matter, healthy green vegetables like broccoli.
“Under the government’s theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables,” the chief justice wrote. “That is not the country the framers of our Constitution envisioned.” Libertarians declared victory.
“We finally won a three-decades-long battle over the commerce clause,” John Eastman, a conservative constitutional scholar and a professor at Chapman University, told me hours after the court’s decision.
This might seem a paradox, given that the court upheld the legislation. But the decision may ultimately prove a Pyrrhic victory for supporters of expansive Congressional power. The opinion reads like a hymn to the ideal of limited government. And by embracing the broccoli argument, it sharply limits the commerce clause — until now the source of ever-expanding legislative power since Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1824 that Congressional power to regulate commerce “may be exercised to its utmost extent.”
“The commerce clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. Libertarians and conservatives have been seeking such a declaration since the New Deal.
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