Should the Supreme Court Overturn Obama's Healthcare Law? >
Individual Mandate Goes Against Basic Freedom and Liberty
Congress has no power to mandate commerce into existence
March 26, 2012
The Supreme Court has a solemn duty to apply the law, and thus, it must find the individual mandate and the coerced Medicaid spending conditions unconstitutional. Because those provisions are inextricably intertwined with so many others, the court should throw out the entire law.
The high court has upheld some far-reaching regulations of economic activity by Congress, including the power to regulate interstate commerce in fungible goods such as wheat and marijuana as part of a comprehensive system regulating or prohibiting the intrastate possession and production of those goods. But government has never required people to buy any good or service.
The individual mandate does not regulate or prohibit activity of any kind. Instead, it mandates commerce into existence. Congress has no such power. Although Congress may be able to regulate the operations of health insurance companies directly if their economic activities have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, it cannot regulate an individual's decision not to purchase a contract from those companies.
[See a collection of political cartoons on healthcare.]
If Congress can mandate this, then it can mandate anything. It could require Americans to buy a General Motors car or pay a penalty to help stimulate commerce and repay General Motor's government loans, or it could mandate a weekly purchase of bread to subsidize wheat farmers and the interstate market in wheat. The very idea that Congress has the power to force individual Americans into commercial activity goes against our most basic notions of freedom and liberty.
Congress also exceeded its spending powers and violated basic principles of federalism with the massive expansion of Medicaid. It is coercing states into accepting costly new conditions that Congress could not impose directly by threatening to withhold all federal funding under the single largest federal grant-in-aid program. The court has long recognized that a federal financial inducement can be so massive as to leave states with no choice but to accept it, no matter how destructive the attached conditions may be to their sovereignty.
If the court approves this unprecedented and unbounded abuse of power, then there will truly be no limits on the federal government, and our days as a federal republic with a government of enumerated and limited powers will be over.
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- Other Arguments
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#1200114
Yes — Never before in history has the Congress attempted to force every American to purchase a product of their choosing
PHIL KERPEN, Vice President for Policy at Americans for Prosperity
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#313997
Yes — Congress exercised unprecedented and unbounded power in passing Obamacare
TREVOR BURRUS, Legal Associate at the Cato Institute
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#4205166
No — Supreme Court must uphold the law and not bow to political pressures
ETHAN ROME, Executive Director of Health Care for America Now
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#5123112
Yes — Obamacare and Romneycare are a threat to freedom
RICK SANTORUM, Republican Candidate for President of the United States
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#697137
No — Both the Constitution and the Supreme Court's precedent support upholding the Affordable Care Act
IAN MILLHISER, Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress
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#788131
No — It would be unconscionable for the Supreme Court to take healthcare gains away from the American people
RON POLLACK, Founding Executive Director of Families USA
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#8105153
No — The Constitution gives the federal government the power to enact national solutions to national problems
ELIZABETH B. WYDRA, Chief Counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center
