Randy Magazine: Damon Root- Randy Barnett: 'Losing Obamacare While Preserving the Constitution'

Source:Reason Magazine- Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barmett.

"We won in our effort to preserve the Constitution and, in fact, we moved the ball in a more positive direction," says Georgetown Law's Randy Barnett, one of the legal architects behind the constitutional challenge to Obamacare.

Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion in the 5-to-4 decision upheld Obamacare's individual mandate as an exercise of Congress' tax powers, while simultaneously rejecting the Obama administration's sweeping assertion of federal power under the Commerce Clause. Barnett argues that the chief justice "substituted a less dangerous tax power for a far more dangerous Commerce Clause power." Had the Supreme Court accepted the government's theory of the Commerce Clause, Barnett explains, Congress would have had the power "to do anything it wants with respect to the economy."

A professor of legal theory at Georgetown University Law Center and the author of nine books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (2004), Barnett represented the National Federation of Independent Business in its challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Reason Senior Editor Damon Root recently sat down with Barnett to discuss the Obamacare decision, the "echo chamber" of liberal academia, and why the Constitution is fully consistent with libertarian principles." 

From Reason Magazine

The Affordable Care Act was ruled constitutional based on the taxing power of the Federal Government, not through the Commerce Clause. Which means Congress can tax people based on when they believe Americans are doing something thats unhealthy or bad for the country as a whole. 

For example, people who can afford to pay for their Healthcare but have chosen not to and get their healthcare at the expense of people who pay for their healthcare. Which is a victory for Liberals (meaning real Liberals) who don't want to deny people the ability to do things that are unhealthy to themselves. They just don't want people to be able to pass the costs of others unhealthy activity onto people who make better decisions. 

The ObamaCare decision is a lost for Libertarians because now the Federal Government can penalize people for things that they've decided to do on their own. But it's a victory for Libertarians, Conservatives and why would argue for Liberals, as well as a Liberal myself as it relates to the Commerce Clause because the Supreme Court decision limits the Federal Government in what it can do under the Commerce Clause.

My opinion of the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is similar to Chief Justice Roberts, that it's very hard if not impossible to make the case that its constitutional based on the Commerce Clause, that the Federal Government can force people to purchase something in the private market. But that it can penalize people when they do things that are not only bad for them but bad for the rest of the people who have to pay the price of these bad decisions. 

The Affordable Care Act doesn't say that Americans can't make bad, unhealthy decisions for themselves. But what it says with the individual health insurance mandate, is that American's can't pass the costs of their unhealthy decisions onto others. Which is actually a conservative value when you think about it, at least in the classical sense.