http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/294831/statism-goes-court-andrew-c-mccarthy
‘Well, I can’t imagine that that — that the Commerce Clause would — would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.”
This was Solicitor General Donald Verrilli on Day Two of the great Obamacare case. At issue was Affordable Care Act’s most controversial aspect: the “individual mandate” — the requirement that Americans purchase health insurance as a condition of living in their country. The SG was being pummeled by Justice Antonin Scalia.
Pummeling was the order of the day for Verrilli. From the moment he rose to deliver the most important argument of his professional life, he seemed tongue-tied; he could barely get through “May it please the Court” without sputtering. It is hard, even for a lawyer as fine as Verrilli, to defend the indefensible. Yet, as he argued with Scalia, the SG grabbed on to a hidden truth: He and his fellow progressives are already way, way ahead. They may not win this skirmish over the individual mandate. But there is the battle, and then there is the war. For statism, the war is still going very well.
The “deeply embedded social norm” to which the SG referred was another government mandate: The 1986 law demanding that hospitals, without compensation, treat emergency patients who lack insurance or the capacity to pay. It was a telling moment: The hullaballoo over the individual mandate is a case of noticing the barn door open about a quarter-century after the horse has galloped away.