[jbooth]

It's not new. You've got mandatory flood insurance from a selected group of companies, mandatory osha safety training from a selected group of companies, mandated accounting procedures that must be certified by selected people...

If you disagree with the law on principle, that's fine, it's certainly not a perfect solution.

But those are political objections. Based on how the interstate commerce clause has been interpreted for a wide variety of issues, it's not unconstitutional (for most working definitions of constitutional). That's why Pelosi laughed and moved on to the next question.

[embolism]

This is a good argument for the constitution meaning essentially nothing since if there are no limits on how the government can control how people spend their money, there are no real limits on how much control the government can exert over the individual.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your point isn't really about what is or is not constitutional, but rather that interpretation has rendered the constitution meaningless so anything is constitutional now. Perhaps this is why Pelosi laughed at the idea of something being unconstitutional.

[dragonwriter]

> I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your point isn't really about what is or is not constitutional, but rather that interpretation has rendered the constitution meaningless so anything is constitutional now.

Except that that's clearly not the case, as plenty of things remain prohibit by the Constitution, as we see the Supreme Court finding as recently as today [1].

Sure, the interstate commerce power is generally interpreted in a fairly broad manner today, but that is very different than "anything is constitutional now".

[1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-9540_8m58.pdf

[CWuestefeld]

plenty of things remain prohibit by the Constitution

The language of your statement reveals the problem (sorry for being deconstructionist...)

There is very little that the Constitution prohibits -- that's not how it's constructed. It's not designed to blacklist certain governmental powers.

Rather, it starts from a perspective where all rights belong to the people, and the government may do nothing. It then whitelists certain powers as the people have decided to vest them with the government. That is, the government can do nothing other than the things the people have enumerated for it in the Constitutions (particularly Article 1 Section 8).

That people think of government power in terms of whether it's prohibited by the Constitution rather than whether it's allowed by the Constitution reveals how far away we've gotten from understanding how it was intended to work.

[dragonwriter]

> The language of your statement reveals the problem (sorry for being deconstructionist...)

Sure, but not for being wrong.

> There is very little that the Constitution prohibits -- that's not how it's constructed. It's not designed to blacklist certain governmental powers.

There's quite a lot that the Constitution prohibits the government from doing.

> That people think of government power in terms of whether it's prohibited by the Constitution rather than whether it's allowed by the Constitution reveals how far away we've gotten from understanding how it was intended to work.

That people think that there is a difference shows how little people have paid attention to the Bill of Rights, a rather critical piece of the Constitution, which, as part of its whole stack of specific prohibitions, made the two superficially-conflicting approaches you refer to equivalent when everything not explicitly granted to the federal government was explicitly reserved against the federal government (see Amendment 10.)

[embolism]

Presumably that set of opinions is meant to make the point that the Supreme Court is still ruling things unconstitutional and therefore some things are still unconstitutional. This is true, but irrelevant.

The point is that if anything can be ruled constitutional, then the ruling something unconstitutional is merely a tool for the federal government to use to regulate the states and lesser courts, not any kind of protection against the power of the federal government itself against the rights of the individual.

[dragonwriter]

> The point is that if anything can be ruled constitutional

The Constituton isn't magic. No matter what it says, courts applying it have always been able to rule anything constitutional (or, conversely, unconstitutional.) Like any set of rules for human behavior, it is not self enforcing.

The Constitution has never, from day one, been a protection against the power of the federal government, it is at most a warning about what the public intends to limit the federal government to, and it has force exactly to the extent that the public is willing to follow up on that warning.

[embolism]

Absolutely agreed. And since the public can't follow up, it no longer can limit the federal government.

[dragonwriter]

The public absolutely can follow up.

If the public chooses not to, because its not important relative to other priorities, then, yes, on those points there is no constraint on the federal government.