Devildawg15's blog: "Is Obamacare Constitutional?"

A reporter recently asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D;CA)
where in the Constitution Congress is given the authority to force
Americans to buy health insurance, she responded, "Are you serious?
Are you serious?" Responding to a follow-up question to this
non-answer, Pelosi's press secretary said, "That is not a serious
question."

I think otherwise and so should all Americans who value the liberties which our Constitution protects. And once the mandate question is thoroughly examined through the lens of the
Constitution's original meaning, the answer is inescapable: it is not constitutional.

For those with a traditional understanding of the Constitution as a
charter of liberty (as opposed to the 'living version'), the list of
Congress' powers in Article I, Section 8, grants it no authority to
require any such thing. To defend their unprecedented expansion of federal power, Obamacare's proponents rely upon excessively broad interpretations of Congress' powers --
namely the powers to regulate interstate commerce and impose taxes.

Commerce and taxing power don't support mandate

In a recent legal memorandum, Heritage legal scholar Todd Gaziano,
joined by Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett and Nathaniel
Stewart, LLP, argues that the individual mandate is both
unconstitutional and unprecedented.

Neither the power to regulate commerce nor the power to impose taxes
grants Congress the power, they write, to "mandate that an individual
enter into a contract with a private party or purchase a good or
service and no decision or present doctrine of the Supreme
Court justifies such a claim of power."

Though many on the Left overlooked it, the nonpartisan Congressional
Research Service even recognized the constitutional obstacles to the
individual mandate:

Whether such [an individual mandate] requirement would be
constitutional under the Commerce Clause is perhaps the most
challenging question posed by such a proposal, as it is a novel issue
whether Congress may use this clause to require an individual to
purchase a good or a service.

The Supreme Court has long held that there are limits to Congress'
power under the Commerce Clause. An individual mandate would require
stretching these limits. Although this has been done in the past, "the
current Supreme Court is unlikely to stretch the commerce power
further than it already has," explain Gaziano, Barnett and Stewart.

Congress' power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and
Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and
general Welfare of the United States...." also does not validate an
individual mandate. The Constitution requires that a tax be
apportioned on the basis of the census population, and not vary based
upon factors such as the financial condition of the state's residents.
"[But] this [constitutional] requirement will be impossible to meet
based upon the variety of exceptions provided in the mandate," write
Gaziano, Barnett and Stewart.

Interpreting the Constitution to support an individual mandate would
open the door for future abuses:

If the individual mandate is Constitutional, then Congress could do
anything. They could: require us to buy a new Chevy Impala each year
to support the government-supported auto industry; require us to buy
war bonds to pay for the Iraq and Afghan wars; require us to grow
wheat (10 bushels each), or pay someone else to grow your share;
require us to buy whatever they want.

"Politics may tell us what we want to do, but the Constitution tells
us what we may do and we must keep those separate," Sen. Orrin Hatch
(R-UT) said yesterday at an event on the Constitution's role
in the health care debate. An individual mandate that forces all
Americans to purchase health coverage or incur a penalty would blur
this separation horribly. And that's a serious problem.