From Pirate’s Cove;
Elizabeth Wydra engages in a bit of fantasy over at The Politico, hoping against hope that the voices on the right will be shut down
Of all the possible outcomes being tossed around as the Affordable Care Act litigation heads for Supreme Court consideration, one is usually overlooked: If the court upholds the act’s constitutionality and its “individual mandate,” it could sound the death knell for the tea party.
Well, if pooping on cop cars, rampant drug use, violence, murder, sexual assault, and rape hasn’t shut down the Occupiers, a loss at SCOTUS wouldn’t eliminate the Tea Party. For one thing, the TP is not a single subject movement, unless you consider the over-arching idea of a limited federal government as the starting point.
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But what if this message were delivered by the conservative Roberts Court in a high-profile defeat for the tea party in the health care litigation?
There is a distinct possibility that the high court could uphold the health care law’s constitutionality, not just with a 5-4 ruling — in which swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy sides with the court’s more liberal members — but with the support of conservative heroes, like Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John Roberts.
Got that? A distinct possibility. Why?
After all, Scalia concurred in the 2005 decision, Gonzales v. Raich, in which the court upheld a federal ban on possession of marijuana grown in accordance with local law for personal, medicinal use — because the ban was part of a broader regulation of interstate commerce.
Except, marijuana, rightly or wrongly, is a Schedule I drug, banned and illegal, under federal law. Unlike the individual mandate, no one is being forced to purchase cannabis simply because they are a citizen of the United States under the Commerce clause, because they might possibly cross state lines at some point. Heck, the federal ban on drugs itself may be overbearing, if the drugs never cross a state line or US border.
The health care law might also pick up conservative support in the Supreme Court beyond the Commerce Clause argument. Another constitutional basis for the law’s individual mandate is that it is a “necessary and proper” means of carrying out Congress’s constitutional power to regulate commerce.
I’ve been to a couple of Tea Party events and it was never just about the health care mandate. It was about too much government and the profligate spending by government. It was about the so called Patriot Act and the usurpation of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment by government agencies.
The Tea Parties are about a lot of things and the health care mandate is just a small part of our grievances.
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