Thursday, March 22, 2012

Lederman on the minimum-coverage law

Marty Lederman posts what is probably the best explanation, outside the briefs themselves, of why the minimum-coverage (or "individual mandate") provision of the PPACA should be upheld.

Anyone sincerely interested in the issue should take a look at his long post. UPDATE: I missed this March 17 post by Andrew Koppelman, which I also recommend. He's read Paul Clement's brief on the merits for the challengers: "It is astoundingly thin and weak," and he explains why.

... Linda Greenhouse, having read the main briefs in the case, has a GMAFB moment.
... Journalistic accounts of court cases, at least in advance of a definitive ruling, understandably tend to take the safe course and treat the arguments on both sides with equal dignity. So it’s perhaps not surprising that just about half the public apparently believes that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is unconstitutional.

Free of convention, and fresh from reading the main briefs in the case to be argued before the Supreme Court next week, I’m here to tell you: that belief is simply wrong. The constitutional challenge to the law’s requirement for people to buy health insurance — specifically, the argument that the mandate exceeds Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause — is rhetorically powerful but analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection. There’s just no there there.

No comments:

Post a Comment