Why Did You Force Me To Eat BROCCOLI?
So after days and days of reading articles spanning from Slate to the National Review (I have a very bipartisan twitter feed thankyouverymuch), and pretending like I can zap into my law school friends' heads and understand things like this, this, and this, I have finally begun to understand the unraveling of the ACA, the SCOTUS, and all that other hubub thanks to Jonathan Chait's consistent ability to explain without any legalese nonsense (even Ezra has been confusing me... see the latter "this"):
Having accepted a shaky series of premises, this has led the Court to settle on what it regards as the central issue of the case: If Congress can force you to purchase health insurance, why can’t it make you buy broccoli, or anything at all?
...There are many possible ways to solve this objection, if a Justice were so inclined to look for them. Health insurance is inherently different from almost any other product, with inherent problems of cost-shifting and adverse selection. (The economics of this seem to be utterly eluding the conservative justices.) As former Reagan solicitor general Charles Fried argues, the absence of the mandate would have a major impact on already-existing interstate commerce, which cannot be said of broccoli consumption. Or, as Matt Steinglass offers, mandating the purchase of broccoli might be marginally helpful to the goal of containing health care costs — eating broccoli makes you slightly healthier — but it’s certainly not necessary, as an insurance mandate is.
But to even accept this as the central question at hand is to accept a very strange way of looking at the law. Certainly, the Court needs to be mindful of setting a dangerous precedent. But the Court does not habitually strike down any use of government power that could conceivably, when stretched to its maximal limit, have nasty results. As Akil Amar notes, if Congress can tax income it could tax income at 100% percent. If you can conscript 18-year-olds into the army, you can conscript them for 25-year terms like the Czars did. You could put them into the Army Corps of Engineers and turn them into a vast pool of government slave labor. But such hypothetical possibilities don’t normally dominate jurisprudence the way they have at the Court this week.
...The Obama era has unleashed deep-rooted conservative fears of economic democracy. If you pay close attention to the commentary of the conservative justices this week, their incredulity at the health-care law itself is everywhere. They are concerned with the possibility that mob rule could produce tyrannically intrusive regulations with no rational basis because this is what they think is happening already.
I blame all the parents out there who forced their kids to eat broccoli. It's not broccoli's fault that it now conjures up such terrible images and memories in the minds of all these people who have grown up with an inexplicable hatred to the green veg that's just trying to look like a tree and provide you with a little bit of fiber, vitamin C, calcium, and iron (thanks Lance).
Poor broccoli. But Happy Friday.
