February 7, 2011 8:20AM

Responding to Akhil Amar on Obamacare

By Ilya Shapiro

Yale law professor Akhil Amar, one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars and a “progressive originalist” of sorts — he joined with Randy Barnett and others on a brief supporting our view of the Privileges or Immunities Clause in the McDonald case — had a fiery op‐​ed about Judge Vinson’s decision in the Sunday L.A. Times. More than fiery; I’d say intemperate, uncharacteristically so for the mild‐​mannered Prof. Amar.


Here’s an excerpt:

There is nothing improper in the means that Obamacare deploys. Laws may properly regulate both actions and inactions, and in any event, Obamacare does not regulate pure inaction. It regulates freeloading. Breathing is an action, and so is going to an emergency room on taxpayers’ nickel when you have trouble breathing.

I was all set to respond when I saw that Tim Sandefur had beat me to the punch on PLF’s blog. Here’s an excerpt of that:

Instead [of offering a limiting principle to federal power if the individual mandate passes constitutional muster], he resorts to the saddest of rhetorical tricks–accusing the judge of being like Roger Taney in Dred Scott. Lawyers should have their own “Godwin’s Law”: whoever is first to accuse the judge of being like Dred Scott loses the argument. Amar starts out by saying his students know more about the Constitution than Judge Vinson, but what I wonder is whether Amar’s students will, like their teacher, use false analogies, set up straw men, ignore their opponents’ arguments, and resort to the equivalent of childish name‐​calling.

Good on ya, Tim! Read the whole thing. David Bernstein and Ilya Somin have similarly chimed in, and similarly cited Tim.


One thing for which I will commend Amar is his adoption of the term “Obamacare.” I’ve never understood how this is a pejorative (unless said with a sneer, but by that standard anything can be pejorative). The one semi‐​accurate criticism I’ve heard is that the law was mostly written by Congress, not the White House — for which the president got plenty of heat. But that just means it would be better to call it Pelosi‐​Reid‐​care, which presumably is no more or less pejorative. In any event, that ship has sailed: Obamacare this abomination (note I didn’t say “Obamination”) will remain.