The Sky Isn't Falling! The Sky Isn't Falling!

On C-SPAN this morning, Slate Magazine's Dahlia Lithwick listed several expansive Commerce Clause decisions since FDR, and observed that the Republic has not yet crumbled under the weight of Federal mandates. Yes, America has groaned for 75 years under the spreading girth of that power—without total collapse.

Liberal law professors now use this same ratchet-effect principle to justify FDRs breathtaking expansion of Federal power as a natural "progressive" trend. But FDR only got his way by bullying the court (ever heard of "the switch in time that saved nine"?) and then flooding them with a torrent of regulatory legislation, only some of which they could stop. Honestly, if a typical American today were told that the Federal government has the power to stop her from growing beans or carrots on her own land for her own use, she would deem that un-American. But such power has lodged with the Feds since Wickard v Filburn in 1942.


Listening to proponents of Obamacare describe the magical effects of increased government power—besides prompting me to mention LBJ's failed-and-costly war-on-poverty—reminds me of the old saying "what one generation tolerates, the next adopts as its standard". The US Supreme Court today will hear oral argument about the constitutionality of Obamacare's individual mandate, which the government is justifying under...the Commerce Clause.


The court has been friendlier and friendlier to expanding government power for several generations now. But in recent decades the fruit of that power has begun to be harvested, and Americans don't like its taste.


If the individual mandate in PPACA (see why I call it Obamacare?) is held to be constitutional by five black-robed progressives, the sky may once again not fall. But does anyone doubt there's a limit to the number of straws a camel can carry? That there's a water temperature above which a frog will explode? That there's a slope too slippery to stand on?


America has been heading in the wrong direction since Woodrow Wilson: we are not Europe or even Canada. We do not want to be like the other nations. So here's my prayer for the week: "God save the United States and this Honorable Court!"