Free Republic

Conservatives won a substantial victory on Thursday. The physics of American politics — actions provoking reactions — continues to move the crucial debate, about the nature of the American regime, toward conservatism. Chief Justice John Roberts has served this cause. The health care legislation’s expansion of the federal government’s purview has improved our civic health by rekindling interest in what this expansion threatens — the Framers’ design for limited government. Conservatives distraught about the survival of the individual mandate are missing the considerable consolation prize they won when the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional... --snip-- When Nancy Pelosi, asked where...

Oh, how far we’ve deviated from our Founders in just over 200 years. The entire country is pouring over an incoherent, internally contradictory, ill-conceived and politically motivated decision by Chief Justice Roberts, which grants Congress the power to regulate anything that moves and the power to tax anything that moves and anything that doesn’t move. Amidst the garrulous analysis from the conservative pundit class on the Roberts decision, there is a one-page dissent from Justice Thomas (in addition to his joint dissent with the other 3 conservatives) that has been overlooked. The joint dissent with Scalia, Alito, and Kennedy focuses...

CNN and Fox News aren’t the only ones doing a 180 on the Supreme Court ruling. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R), the first attorney generalin the nation to file a lawsuit over President Obama’s health-care overhaul, said the sky was pretty much falling in a news release issued half an hour after the court upheld the law. “This is a dark day for the American people, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” Cuccinelli said in the release. “This is a dark day for American liberty.” By the time he held a news conference an hour and 45...

Conservatives won a substantial victory Thursday. The physics of American politics — actions provoking reactions — continues to move the crucial debate, about the nature of the American regime, toward conservatism. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has served this cause. The health-care legislation’s expansion of the federal government’s purview has improved our civic health by rekindling interest in what this expansion threatens — the Framers’ design for limited government. Conservatives distraught about the survival of the individual mandate are missing the considerable consolation prize they won when the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional rationale for the mandate — Congress’s...

The chief justice’s canny move to uphold the Affordable Care Act while gutting the Commerce Clause. The scholars expected to see the court gut existing Commerce Clause ... Roberts was smarter than that. By ruling that the individual mandate was permissible as a tax, he joined the Democratic appointees to uphold the law—while joining the Republican wing to gut the Commerce Clause (and push back against the necessary-and-proper clause as well). Here's the Chief Justice's opinion (italics in original): Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and...

-snip-Justice Scalia writes, for instance, that he has little use for a central precedent the Obama administration has cited to justify the health care law under the Constitution’s commerce clause, Wickard v. Filburn. In that 1942 decision, Justice Scalia writes, the Supreme Court “expanded the Commerce Clause beyond all reason” by ruling that “a farmer’s cultivation of wheat for his own consumption affected interstate commerce and thus could be regulated under the Commerce Clause.”… Justice Scalia’s treatment of the Wickard case had been far more respectful in his judicial writings. In the book’s preface, he explains (referring to himself in...

Candidate for Senate Dan Liljenquist (left) pledged to The New American that should he be elected to the U.S. Senate he will offer legislation explicitly repealing the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). In a press conference held on April 24 at 2:00 p.m. (MDT), the former Utah State Senator and current GOP challenger to six-term Senator Orrin Hatch described the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA as “an overreach and a violation of the Bill of Rights.” He said that had he been in office when Congress voted to pass the NDAA he would have...

How dare President Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that? Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances? Nah. And why should he? This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern American history. It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes ...

Checks And Balances: A president with no respect for the Constitution warns of judicial activism by a Supreme Court reviewing his landmark legislation's constitutionality. It would be unconstitutional to let it stand. Someone will have to remind President Obama the Supreme Court is a co-equal branch of government, part of a system of checks and balances designed to rein in precisely the kind of runaway government exhibited by his administration. Our community-organizer-in-chief has a different opinion. "Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was...

I was listening to the tape-delayed Obamacare oral arguments in the car Tuesday when I first heard Justice Breyer's Commerce Clause diatribe, and I meant to post something when I got home. But after making dinner and putting the kids to bed, I forgot.Until today, that is, when I read Jeffrey Anderson's account of "Breyer's Missteps." I think Jeffrey is far too generous to Breyer. Here is a fuller transcript of Breyer's outburst: I look back into history, and I think if we look back into history we see sometimes Congress can create commerce out of nothing. That's the...

