My Jurist Op Ed on the Sixth Circuit Decision Upholding the Individual Mandate

(Ilya Somin)

The Jurist has just published an op ed I wrote criticizing the recent Sixth Circuit decision upholding the individual mandate:

This week, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the individual mandate of federal health care reform is constitutional. This is undeniably a setback for mandate opponents....

Before this decision, judges in these cases had split along ideological and partisan lines.... Judge Jeffrey Sutton, however, a well-known conservative jurist, has now become the first exception to the trend....

At the same time, the opinions by Martin and Sutton highlight a central weakness of the pro-mandate position in even more blatant form than previous opinions upholding the law. Their reasoning has very radical implications, giving Congress unlimited power to impose mandates of any kind, free of any structural limits on its authority.

The Jurist has also published a piece by Charles Fried defending the decision. I criticized a previous Charles Fried column defending the mandate in this post.