A friend of mine had dinner last week with one of her friends who was in town for the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and asked for some tips on talking to a hard-core conservative about health care reform, especially in light of two rulings from federal judges in VA and FL that invalidate ACA in part, or in toto. Instead of sending her a list of articles that I had read, I thought I’d summarize my impressions in a blog post. (Apologies if you’ve read all these arguments elsewhere, already.)
For many conservatives, the central problem with the Affordable Care Act is the “individual mandate”. Prof. Randy Barnett, of Georgetown Law, wrote early on in an op-ed in the Washington Post:
But the individual mandate extends the commerce clause’s power beyond economic activity, to economic inactivity. That is unprecedented. While Congress has used its taxing power to fund Social Security and Medicare, never before has it used its commerce power to mandate that an individual person engage in an economic transaction with a private company.
But, as many more qualified legal scholars have noted, Congress does not rely on the Commerce clause alone. The power to “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”, while broadly conceived in such cases as Wickard and Raich, is being used to regulate the insurance industry–to create health care exchanges, to prohibit discrimination against preexisting conditions, etc. The idea that in order to have insurance we must have everyone participate–the so-called “individual mandate”–is empowered by the Necessary and Proper clause.
The owner of this home was taxed for inactivity.
Universal participation in health insurance was deemed necessary by Congress for the effective operation of that scheme, that is, the risk pool will be insufficiently large, or the elimination of preexisting conditions limits would encourage selection bias. As Prof. Tribe points out in a recent op-ed, it was necessary to Scalia, concurring in Raich, when the federal government quashed even small, purely intrastate marijuana operations: “Our cases show that the regulation of intrastate activities may be necessary to and proper for the regulation of interstate commerce in two general circumstances.” In the landmark case McCulloch, Chief Justice John Marshall writes: “Take, for example, the power ‘to establish post-offices and post roads’ [an enumerated power of Congress]. This power is executed by the single act of making the establishment. But, from this has been inferred the power and duty of carrying the mail along the post-road, from one post-office to another. And, from this implied power, has again been inferred the right to punish those who steal letters from the post-office, or rob the mail.” So even though postal carriers were not mandated by the Constitution, and even though Congress is not supposed to deal with intrastate commerce, both of those things are necessary to the achievement of Congress’ constitutional ends. That is, Marshall explained, if “the end be legitimate,” then “all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end… are constitutional.”
Of course, as many people have pointed out, the government is not creating a “mandate” in the sense that it will jail you for your “economic inactivity”. It is going to tax your income if you aren’t paying health insurance premiums. So the part of the Constitution that specifically relates to the individual mandate is in fact the General Welfare Clause, whereby “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States…” And the decision on what constitutes “general welfare” is for the democratically-elected Congress to decide, not activist judges. Justice Cardozo wrote in Helvering v. Davis:
“The line must still be drawn between one welfare and another, between particular and general…There is a middle ground or certainly a penumbra in which discretion is at large. The discretion, however, is not confided to the courts. The discretion belongs to Congress, unless the choice is clearly wrong, a display of arbitrary power is not an exercise of judgment. This is now familiar law.”
So far we’ve talked about whether the government can regulate your “economic inactivity”, I also wanted to give an example in which government clearly does regulate your “economic inactivity”.
One example is blight law. In Virginia, for example, if a property is vacant, or subject to many complaints, or is in a dilapidated condition or lacks normal maintenance or upkeep, it may be subject to a blight declaration:
After the owner is notified that the property is blighted if the property owner does not remove the blight or present an acceptable plan to cure the blight within a reasonable period of time, under powers granted under the Code of Virginia, the County can declare, by ordinance, any blighted property as a nuisance and then compel the abatement of the nuisance.
If the owner or owners fail to abate the nuisance, the County may do so and charge and collect the cost thereof from the owner of the property in any manner provided by law for the collection of state or local taxes.
But if the property is privately held, the DPW will have to determine the owner’s name and then contact that person about the applicable code violations. The owner will receive a notice from the city giving him or her 30 days to clean up and/or repair the property. If the owner does not respond or comply, the DPW may go there and do the work, billing the owner for the services or placing a lien against the property for repayment.
Mike Dorf pointed out that governments can also mandate positive actions in other arenas: jury duty, schooling your children (state gov.), Selective Service, and even vaccination. Jury duty, for example, is necessary if the federal government is to provide the juries alluded to in the Bill of Rights, in the course of prosecuting federal crimes. And for the originalists out there, as early as 1792, Congress passed a militia act (since repealed) that required citizens between 18 and 45 to “provide [themselves] with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder”.
In the blight example these are state laws, but they derive that power from the same type of police or taxation powers as the federal government, and philosophically the theory is the same. So it’s clear that “economic inactivity” is still “activity” in the sense that your inaction can effect commerce generally–an unwillingness to maintain your property can be a nuisance and eyesore for a community, an unwillingness to educate your kids creates dumb citizens, and an uninsured person will impact the health care system by going to emergency rooms when they do get sick, or relying on family and friends to support them when they get ill. A 2008 Kaiser study finds that “the uninsured will spend $30 billion out-of-pocket for health care in 2008 while receiving $56 billion in uncompensated care, three quarters of which will be from government sources.” It is equally clear that the government can, and currently does, regulate “inactivity”, the government can compel behavior, and at the very least, the government can tax.
stone soup 