The constitutional questions the Affordable Care Act poses are great, novel and grave, as much today as they were when they were first posed in an op-ed on these pages by the Washington lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey on September 18, 2009. The appellate circuits are split, as are legal experts of all interpretative persuasions. The Obama Administration and its allies are already planning to attack the Court's credibility and legitimacy if it overturns the Affordable Care Act. They will claim it is a purely political decision, but this should not sway the Justices any more than should the...

<p>I will be live-blogging the Supreme Court hearings on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from March 26 to 28, beginning at 10 a.m. on Monday. I invite readers and NRO contributors to chip in with their observations. I will also incorporate Twitter feeds from various people from the health-care and legal worlds who are covering the case.</p>

The Obama administration repeatedly cites the conservative Supreme Court justice in defense of its health care overhaul. When the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments later this month on whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, which requires all Americans to buy or secure health insurance, oversteps Congress’ lawful authority to regulate interstate commerce, the Obama administration will be drawing heavily from the legal arguments of a surprising ally: conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. That’s because in 2005, when the Supreme Court last heard a major Commerce Clause challenge to a federal regulation, Scalia sided with the liberal...

In 1942, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Supreme Courts ruled that an Ohio farmer named Filburn was NOT permitted to raise the amount of wheat he wished on his own farm, for the purpose of feeding his own family. And for 70 years this and a handful of similar, overreaching decisions by the Court have resulted in the wholesale abuse of a power granted Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, namely the “Commerce Clause.” (1) In the Wickard v Filburn case, the Court opened to Congress the nearly unlimited power to exercise legislative authority relating to...

President Obama's appointee to the Consumer protection bureau Richard Cordray is a staunch supporter of Obamacare. He has said the lawsuits against the legislation were "frivolous" because of the commerce clause.

Ninety-one-year-old retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens told Bloomberg News that he thinks President Obama's health care law will pass constitutional muster. He referenced a 2005 Supreme Court decision that held the federal government could outlaw state-sanctioned medical marijuana even if the substance didn't cross state lines, which was based on a broad interpretation of the commerce clause.

Why there is a good chance the individual mandate will be struck down by the Supreme Court. The Eleventh Circuit majority opinion (nicely summarized by Dan Miller) is noteworthy not only as the most thorough judicial discussion to date — 207 pages — but as an opinion written jointly by Chief Judge Joel F. Dubina (appointed by the first President Bush) and Judge Frank M. Hull (appointed by President Clinton). As a single opinion, co-authored by two experienced judges, appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents, it has considerable persuasive force.The federal district courts have divided on the constitutionality of ObamaCare...

The power to mandate health insurance is the power to mandate almost anything. (snip) Under our system of government....Congress has only those powers that are explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, with the rest "reserved to the states respectively, or to the people"....An all-encompassing Commerce Clause that authorizes any mandate, restriction, or prohibition aimed at behavior that might affect interstate commerce (subject to specific limits such as those imposed by the Bill of Rights) is plainly inconsistent with this federal system. he Obama administration therefore needs to explain why its constitutional rationale for the health insurance mandate—that the failure to obtain...

Tractors lumbering down country roads are as common as deer in rural Montana, but the federal government wants to place new driving regulations on farmers and ranchers. “It’s a huge deal for us,” said John Youngberg of the Montana Farm Bureau. After years of allowing state governments to waive commercial driver’s license requirements for farmers hauling crops or driving farm equipment on public roads, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is poised to do away with the exceptions. Regulators are suggesting that all wheat shipments be considered interstate, even when farmers making short hauls to local grain elevators aren’t crossing...

The interests of each constituent group in the Democrat Party coalition shows how distorted our federal government has become, all due to the errors of the Supreme Court. Swift v. United States, 196 U.S. 375 (1905) found that federal regulation of meat packing to prevent price fixing permissable because the regulated activity had an "affect" on commerce. And the trust busting Teddy Roosevelt smiled. A generation later, the New Deal took root in the the redefinition that consideration of an "impact" or "effect" on commerce permits. Justice Thomas filed a brilliant concurring opinion in U.S. v. Lopez 514 U.S. 549...