I promised some links:
Reagan’s solicitor general: ‘He...regulation of it? Yes. End of story.’ Neal Katyal on defending Obamacare I think the challengers have framed this as an issue of individual liberty, and one of the government forcing individuals to buy private products, and I do think that’s very innovative. In 230 years, the Supreme Court has never accepted such an argument. So what they’re doing is asking for a new rule.
The Supreme Court spent 91 minutes Wednesday operating on the assumption that it would strike down the key feature of the new health care law, but may have convinced itself in the end not to do that because of just how hard it would be to decide what to do after that. A common reaction, across the bench, was that the Justices themselves did not want the onerous task of going through the remainder of the entire 2,700 pages of the law and deciding what to keep and what to throw out, and most seemed to think that should be left to Congress. They could not come together, however, on just what task they would send across the street for the lawmakers to perform. The net effect may well have shored up support for the individual insurance mandate itself.
The provisions of the Affordable Care Act, mandating that individuals maintain insurance health insurance coverage in exchange for affordable access to coverage with no restrictions based on health conditions, recognize the interdependent nature of economic and social relationships. Under this view, untreated infectious disease or late-diagnosed cancer is perceived as a danger to the health of us all and as raising health insurance premiums for everyone.
And, I think a pretty thoughtful piece, although not from a conservative source:
Precedents Support This Law While the Roberts court has not hesitated to reach broadly when it could have gone narrow — see Citizens United — the justices are undoubtedly aware that the eyes of the American public are upon them. Conservative justices like John Roberts and Antonin Scalia and the swing voter Anthony Kennedy will find it difficult to avoid the force of opinions supporting federal power that they either wrote or joined — even if they might be politically, privately opposed to the health care reform law.
The groundwork has been laid for conservative jurists to uphold the mandate. Two conservative court of appeals judges — the George W. Bush appointee Jeffrey Sutton from the Sixth Circuit and the Ronald Reagan appointee Laurence Silberman from the D.C. Circuit — provided compelling, conservative arguments for the mandate’s constitutionality.
