And Now the Supreme Court Must Decide

For the past three days, the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court heard a series of arguments on Obamacare — what promises to be one of the most seminal decisions in the Court’s history. Now that the dust has settled, it appears more than likely that President Obama’s signature health care law is on the verge of being struck down — perhaps even in its entirety.

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The challengers to the law include more than half of the States of the Union, the National Federation of Independent Business, and private parties, while the Obama Administration is standing in defense of it. Having heard arguments on Monday on whether a law called the Anti-Injunction Act would bar the Court from considering whether Obamacare’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional, the Court on Tuesday moved on to examining the mandate itself and whether Congress vaulted across the Maginot Line of constitutionality when it imposed the mandate on Americans. The liberal justices of the Court hammered the attorneys who were challenging Obamacare, leaving little doubt where they stand on the law. In their view, it appears, the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the authority “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes,” also empowers Congress to impose the individual mandate. As the government argued, since everyone will have to participate in the health care market at some point, the government is justified in requiring people to buy insurance today. Heritage’s Todd Gaziano explains the failure of this argument:

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