Justice Scalia can you at least give a notion of impartial integrity while wearing the black robe and stop playing to the Republican electorate? Asking if the national health care plan means that the government can force people to buy broccoli? Come on.

Justice Ginsberg, on the other hand, nailed it. If the health care plan (which mandates everyone must buy a policy) is deemed unconstitutional, then what’s to stop social security being next, since it forces everyone to invest in their retirement?

A fair question indeed, and appropriate.

The gist of the case is that if young ‘healthy’ people don’t buy insurance and then have an accident it costs the taxpayer. By not buying, they actually affect the market and therefore it falls under the Commerce Clause which gives Congress the constitutional power to regulate trade and impose their chosen policy upon the citizenry.

The precedent that the government cites when invoking the Commerce Clause is Wickard v. Filburn, a 1942 case in which a farmer was fined for growing more than his federally mandated wheat allotment even though the extra wheat was not sold and was instead used to feed his family and his livestock.

The farmer’s defense was that since he didn’t sell it, no commerce was involved, so the Congress had no power to fine him for exceeding the federal allowance on how much he can grow.

The court upheld the farmer’s fine reasoning that growing extra wheat had an impact on the overall national wheat market. Since Wickard paid nothing for the wheat he gave his family, it allowed him to not buy from the market thus, it affected the state of the market by increasing supply.

In broader terms, in the unlikely event that all farmers did this, the wheat market would crash. Therefore, there needed to be some regulation to prevent such things from happening.

We won’t know the court’s decision on “Obamacare,” a plan that was initially the brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, until June.

The video below is a bit alarmist and ‘the world will end’ runs deep in the undertone, but it will give you a good briefing on the Commerce Clause, which is at the heart of the Obamacare case currently before the Supreme Court.

Now, back to my broccoli.