Yesterday was, no doubt, a historic day – more historic than you probably realize.  The Supreme Court heard arguments on the individual mandate, an ObamaCare provision that has the absolute potential to forever change our relationship as free individuals with our imperial federal government.  Jamie Dupree was witness to these arguments, and will be there today to cover the last few hours dealing with the severability of the mandate to the law as a whole. 

So how did Jamie think it went?  Well it wasn’t exactly a red-letter day for the Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, and the Justices seemed skeptical.  As Jamie said, “what emerged was the distinct possibility that a majority of justices could rule against the mandate.”

Let’s take a look at some of those skeptical moments from the Justices. 

One of the “swing” justices is Justice Anthony Kennedy.  Here’s just one of his exchanges with Verrilli …

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?

GENERAL VERRILLI: That's not what's going on here, Justice Kennedy, and we are not seeking to defend the law on that basis.  In this case, the -- what is being regulated is the method of financing health, the purchase of health care. That itself is economic activity with substantial effects on interstate commerce.

Justice Kennedy also went on to ask …

JUSTICE KENNEDY: I understand that we must presume laws are constitutional, but, even so, when you are changing the relation of the individual to the government in this, what we can stipulate is, I think, a unique way, do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show.

GENERAL VERRILLI: So two things about that, Justice Kennedy. First, we think this is regulation of people's participation in the health care market, and all -- all this minimum coverage provision does is say that, instead of requiring insurance at the point of sale, that Congress has the authority under the commerce power and the necessary proper power to ensure that people have insurance in advance of the point of sale because of the unique nature of this market … virtually everybody in society is in this market, and you've got to pay for the health care you get, the predominant way in which it's -- in which it's paid for is insurance, and -- and the Respondents agree that Congress could require that you have insurance in order to get health care or forbid health care from being provided …

“Uniqueness of the market?”  Every market for every consumer product is unique, not just the health care market.  I’m gluten free – so I’m a participant in a unique market for gluten free foods.  Does the fact that a product, or the market for that product is “unique” give the government this type of power?  On the issue of food, Justice Scalia interrupted Verrilli and and asked him why he defines the healthcare market place so broadly.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Could you define the market -- everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli

GENERAL VERRILLI: The food market, while it shares that trait that everybody's in it, it is not a market in which your participation is often unpredictable and often involuntary

Wait a minute?  Your participation in the food market is not often unpredictable?  Do we not get agonizing reports week after week of people who are going hungry?  What about all those children who supposedly go to bed hungry every night?  Haven’t we read that some people who were employed and doing fine just three years ago are now going to community food banks?  Of course participation in the food market is unpredictable!  

Along similar lines, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that the government might require Americans to buy cellphones to be ready for emergencies.  Here’s how that little exchange went.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, the same, it seems to me, would be true say for the market in emergency services: police, fire, ambulance, roadside assistance, whatever. You don't know when you're going to need it; you're not sure that you will. But the same is true for health care. You don't know if you're going to need a heart transplant or if you ever will. So there is a market there. To -- in some extent, we all participate in it. So can the government require you to buy a cell phone because that would facilitate responding when you need emergency services? You can just dial 911 no matter where you are?

GENERAL VERRILLI: No, Mr. Chief Justice. think that's different. It's -- We -- I don't think we think of that as a market. This is a market. This is market regulation. And in addition, you have a situation in this market not only where people enter involuntarily as to when they enter and won't be able to control what they need when they enter but when they --

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: It seems to me that's the same as in my hypothetical. You don't know when you're going to need police assistance. You can't predict the extent to emergency response that you'll need. But when you do, and the government provides it.

But ultimately it was Justice Scalia who hit it right on the head. 

JUSTICE SCALIA: The argument here is that this also is -- may be necessary, but it's not proper because it violates an equally evident principle in the Constitution, which is that the Federal Government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers; that it's supposed to be a government of limited powers. And that's what all this questioning has been about. What -- what is left? If the government can do this, what, what else can it not do

That pretty much wraps it up.  Our federal government is not supposed to have “all powers” but to be a government of limited powers.  That’s why we have a Constitution with enumerated powers, and those not specifically enumerated to the federal government are left to the states.  As Scalia questions, if ObamaCare’s individual mandate is ruled Constitutional, “what is left” that our government cannot do?

The answer is that there isn’t anything.  This is ultimately what ObamaCare is all about: power.  The Democrats have been striving for decades to see to it that they have more power over you and that you are dependent on our imperial federal government for even the most basic of care.