A Master Class on the Constitutionality of ObamaCare

[Valin]

Commentary/Contentions:

Rick Richman
04.01.2011

If you want to understand the constitutional arguments of both sides on ObamaCare, watch this debate at Harvard Law School last week among Randy Barnett, Charles Fried, and Lawrence Tribe, three of the finest constitutional lawyers in the country.

It seems safe to say that those who pushed ObamaCare through the Congress last year never thought it would be subject to a constitutional challenge as compelling as Barnett’s. His case against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a tour de force that begins with a couple of “thought experiments” – one designed to demonstrate that an economic mandate is fundamentally different from economic regulation or even economic prohibition; another, to establish that the ObamaCare mandate is unprecedented.

In reply, Fried argues that, under the Commerce Clause, Congress can require citizens to do whatever it wants them to do, if what it wants them to do substantially affects interstate commerce – a position that renders the Commerce Clause a plenary power over the economy limited only by the Bill of Rights. Tribe then holds that no personal liberties under the Constitution are violated by requiring citizens to buy health insurance. The video ends with Barnett’s five-minute rebuttal.

(Snip)