The Supreme Court's Review of Obamacare: A Chance to Re-visit the Commerce Clause

Statement

By Senator Lee

I join the majority of Americans in opposing Obamacare and welcome the Supreme Court's decision to review the constitutionality of that legislation. Not only is Obamacare bad policy, it is clearly unconstitutional. The Constitution grants the federal government only limited, enumerated powers, and none of those powers permits the government to tell individual citizens when and how to buy health insurance. Never before has the federal government claimed the power to force citizens to buy private products, and it must not be allowed to do so now.

In addressing the constitutionality of Obamacare, I hope that the Supreme Court will look closely at the text and original meaning of the Commerce Clause. That Clause authorizes Congress "[t]o regulate Commerce . . . among the several states." It does not authorize regulation of every aspect of human existence. Obamacare's dramatic scope makes that law unconstitutional under even the Court's most lenient precedent, but this aggressive legislative encroachment into the lives of ordinary Americans should also convince the Court that it is time to reexamine the decades of bad precedent engendered by its New Deal era decisions in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel and Wickard v. Filburn.

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