Precedent is to Supreme Court Justices what peer pressure is to teens. Only after you grow up do you realize how stupid you have been.
The ridiculous expansion of the commerce clause is to SCOTUS what stealing Cap’t Morgan’s Spiced Rum out of your parent’s liquor cabinet is to teens. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but they didn’t think out the consequences.
Justice Scalia writes, for instance, that he has little use for a central precedent the Obama administration has cited to justify the health care law under the Constitution’s commerce clause, Wickard v. Filburn.
In that 1942 decision, Justice Scalia writes, the Supreme Court “expanded the Commerce Clause beyond all reason” by ruling that “a farmer’s cultivation of wheat for his own consumption affected interstate commerce and thus could be regulated under the Commerce Clause.”
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Justice Scalia’s treatment of the Wickard case had been far more respectful in his judicial writings. In the book’s preface, he explains (referring to himself in the third person) that he “knows that there are some, and fears that there may be many, opinions that he has joined or written over the past 30 years that contradict what is written here.” Some inconsistencies can be explained by respect for precedent, he writes, others “because wisdom has come late.”“Worse still,” he writes, he “does not swear that the opinions that he joins or writes in the future will comply with what is written here,” for the first two reasons “or because a judge must remain open to persuasion by counsel.”
Translation. Too many times I went along to get along and now I realize the folly of it all. The expansion of the commerce clause means the intrusion of the Feds into the most mundane aspects of your lives. From lemonade stands to farm-stands to bullets, the Feds can regulate it.
Much discussion has been given in the Obamacare debate as to whether the Feds could articulate any limiting principle to the intrusion of the Federal Gov’t and not one of the sophistic geniuses in the administration could conjure one. For very good reason, when interpreted that way, there isn’t one.
This is why if we lose Obamacare, we lose everything.
