Obamacare’s unlimited power

Washington Times ^ | 6/2/11 | Editorial

[Nachum]

The White House defense of Obamacare hinges on the claim that Congress essentially has unlimited power to force Americans to spend their personal money on a cause of the government’s choosing. Oral arguments before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday made this all the more clear. Administration lawyers argued that uninsured individuals can be compelled to buy health care coverage under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. If that’s so, what else could Congress compel people to do? As Judge James L. Graham asked acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal,

[Nachum]

Heard Mark Levin going on about this today.

[Nachum]

The list, ping

Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list

http://www.nachumlist.com/

[allmost]

Kill them, end statement

[Meet the New Boss]

If that’s so, what else could Congress compel people to do?

Like compelling people to purchase insurance, Congress could compel people to purchase Treasury bonds.

That would be the ultimate Marxist wet dream of confiscating people's wealth and putting it at the disposal of government and growing government to as big as they want. When the debt gets too large, they inflate it away or default and start the cycle over.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Liberals hate other people’s freedom.

[ExTexasRedhead]

Behold the second Holocaust brought to you by the Democrat Party, Hussein, Pelosi, and Reid.

There are other names for all of them but I can’t express them here.

[SpaceBar]

I know it sounds extremist and hyperbolic, but we really are literally one decision away from a complete socialist totalitarian state indistinguishable from the former USSR. The State is everything, and claims all powers. You are nothing you sniveling little worms, in fact less than nothing. Now buy the GD insurance and shut up.

[EQAndyBuzz]

“Like compelling people to purchase insurance, Congress could compel people to purchase Treasury bonds.”

Compel people to have only one child. Compel seniors to die at 75. Compel conservatives to give up their guns and religion.

No thanks.

[hal ogen]

I am compelled to resist creatively.

[andyk]

In the 2005 case Gonzales v. Raich, the court reaffirmed that “Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself ‘commercial,’ in that it is not produced for sale, if it concludes that failure to regulate that class of activity would undercut the regulation of the interstate market in that commodity.”

Even so-called originalists, like Scalia, confuse the plain words of the interstate commerce clause. Scalia wrote a separate concurring opinion in Gonzales v. Raich stating:

As Lopez itself states, and the Court affirms today, Congress may regulate noneconomic intrastate activities only where the failure to do so “could … undercut” its regulation of interstate commerce.

What pitiful decision. You could use that same decision to infer that Scalia should support Obamacare.

[dalebert]

Is anyone going to stop it? Not hearing much from the R side about it