Clive Crook argues that a common sense look at existing policy shows that we have far more coercive statues on the book than what is proposed in the Affordable Care Act:
For all practical purposes, the economic power of the federal government
is no longer constitutionally constrained. By using its tax power, the
federal government already forces you to save for retirement (Social
Security), insure against disability (ditto), provide for health care in
retirement (Medicare), and pay for all manner of stuff you may neither
need nor want. The government could perfectly well use its tax power to
pay for universal health insurance. Obamacare is a milder
dispensation in terms of personal liberty than tax-and-spend schemes
that are already in place or any number of tax-and-spend alternatives to
Obamacare that would immediately pass constitutional muster.
The irony is that sing the private sector to provide health care - he argues - is less coercive than programs currently in place.
He concludes by pointing out that the Constitution - whether we admit it or not - is constantly changing:
The world has changed, and what we expect of the government has
changed. The Constitution had to change as well, and that could be done
either by amending it explicitly or having the Court draw on all its
reserves of ingenuity and rewrite it judgement by judgement. In America,
the Constitution is a quasi-religious document. Its constancy is an
inviolable national myth. Changing it therefore falls to the Court and
must be done by stealth, with a certain suspension of disbelief on the
part of the citizenry. The big disadvantage of amendment by
jurisprudence is that it takes an unavoidably political task out of
politics and gives it to unelected judges. Obviously, that's also its
big advantage.
Whether we like the way the Constitution has been rewritten is beside
the point. The thing is, it has been. The Court has all but erased the
limits on the economic power of the federal government. So let's not
pretend that striking down the mandate would be a victory of principle
rather than just a huge embarrassment for the White House, or that
upholding it would mark a big new advance of government power.
Politically, it matters. Constitutionally, it's a tremendous fuss about
not very much.
This is, he argues, a political - not a constitutional - dispute
