Why Health Care Reform is Constitutional
by The populist right is starting to wonder if Congress has the power under the Constitution to pass health care legislation. This article is intended to show why that power exists.
Numerous libertarians and members of the populist right are suggesting that Congress cannot enact health care legislation under the United States Constitution. An October 31, 2009 Commentary in World Net Daily, by Patrice Lewis, for instance, explicitly asserts that Congress has no such authority exists. Those voices, however, fail to correctly analyze Congressional powers under Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, and relevant decisions by the United States Supreme Court.
We do not yet know the outcome of the health care debate, or what the final bill in Congress will contain. For purposes of this article, let’s consider one of the more extreme possibilities. Let’s assume Congress increases income taxes to pay for an extension of Medicare that provides basic health insurance for everyone legally living in the United States.
There is no question that this law would be constitutional. The first paragraph of Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution says:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Since the proposed plan would be paid for through income taxes, the question about my hypothetical plan reduces to whether it is a provision for the ‘general Welfare.’
All contemporary interpretations of that language suggest that it is. The debate about the meaning of the words “general Welfare” dates back to the drafting of the Constitution. Madison argued for a construction that restricted those words to the other enumerated powers of Congress in the Constitution. Hamilton argued for a broader reading, and said that the general Welfare provision was an independent power of Congress that let it address any and all issues of national concern. In the nineteenth century, Justice Joseph Story adopted Hamilton’s position in his private writings. The Supreme Court explicitly addressed the issue in United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936) and adopted the Hamilton/Story approach. In addition, the Court said in United States v. Gettysburg Electric Railway Co., 160 U.S. 668 (1896) that the purchase of land for a national park commemorating the Battle of Gettysburg was constitutional. The Court cited the general Welfare provision in that decision, but did not rely upon it specifically.
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