Court Pimp-Slaps Obamacare: "A Stunning Victory for the Constitution"

This afternoon the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a stunning rebuke to Obamacare. Two Democrat appointees and one Republican delivered what I like to call "The Pimp-Slap Heard 'Round the World"; the Court handed the victory to 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, which had challenged the constitutionality of the massive bill. The decision reads, in part:

...the individual mandate contained in the Act exceeds Congress’s enumerated commerce power... The power that Congress has wielded via the Commerce Clause for the life of this country remains undiminished. Congress may regulate commercial actors. It may forbid certain commercial activity. It may enact hundreds of new laws and federally-funded programs, as it has elected to do in this massive 975- page Act. But what Congress cannot do under the Commerce Clause is mandate that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die.



It cannot be denied that the individual mandate is an unprecedented exercise of congressional power. As the CBO observed, Congress “has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.” CBO MANDATE MEMO, supra p.115, at 1. Never before has Congress sought to regulate commerce by compelling non-market participants to enter into commerce so that Congress may regulate them. The statutory language of the mandate is not tied to health care consumption—past, present, or in the future. Rather, the mandate is to buy insurance now and forever...

The decision makes it all but certain that the Supreme Court will hear the case.

The decision ... puts to rest the canard that justice regarding Obamacare is just a partisan enterprise, in which Republican-appointed judges rule one way, and Democratic-appointed judges rule another. Today’s decision was co-authored by Judge Frank Hull, a Clinton appointee both to the district court and to his current position on the court of appeals.



...it is [also] much more likely with today’s ruling that the High Court will hear the case in its next term which starts on October 3, with a decision likely to be handed down by the end of June 2012... [In spite of the Obama administration's stall tactics,] with a split between the Eleventh Circuit and Sixth Circuit, the High Court will have little choice but to take the case and resolve the fate of the forced-purchase mandate.

The decision is a delight for those who love and appreciate the Constitution:

[T]he individual mandate is breathtaking in its expansive scope. It regulates those who have not entered the health care market at all. It regulates those who have entered the health care market, but have not entered the insurance market (and have no intention of doing so). It is overinclusive in when it regulates: it conflates those who presently consume health care with those who will not consume health care for many years into the future. The government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual’s existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life. This theory affords no limiting principles in which to confine Congress’s enumerated power.



The federal government’s assertion of power, under the Commerce Clause, to issue an economic mandate for Americans to purchase insurance from a private company for the entire duration of their lives is unprecedented, lacks cognizable limits, and imperils our federalist structure.

As Ilya Shapiro writes, "Today is a great day for liberty."



Chris Christie, who refused to join the fight on behalf of New Jersey, could not be reached for comment.