The Supreme Court hearings on President Obama's health care reform start Monday morning, which means you'll be hearing a lot of arguments about government overreach and/or the limits of the Commerce Clause. Some opinions today:
- Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post: He lays out his objections in a column headlined "The reckoning" and sums it up thusly: "Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state—grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality, and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness." Full column here.
- Linda Greenhouse, New York Times: She thinks the argument that the individual mandate is unconstitutional—"specifically, the argument that the mandate exceeds Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause—is rhetorically powerful but analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection. There’s just no there there." She predicts the court will uphold the law "by a wide margin." Full column here.