By Michael F. Cannon
Richard Thaler writes in the New York Times: Justice Scalia is arguing that if the court lets Congress create a mandate to buy health insurance, nothing could stop Congress from passing laws requiring everyone to buy broccoli and to join a gym…Can anyone imagine Congress passing a broccoli mandate law, much less the court allowing it to take [...]
Stop Using Slippery-Slope Arguments? Where Would that End? is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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By Ilya Shapiro
While perhaps more identified with eating than drinking, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — who headlined Cato’s recent Milton Friedman Prize Dinner — signed a law in January that allowed out-of-state winemakers to sell directly to in-state consumers and retailers. This wasn’t a spontaneous bit of New Year’s bonhomie — the U.S. Court of Appeals [...]
Chris Christie Allows New Jerseyans to Quaff Better Wine is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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By Michael F. Cannon
In the Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz says you probably didn’t. And it shows: It would be difficult to overstate the significance of The Federalist for understanding the principles of American government and the challenges that liberal democracies confront early in the second decade of the 21st century. Yet despite the lip service they pay to [...]
Did You Read the Federalist Papers in College? Grad School? Law School? is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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By Michael F. Cannon
Charles Kolb is president of the Committee for Economic Development and was a domestic policy adviser to Bush the Elder. Over at Huffington Post, he articulates why (he thinks) the Constitution’s Commerce Clause empowers Congress to force people to purchase health insurance, but not broccoli. That is to say, he offers (what he thinks is) a limiting principle [...]
That’s Not a Limiting Principle, Charles Kolb Edition is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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If you’ve ever bought anything on the Internet, over the phone, or from a catalog, you might have noticed that when you buy from some stores, you don’t pay any state sales tax, but if you buy from other stores, you do. That’s because a Supreme Court decision protected out-of-state businesses from revenue-hungry states. But a new bill working its way through Congress would change all that, turning every online retailer into a sales tax collector. And that’s legislation Congress should reject. Back in 1992, the Supreme Court ruled in Quill … More
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By Ilya Shapiro
Now that I’ve woken from the first full night’s sleep since the Supreme Court’s three-day Obamacare marathon began, I can share my thoughts on how the argument went, in case you haven’t seen my first and second days’ reports for the Daily Caller: The Anti-Injunction Act: On an argument day that can best be described [...]
Obamacare Argument Post-Mortem is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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By Caleb O. Brown
Cato Senior Fellow Randy E. Barnett argued on behalf of Angel Raich at the Supreme Court in 2004. It was the last big case at the High Court dealing with broad federal assertions of power under the Commerce Clause. On Friday at the Cato Institute’s new F.A. Hayek Auditorium, Barnett laid out the four words [...]
ObamaCare in Four Words is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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Call it the main event: after a day puzzling over whether Obamacare’s fines on those who don’t buy insurance constitute a tax or a penalty—an important threshold issue, to be sure, but one that hasn’t quite captured the public’s imagination—the Court today will hear oral argument regarding one of the most important issues before it in 65 years: whether the Constitution empowers Congress to require that virtually all Americans purchase or obtain health insurance coverage. The answer to that question will determine whether the federal Leviathan truly remains a government … More
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By Ilya Shapiro
Cato legal associate Carl DeNigris co-authored this blogpost. Over the last few decades, the number of federal crimes has exploded. The U.S. criminal code has grown so large and so expansive that no one is exactly sure how many federal crimes are actually on the books, with estimates ranging from 4,000 to 300,000. As Justice [...]
Not Everything Can Be a Federal Crime is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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By Ilya Shapiro
With the scheduled three days of oral argument six weeks away, Cato filed its fourth and final Supreme Court amicus brief in the Obamacare saga, this time on the most critical issue: the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Alongside Pacific Legal Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, 14 other organizations, and a bipartisan group of 333 state [...]
Cato’s Final Obamacare Brief — on the Individual Mandate — Joined by 16 Other Groups and 333 State Legislators is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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