Heavy Burden by Jeffrey Toobin {ACA & the supremes}
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/04/09/120409taco_talk_toobin
Its well known by now that Donald Verrilli, Jr., the Solicitor General, had an off day at the Supreme Court last Tuesday, when he was called on to defend the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the part of the Affordable Care Act which requires people to buy health insurance. Still, its worth noting the magnitude of the challenge that he was facing. The key issue in the case is whether Congress, in passing the law, exceeded its powers under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which allows the government to regulate interstate commerce. Consider, then, this question, posed to Verrilli by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy: Assume for the moment that thisthe mandateis unprecedented, this is a step beyond what our cases have allowed, the affirmative duty to act to go into commerce. If that is so, do you not have a heavy burden of justification? Every premise of that question was a misperception. The involvement of the federal government in the health-care market is not unprecedented; it dates back nearly fifty years, to the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. The forty million uninsured Americans whose chances for coverage are riding on the outcome of the case are already entered into commerce, because others are likely to pay their health-care costs.
Kennedys last point, about the heavy burden on the government to defend the law, was correctin 1935. That was when the Supreme Court, in deciding Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United Statesa case involving the regulation of the sale of sick chickensstruck down the National Industrial Recovery Act, a principal domestic priority of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the ground that it violated the Commerce Clause. Two years later, however, the Court executed its famous switch in time that saved the Nine and began upholding the reforms of the New Deal. The Justices came to recognize that national economic problems require national solutions, and they deferred to Congress, usually unanimously, to provide those solutions, under the Commerce Clause.
Read more
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/04/09/120409taco_talk_toobin#ixzz1qtB0dDRK