Orange County's two most-quoted legal scholars turn up in the Florida federal judge's ruling Monday that found parts of “Obamacare” unconstitutional and declared the entire law must be made “null and void.”
Specifically cited by U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson is Erwin Chemerinsky, the founding dean of UC Irvine's law school. The judge points to a statement Chemerinsky made in a video that also features his good friend and frequent philosophical sparring partner John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University's law school.
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“I must reluctantly conclude that Congress exceeded the bounds of its authority in passing the act with the individual mandate,” Vinson writes in reference to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and its mandate that individuals must purchase health insurance, a provision that is scheduled to kick in in 2014.
“The health-care market is more than one-sixth of the national economy, and without doubt, Congress has the power to reform and regulate this market,” Vinson continues. “That has not been disputed in this case. The principal dispute has been about how Congress chose to exercise that power here.”
To give an example of how Vinson believes the system is supposed to work, you must turn to page 47 of his ruling, on which he cites (and provides the link to) “Wheat, Weed, and ObamaCare: How the Commerce Clause Made Congress All-Powerful,” a video Reason.TV posted on Aug. 25, 2010.
“For example,” Vinson writes, “in the course of defending the Constitutionality of the individual mandate, and responding to the same concerns identified above, often-cited law professor and dean of the University of California Irvine School of Law Erwin Chemerinsky has opined that although 'what people choose to eat well might be regarded as a personal liberty' (and thus unregulable), 'Congress could use its commerce power to require people to buy cars.'”
Here is the video:
Watch, and you'll discover the producers pull off the impossible, making Eastman come off, well, reasonable and Chemerinsky totally crackers.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.