Free Republic

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...

MISSOULA, Mont.—With a homemade .22-caliber rifle he calls the Montana Buckaroo, Gary Marbut dreams of taking down the federal regulatory state. He's not planning to fire his gun. Instead, he wants to sell it, free from federal laws requiring him to record transactions, pay license fees and open his business to government inspectors. For years, Mr. Marbut argued that a wide range of federal laws, not just gun regulations, should be invalid because they were based on an erroneous interpretation of Congress's constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. In his corner were a handful of conservative lawyers and academics. Now,...

The signature crimes of the most violent drug cartel in Mexico are its beheading and dismemberment of rival gang members, military personnel, law enforcement officers and public officials, and the random kidnappings and killings of civilians who get caught in its butchery and bloodletting. But this disparate band of criminals known as Los Zetas is no longer just a concern in Mexico. It has expanded its deadly operations across the southwestern border, establishing footholds and alliances in states from New York to California. Just last year, federal agents tied a cocaine operation in Baltimore to the Zetas. “Those of us...

'I can take care of my enemies all right," Warren Harding once said. "But my friends, my damn friends, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!" In the sense that so irked Harding, Judge Gladys Kessler is a great good friend of ObamaCare. The US district-court judge in Washington, DC, delivered a more telling blow against the law in the course of ruling it constitutional than critics have in assailing it as a travesty. At issue is the individual mandate. Two other district-court judges have struck it down on grounds that Congress doesn't have the power under...

A federal judge has upheld the national health care law, making it the fifth ruling on the merits of the legal challenges to the individual mandate. The ruling by the Clinton appointee, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler of the District of Columbia continues the pattern of Democratic-appointed judges siding with the Obama administration and Republican judges siding with the plaintiffs in ruling the mandate unconstitutional. Kessler's ruling comes in a case brought by individual plaintiffs, where as the two decisions striking down the mandate have come in cases brought by 27 states, based in Virginia and Florida. Like the...

As I promised in a previous post, I'm going to work my way through the Supreme Court justices and try and determine how likely each is to vote that Congress exceeded its authority under the Commerce Clause when it enacted the individual mandate. I'll start with Justice Thomas. This is the good news! I'll be researching these posts as I do them, but my initial somewhat educated impression is that Justice Thomas is probably the only Justice who is close to being a very high probability "unconstitutional vote" in a case decided on the merits. To start at the beginning,...

As the challenge to Obamacare’s constitutionality approaches the Supreme Court, the question on everyone’s mind is: How will Anthony Kennedy vote? But perhaps we should also ask: How will Antonin Scalia vote? Scalia is known as one of the Court’s most conservative justices, but a concurrence he wrote in a 2005 case should give opponents of the health-care law pause.

The thread title pretty much sums up the argument being put forward by Democrats. They believe that since commerce can be taxed, and the Constitution gives Congress the power to tax, that they can implement forced commerce and make people purchase health care coverage per the individual mandate. This argument is similar to "Murder is wrong, therefore capital punishment is wrong." Just as this is a false conclusion (capital punishment hasn't been proven to be murder) and begs the question, so too does the argument being put forward by center-left Democrats. Just because Congress can tax commerce does not mean...

On December 13, 2010, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson ruled in Virginia v. Sebelius that the individual mandate included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), popularly known as Obamacare, is unconstitutional.

Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue indicated on Wednesday that the business group was looking past Congress and focusing more on federal regulators now that the election’s over. Donohue, during an address to members this morning, cited the threat of a “regulatory tsunami” as “the biggest single threat to job creation.” He claimed that the EPA is advancing 29 proposed major rules and the Labor Department was pushing “at least 100 regulations and policy changes.” The new financial regulatory overhaul has 320 required rule makings, and ObamaCare creates 183 “agencies, commissions and panels.”

Full headline:In CA on Election Eve, Women Solidify Opposition to Prop 19; Even the Greater San Francisco Bay Area No Longer Supports Legal Marijuana SurveyUSA Breaking News - 8 hours ago [about 5pm edt] On Election Eve, California remains divided on Proposition 19, with women opposing the measure now more than at any point during the campaign and support in the greater San Francisco Bay Area no greater than opposition, according to SurveyUSA's 8th and final pre-election tracking poll , conducted for KABC-TV in Los Angeles, KPIX-TV in San Francisco, KGTV-TV in San Diego, and KFSN-TV in Fresno. "No" has 46%,...

In the latest news from my home state, aka La-La Land of the Loony Left, last week's polls showed that the initially high support for Prop 19, which would legalize recreational marijuana, have dropped below 50% .

A report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) casts doubt on the two main arguments used by the Obama administration to defend the individual insurance mandate that is the central component of the controversial health “reform” law. Published on October 15, the CRS report examines the arguments both for and against the constitutionality of the individual mandate, which requires every American to purchase government-approved health insurance or else pay a fine. The mandate, to be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service, has been challenged as an unconstitutional overreach of federal authority in a lawsuit filed by Virginia Attorney General Ken...

LOS ANGELES — The Department of Justice says it intends to prosecute marijuana laws in California aggressively even if state voters approve an initiative on the Nov. 2 ballot to legalize the drug.

Alice in Wonderland notwithstanding, Congress must say what it means and mean what it says. In an order released on October 14 . . . Judge Vinson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Pensacola Division, permitted an action by twenty states challenging the mandatory health insurance provisions of ObamaCare to go forward. . . . He noted, "Reviewing courts cannot cannot look beyond a statute and inquire whether meant something different than what it said. "I have no choice but to find that the penalty is not a tax." Judge Vinson continued, noting that by...