The Largely Ignored Victory

Any loss for the juveniles on the right is always more devastating given their tendencies towards wild emotional swings (see: junior high). That's why I'm still surprised to see very few celebrating the glaringly obvious victory that has come out of the Supreme Court's ruling on the health care bill. For the first time since the New Deal, the Commerce Clause has been defined in such a way that libertarians have declared victory.

“Under the government’s theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables,” the chief justice wrote. “That is not the country the framers of our Constitution envisioned.”

“We finally won a three-decades-long battle over the commerce clause,” John Eastman, a conservative constitutional scholar and a professor at Chapman University, told me hours after the court’s decision. 

This might seem a paradox, given that the court upheld the legislation. But the decision may ultimately prove a Pyrrhic victory for supporters of expansive Congressional power. The opinion reads like a hymn to the ideal of limited government. And by embracing the broccoli argument, it sharply limits the commerce clause — until now the source of ever-expanding legislative power since Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1824 that Congressional power to regulate commerce “may be exercised to its utmost extent.”

“The commerce clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. Libertarians and conservatives have been seeking such a declaration since the New Deal.

You'd think they be happy but no...oh no...Obama won something so it's the end of the world for the 89th time. It's a good thing they don't value "winning the argument" above all else.