Is Health Care Reform Unconstitutional?

„Can Republicans defeat Obama’s health care bill by persuading the courts that mandatory health insurance is unconstitutional? On December 13, 2010, Henry Hudson, a federal judge in Virginia, declared unconstitutional the central provision of the health care reform law. Judge Hudson reasoned that the law’s command that citizens purchase health care insurance extended beyond Congress’s authority to legislate. It has long been established that Congress may regulate citizens’ economic activities, such as entering into contracts, producing or purchasing goods and services, or shipping goods across state lines. But it is entirely unprecedented, Judge Hudson said, for Congress to regulate »inactivity«—a failure to buy insurance.(...)

The roots of the ideological divide, moreover, run deep. The principal constitutional issue at stake—the extent of Congress’s authority to pass laws governing Americans’ lives—has separated conservatives and liberals since the beginning of the Republic. »States’ rights« was the South’s rallying cry in its effort to retain slavery before the Civil War, and to defend racial segregation from federal intervention thereafter. From the turn of the century through the early years of the New Deal, conservatives successfully invoked »states' rights« to interpret Congress’s power over interstate commerce narrowly and thereby invalidate progressive federal laws designed to protect workers and consumers from big business. And the last two times that the Supreme Court struck down laws as reaching beyond Congress’s Commerce Clause power, in 1995 and 2000, the Court split 5–4, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist writing the majority decision, over dissents by Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”