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Constitutional Argument Against Health Care Reform Draws Fire

  • Professor Orin Kerr, 2007 recipient of the conservative Federalist Society's Paul M. Bator Award, identifies a recent piece by Andrew Napolitano as a prime example of when an op-ed is "filled with so many errors, misstatements, and plainly weak claims that the mere number of those becomes far more interesting than the argument of the op-ed itself."

    Here's FOX News's Napolitano in his own words:

    [I]t's clear that his plan is unconstitutional at its core. The practice of medicine consists of the delivery of intimate services to the human body. In almost all instances, the delivery of medical services occurs in one place and does not move across interstate lines. One goes to a physician not to engage in commercial activity, as the Framers of the Constitution understood, but to improve one's health. And the practice of medicine, much like public school safety, has been regulated by states for the past century. 

    From the other side of the political spectrum, Anonymous Liberal digs deeper into Napolitano's claims:

    Napolitano writes that "the delivery of medical services occurs in one place and does not move across state lines." I suppose that's true in some sense (at least most of the time). But the same is true of buying groceries or guns or just about anything else. And all of these things are clearly within the reach of the Commerce Clause.

    It's one thing to argue for a crackpot interpretation of the Constitution. Everyone is free to do that. But you can't just blatantly misrepresent what the current state of the law is. You can't just assert that Roe v. Wade means the opposite of what it actually means. The reality is that if Napolitano's interpretation of [Commerce Clause jurisprudence] was correct, virtually the entire post World War II regulatory state would be unconstitutional. If he was correct, Medicare and Medicaid would be unconstitutional. Needless to say, the Supreme Court never intended to suggest anything of the sort in Lopez.


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