ObamaCare and the Constitution

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704896104575140063408610580.html

The constitutional challenges to ObamaCare have come quickly, and the media are portraying them mostly as hopeless gestures—the political equivalent of Civil War re-enactors. Discussion over: You lost, deal with it.

The press corps never dismissed the legal challenges to the war on terror so easily, but then liberals have long treated property rights and any limits on federal power to regulate commerce as 18th-century anachronisms. In fact, the legal challenges to ObamaCare are serious and carry enormous implications for the future of American liberty.

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Associated Press

A pocket sized copy of the U.S. Constitution

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The most important legal challenge turns on the "individual mandate"—the new requirement that almost every U.S. citizen must buy government-approved health insurance. Failure to comply will be punished by an annual tax penalty that by 2016 will rise to $750 or 2% of income, whichever is higher. President Obama opposed this kind of coercion as a candidate but has become a convert. He even argued in a September interview that "I absolutely reject that notion" that this tax is a tax, because it is supposedly for your own good.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum and 13 other state AGs—including Louisiana Democrat Buddy Caldwell—claim this is an unprecedented exercise of state power. Never before has Congress required people to buy a private product to qualify as a law-abiding citizen.

As the Congressional Budget Office noted in 1994, "Federal mandates typically apply to people as parties to economic transactions, rather than as members of society." The only law in the same league is conscription, though in that case the Constitution gives Congress the explicit power to raise a standing army.

Democrats claim the mandate is justified under the Commerce Clause, because health care and health insurance are a form of interstate commerce. They also claim the mandate is constitutional because it is structured as a tax, which is legal under the 16th Amendment. And it is true that the Supreme Court has ruled as recently as 2005, in the homegrown marijuana case Gonzales v. Raich, that Congress can regulate essentially economic activities that "taken in the aggregate, substantially affect interstate commerce."

But even in Raich the High Court did not say that the Commerce Clause can justify any federal regulation, and in other modern cases the Court has rebuked Congress for overreaching. In U.S. v. Lopez(1995), the High Court ruled that carrying a gun near a school zone was not economically significant enough to qualify as interstate commerce, while in Morrison (2000) it overturned a law about violence against women on the same grounds.

All human activity arguably has some economic footprint. So if Congress can force Americans to buy a product, the question is what remains of the government of limited and enumerated powers, as provided in Article I. The only remaining restraint on federal power would be the Bill of Rights, though the Founders considered those 10 amendments to be an affirmation of the rights inherent in the rest of the Constitution, not the only restraint on government. If the insurance mandate stands, then why can't Congress insist that Americans buy GM cars, or that obese Americans eat their vegetables or pay a fat tax penalty?

The mandate did not pose the same constitutional problems when Mitt Romney succeeded in passing one in Massachusetts, because state governments have police powers and often wider plenary authority under their constitutions than does the federal government. Florida's constitution also has a privacy clause that underscores the strong state interest in opposing Congress's health-care intrusion.

As for the assertion that the mandate is really a tax, this is an attempt at legal finesse. The mandate is the legal requirement to buy a certain product, while the tax is the means of enforcement. This is not a true income or even excise tax. Congress cannot, merely by invoking a tax, blow up the Framers' attempt to restrain government under Article I.

The states also have a strong case with their claim that ObamaCare upsets the Constitution's federalist framework by converting the states into arms of the federal government. The bill requires states to spend billions of dollars to rearrange their health-care markets and vastly expands who can enroll in Medicaid, whether or not states can afford it.

Florida already spends a little over a quarter of its budget on Medicaid, and under ObamaCare that will expand by at least 50% as some 1.3 million new people enroll. Those benefits, and the burden of setting up the new exchanges, will cost Florida $149 million in 2014 and $1.05 billion annually by 2018. The state will either have to cut other priorities or raise taxes. In legal essence, ObamaCare infringes on state sovereignty and unconstitutionally conscripts state officials.

Less potent, at least to our reading, is the challenge on behalf of state laws that bar or exempt their citizens from the mandate. Virginia passed such a law earlier this year, and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is suing on those grounds. But while such efforts serve as healthy political protest, federal laws that are constitutional are supreme under the 10th Amendment, and states can't "nullify" a Congressional action.

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Judicial and media liberals are trying to dismiss these challenges as a revanchist attempt to repeal the New Deal, or, worse, as a way to restore the states's rights of Jim Crow. Modern liberals genuinely believe the federal government can order the states and individuals to do anything as long as it is in pursuit of their larger social agenda. They also want to deter more state Attorneys General from joining these lawsuits.

The AGs should not be deterred, because the truth is that ObamaCare breaks new constitutional ground. Neither the House nor Senate Judiciary Committees held hearings on the law's constitutionality, and we are not aware of any Justice Department opinion on the matter. Judges have an obligation not to be so cavalier in dismissing claims on behalf of political liberty. Under the Constitution, American courts don't give advisory opinions. They rule on specific cases, and the states have a good one to make.

Democrats may have been able to trample the rules of the Senate to pass their unpopular bill on a narrow partisan vote, but they shouldn't be able to trample the Constitution as well.