Constitutional Law Professor Obama Unconcerned by Constitutional Niceties…?
The New York Times has an article this morning providing additional context on the way the Obama campaign, and later the Obama Administration, handled an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Among the interesting tidbits was the following sentence: “While the White House may have been prepared for the public unhappiness over the provision, it appears to have been caught off guard by the constitutional challenge – in part because Obama advisers regarded the mandate as a conservative notion.”
That government requiring all individuals to purchase a (government-defined) product should not have come as a shock to anyone within the Obama Administration, or for that matter the Obama presidential campaign:
A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.
The above quote was written by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office – back in 1994. When Barack Obama was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. (Guess this topic never came up in any of his lectures…)
That Barack Obama – and for that matter, Nancy Pelosi and others – would so blithely impose new federal requirements on individuals to purchase goods as a condition of their existence, without concern for the constitutional implications of their actions, reinforces the way in which the 2700-page health care law was cobbled together and rammed through Congress. Even more ominously, it also speaks to the way in which similar mandates are likely to proliferate if this one is upheld – for if Democrats are so unconcerned about the constitutional implications of their actions now, does anyone believe they will stop at only one federally imposed requirement on all Americans?