As the number of states suing the government over Obamacare climbed to 33, the Obama administration filed its first legal defense of the individual mandate in response to a suit brought by the Thomas More Law Center (whose Plaintiff’s Motion can be found here). The TMLC makes the following argument:
There is no enumerated power in the Constitution that permits the federal government to mandate that Plaintiffs and other American ‘residents’ purchase health care coverage or face a penalty.
The mandate is, in other words, unconstitutional. Not that this minor technicality matters much to the lawyers of the Obama Justice Department. They responded with a 46-page filing that invokes the Constitution’s commerce clause in the following Orwellian fashion:
Individual decisions to forgo insurance coverage, in the aggregate, substantially affect interstate commerce by shifting costs to health care providers and the public.
Yep. You read that right. You are engaging in interstate commerce by doing absolutely nothing. I’m no lawyer, but it’s not hard to see why so many state AGs have joined lawsuits to overturn a statute that depends on such a bizarre interpretation of the term “commerce.” As the TMLC attorney put it:
Under the government’s theory, they could force anyone to purchase vitamins, join a health club, or buy a General Motors vehicle, for that matter.
This should be interesting.
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