Justice Roberts Got It Half Right

Tuesday was a rough day for the Obama administration in oral arguments in the Supreme Court over mandated insurance. The Illinois Policy Institute comments on What Obama's Lawyers Couldn't Answer. If the government can force you to buy health insurance, what can't they force you to do or buy?

One of the big right wing talking points of late has been that the individual mandate is not constitutional, because the constitution does not specifically say "the federal government may impose an individual mandate for the purposes of insuring all eligible Americans." Happily, whether things are or are not constitutional is the sort of thing Senate staff check out before putting them in bills, and in a floor statement today, Baucus laid out his staff's findings on the subject. His arguments follow the jump.

Readers of this blog might know that the Obamacare saga was one of the main topics that I covered here when I first started blogging back in 2009.

Chuck Grassley: occasional defender of the Constitution, and of the individual mandate.

It’s always a bit hard to know exactly what conservatives are trying to claim when they say that the “individual mandate” element of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. Do they mean they think it’s unconstitutional in light of the actually existing state of American law? Or do they mean it’s unconstitutional in the sense that “were we to interpret the constitution in a totally different way, one of the many upshots of that would be to deem the individual mandate unconstitutional.”

This is going to be one of those posts where I try to convince you that a dull, technical decision by the Congressional Budget Office is really a very big deal. Here goes: The CBO has decided against counting premiums paid under an individual mandate as a tax.

|Peter Boettke|

Noah Millman -- blogger for The American Conservative