How so, given those are government operated entities funded via taxation?
Didn't Kennedy or Roberts or somebody specifically say during the hearings that if a single payer system had been implemented instead of a system in which people are required to buy products from private companies, there'd be no issue?
Though striking down the mandate would pose problems for the Republican plan to privatize Social Security.
The first and second congresses compelled sea workers to be provided health insurance, and also for all men in the country to arm themselves with munitions and firearms.
There has not been a court ban on congress achieving regulatory goals through taxation (and that IS what the fine is) since Bailey vs Drexel Furniture in 1922, which invalidated a 10% tax on the annual profits of companies which knowingly employed child labor. But the only reason the court ruled that way is because the court viewed the law as an attempt by congress to circumvent the court overturn of another child-labor-related law from a year or so earlier.
The court even upheld a regulatory tax designed to completely eliminate bookmaking operations in 1953, and a tax that compelled states to create unemployment benefits systems for their residents in 1937.
The mandate is essentially a regulatory excise, which congress is given power in article 1, section 8
No part of the constitution makes a distinction between congress's regulatory authority over private or public commerce. Furthermore, the companies which provide health insurance are all government-created corporations, chartered by the state governments. Though the concept of a corporation did not exist when the constitution was written, the idea that the government can regulate activity between persons within its jurisdiction ha been a prevailing idea for millenia, and the same concept applies to non-personal entities.
Whether they're fining you for not purchasing private insurance or taxing you for a government-run health insurance program that you 1. Are not allowed to use until a certain age. 2. May never be allowed to use in your lifetime and/or 3. Are not required to use when you are permitted to, they are regulatory measures by congress over the territories it holds jurisdiction.
I am referring to medicare and medicaid, in case you didn't notice. The same concept applies to social security.
If the court rules that the government can not impose a health insurance mandate, it will be a huge case of judicial activism that will limit congress's ability to regulate society in any significanat manner. You are ALWAYS using health care in some shape or form, through no conscious decision of your own. It is one of the things that comes with civilization. Sanitation of property and food, noise/air pollution, the various insecticides and filters in the air you breathe and on the Earth you stand on, pest control, travel restrictions on persons with certain diseases from entering the country...
These are not things that can be classified as activities that you, as a person residing within the US, partake in. some of them are not even activities at all. But they are all
structural components of our health care that we naturally think of as a government being able to provide, even if they are not things we can consciously choose to partake or refrain from partaking in (like breathing, or contracting a disease through our environment rather than our own actions or someone else's actions, or having someone with tuberculosis fly into our country).
Is the structure of our society, from how labor interacts with the economy, to any of the conditions relating to the life or quality of living of a person, persons, or people in general, off-limits to government?
I am not saying that the health mandate directly maps to medicare and social security, because it doesn't. Those are funded through payroll taxes, taxes on value derived from labor, which we as a society decide to be the means through which people acquire resources that can be used to better themselves. We set up our society to be structured on labor, despite a life of convenience and leisure for all being within our scientific capabilities.
Congress can regulate an operation or practice out of existence and continue to regulate that activity's non-existence from coming to exist again. It can impose excises. Why wouldn't it be able to regulate being uninsured out of existence?
If it can't, it'll be a "Because it can't" ruling, a general "Government can't compel people to purchase a good or service through regulatory measures" ruling. And that kind of ruling can ban pretty much anything, from setting aside funds for retirement at an arbitrary age (social security) to making mail boxes that can only be used by a government-run mail carrier (post boxes) to providing funds forhealth insurance for senior citizens (medicare).
Conservatives always complain about "judicial activism" and how the courts apply the commerce and necessary and proper clasues to empower the government to do anything it wants.
This would be judicial activism that fabricates some kind of private/public/governmental/personal/communal constitutional concept that can be used to empower the courts from banning the government from doing anything. Judicial activism in the opposite direction.
The notion of using the constitution as a "weapon" through which an ideology about society is empowered seems to be a uniquely American concept. Perhaps it's because so many other countries have gone through so many rebellions and complete constitutional and social upheaval over the centuries (or even just last few decades) that they realize just how little power things like "laws" and "constitutions" hold as opposed to the people who actually create, destroy, enforce, ignore, respect, obey, and disobey them, and give them meaning, but nowhere else in the world is the concept of being masters of our own destiny so utterly foreign as it is in America. Instead, we rely on the "constitution" for guidance like devout religious followers do their books of worship.
We have power over governments and determine how it has power over us. The constitution is a fucking document. An important document, but a document nonetheless. And even if conservatives think activist judges could allow a V for vendetta nanny state, the people still ultimately have the natural capability and responsibility to create such a society. It won't just pop into existence. People would have to make it happen. And even if people made it happen, people would be able to overthrow it, too, even if the government fought against that happening. Society is not equal to government.
Judicial activism in the otheer direction basically fights this concept. It establishes some axiom that the concept of the State is, itself, some Hobbesian State of Nature where there is a natural order to all things which we must always restrict ourselves to.
I'm not really putting my thoughts into writing properly I feel, but I guess what I mean is something like....
We can do things. We can say we can't do things.
Naturally we are allowed to say whether we can do things or whether we can't do things, and to choose, or choose not, to respect those established boundaries. Reading what I just wrote, I'd say that's a pretty good definition of free will. Conservatives are afraid of the "not choosing to respect the establsihed boundaries" part when they speak of judicial activism. But the established boundaries change with the times. Segregation has been both constitutional and unconstitutional without any alterations to the relevant sections of the constitution.
The conservative fear of judicial activism stems from the notion that the boundaries moved
But if the boundaries don't, no, can't move... to say we are forbidden from saying we can do things or saying we can't do things, well, that's ultimately destructive to any social contract or progressive movement (And I don't mean that in the poltiical sense, but in the literal sense.). And that's what the flip side is.
