Jason Mazzone: Can Congress Force You to Be Healthy?
[Jason Mazzone is a professor at Brooklyn
Law School.]
HENRY E. HUDSON, the federal judge in Virginia who ruled this week that the individual mandate provision of the new health care law is unconstitutional, has become the object of widespread derision. Judge Hudson explained that whatever else Congress might be able to do, it cannot force people to engage in a commercial activity, in this case buying an insurance policy.
For the last century the Supreme Court has struggled to define the limits of Congress’s interstate-commerce power. In the early decades of the 20th century, the court experimented with a variety of distinctions: Congress could regulate trade but not the manufacturing process (in a child-labor case); Congress could regulate anything that directly affected interstate commerce but not where the effect was indirect (in a labor dispute involving coal miners); Congress could regulate goods in the stream of commerce but not before they entered or after they left that stream (in a ruling on chicken farming).
These distinctions, however, proved unworkable in a time of industrial growth and expanding national markets. And in the 1930s, confronted with the surge of governmental power during the New Deal, the court abandoned them all....
Read entire article at NYT
Law School.]
HENRY E. HUDSON, the federal judge in Virginia who ruled this week that the individual mandate provision of the new health care law is unconstitutional, has become the object of widespread derision. Judge Hudson explained that whatever else Congress might be able to do, it cannot force people to engage in a commercial activity, in this case buying an insurance policy.
For the last century the Supreme Court has struggled to define the limits of Congress’s interstate-commerce power. In the early decades of the 20th century, the court experimented with a variety of distinctions: Congress could regulate trade but not the manufacturing process (in a child-labor case); Congress could regulate anything that directly affected interstate commerce but not where the effect was indirect (in a labor dispute involving coal miners); Congress could regulate goods in the stream of commerce but not before they entered or after they left that stream (in a ruling on chicken farming).
These distinctions, however, proved unworkable in a time of industrial growth and expanding national markets. And in the 1930s, confronted with the surge of governmental power during the New Deal, the court abandoned them all....