In his piece explaining that yesterday's PATRIOT Act vote was not a libertarian revolution, Dave Weigel links to a video that basically exemplifies how Democrats' position on health care appears to many people. Former Democratic Rep. Phil Hare, who lost his seat last November, is being quizzed on the Affordable Care Act and the Constitution. He says, "I don't worry about the Constitution on this," arguing that getting people health care is more important. The person taking the video, presumably a conservative, actually yells "jackpot brother," right after he says it:
This video has more than 450,000 views. Not because people care about the fate of a single Democratic representative in Illinois, but because it confirms conservative suspicions about Democrats' bad faith in passing what they are certain is an unconstitutional piece of legislation.
The two major liberal responses to the Affordable Care Act have been to emphasize the very real human consequences of repeal and the litany of legal precedent that suggests the ACA is constitutional. But Republicans have very successfully employed constitutional first principles against the ACA, and liberals haven't responded forcefully enough on the same grounds, allowing the impression that even they might be uncertain about the ACA being constitutional. Jack Balkin is among the few people who understands how important it is that liberals be as aggressive in wrapping themselves in the Constitution when it comes to defending the ACA as conservatives are in attacking it. The irony is that the constitutional argument against the ACA is pretty flimsy and relies largely on treating "interstate commerce" the same way Bill Clinton treated the word "is."
