Roberts Rejects Obama’s Theory On Mandates

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From Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion, in which he rejects the Obama administration’s broad reading of the Constitution’s authority to regulate interstate commerce:

Congress addressed the insurance problem by ordering everyone to buy insurance. Under the Government’s theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables. …

People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures—joined with the similar failures of others—can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Under the Government’s logic, that authorizes Congress to use its commerce power to compel citizens to act as the Government would have them act.

That is not the country the Framers of our Constitution envisioned. 

Roberts saved the law by essentially declaring the individual mandate a tax, but his reading of the Commerce Clause has significant implications for what Congress can and cannot regulate in the future.

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