Unprecedented officially comes out today. The Daily Caller ran a full-length interview with me about the book, titled “New book takes you behind the scenes of the constitutional challenge to Obamacare“. You may enjoy the story of where the title Unprecedented came from (some of you may know part of it).
Like most things in Washington, the title “Unprecedented” came from alcohol. Or, at least a drinking game. The leading intellectual leader of the challenge was Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett (author of the Foreword of my book). The New York Times dubbed Barnett the “intellectual godfather” of this constitutional movement. Randy’s main argument as to why Obamacare violated the Constitution was that it was unprecedented. Congress had never before passed a law that forced people to purchase a commercial product. In his dozens of talks, articles, and interviews about the law, Barnett would say over, and over, and over again that the law was unprecedented. At one event, I joked on my blog that we should create a Randy Barnett drinking game – take a shot every time he says unprecedented. Barnett laughed, but he had a realization. The phrase unprecedented was very powerful, and persuasive. Barnett wrote that my “‘joshing’ spurred [him] to make ‘unprecedented’ the one-word centerpiece of [the] strategy in the courts and in the court of public opinion.” When picking titles, this was the single word that summed up the entire case. Unprecedented.
I’ll have another post shortly about how Randy joined the case, following a fortuitous meeting at the Mayflower in November 2009.
Cross-Posted at JoshBlackman.com.