That’s the question posed today over at Scotusblog. It’s the premiere of the Scotusblog Community, which aims to encourage discussions by Scotusblog readers. To start the ball rolling, Scotusblog solicited short comments (up to 2 paragraphs) from Erwin Chemerinsky, Dawn Johnsen, Ilya Shapiro, Stephen Presser, Adam Winkler, and me, among others.
My answer to what the Supreme Court should do is:
The Court should re-affirm Gibbons v. Ogden, which followed the original understanding of the interstate commerce clause: “commerce” means mercantile exchange, plus some closely-related subjects, such as navigation. Among the subjects which are not interstate commerce, according to Gibbons, are “health laws of every description.” The Court should then over-rule South-Eastern Underwriters (1944), which broke from long-established precedent, and declared that even purely intrastate insurance was interstate commerce. Because South-Eastern claimed to be following original meaning, the modern Court should simply point out that none of the original sources cited by the South-Eastern opinion remotely support the contention that all forms of insurance are “commerce.”
Finally, Congress should explain that the Necessary and Proper clause underscores the unconstitutionality of the mandate. As McCulloch v. Maryland demonstrated, the original meaning of the clause affirms the Congress may exercise powers which are incidental to an enumerated power. The power to compel a private person to engage in commerce with a private company is not an incident of, or lesser than, the power to regulate voluntary interstate commerce. Further, government-created monopolies were, in the Founding Era, a paradigmatic example of improper government action. Therefore, it is not constitutionally “proper” to force citizens to spend their money on a government-favored Big Insurance oligopoly.
The rationale for the above can be found in my articles Bad News for Professor Koppelman: The Incidental Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate, 121 Yale Law Journal Online (forthcoming 2011)(with Gary Lawson); “Health Laws of Every Description”: John Marshall’s Ruling on a Federal Health Care Law, 12 Engage 49 (June 2011) (with Robert G. Natelson); Commerce in the Commerce Clause: A Response to Jack Balkin, 109 Michigan Law Review First Impressions 55 (2010) (with Natelson); and Health insurance is not ‘commerce’: A single erroneous Supreme Court precedent from 1944, South-Eastern Underwriters, should be overturned, National Law Journal, March 28, 2011 (with Natelson) (available on Lexix/Nexis).
Since Scotusblog is trying to get people to comment on its own website, I’m not opening comments on this post, and I encourage you to share you thoughts over at Scotusblug.
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