Interesting comment. The oral arguments before the Supremes start a week from Monday, the 26th.
This aggregation review of previous decisions essentially says the Supremes will likely hold with the two other conservative lower court judges opinions in support of the mandate. Points out a libertarian (conservative) court view of individual responsibility supports the individual mandate, and to overturn it would go against previous court rulings on the commerce clause.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1354804.html
Quote:
Neal Katyal, the former acting U.S. solicitor general, said iIn an interview with HuffPost that the government responds to this argument by saying that "everyone consumes health care in this country."
"Right now 50 million people don't have insurance, so it means that you and I essentially are paying for them," said Katyal, who defended the law in front of three appeals courts. "Congress said, 'Let's fix that system and make it so that everyone has a certain amount of insurance.'"
Next week's health care cases come from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which did not buy the government's argument. But high-profile conservative judges on two other appeals courts. Sixth Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a former Scalia law clerk, was the first among all federal judges to cross party lines to uphold the mandate. D.C. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan-appointed greybeard of the conservative legal movement, did the same.
The challengers' "view that an individual cannot be subject to Commerce Clause regulation absent voluntary, affirmative acts that enter him or her into, or affect, the interstate market expresses a concern for individual liberty that seems more redolent of" the cramped pre-1937 view of economic regulation, wrote Silberman. That reading "has no foundation in the Commerce Clause," he concluded.
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