A U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Congress shall have the power “To regulate Commerce … among the several States”) means the federal government can coerce you under threat of punishment into purchasing services from private companies.
Among other Orwellian arguments, the court confuses “Commodities” with “Services”, absurdly saying they are the same thing, and repeatedly using the words interchangeably.
So long as the Congress has a “rational basis” to belief an act would affect interstate commerce, it is not unconstitutional, the court argued. If the Congress didn’t compel Americans to purchase health insurance from private companies in the case of Obamacare, the court argued, it would undermine its efforts to regulate the interstate markets in health care and health insurance. The court argued that Congress’s Power under the Constitution to do anything in its means to regulate markets is boundless.
One of the judges, Judge Setton, acknowledged that Obamacare is “intrusive”, but said the Congress had the Power under the Constitution to pass “intrusive” laws. “Not every intrusive law is an unconstitutionally intrusive law,” he said. As the New York Times points out, “Judge Graham countered in his dissent that if the mandate was allowed, ‘it is difficult to see what the limits on Congress’s Commerce Clause authority would be.'”
