The Constitution's Financial Terms

Note: This was originally a four-part series published at the leading constitutional law website, “The Volokh Conspiracy,” which is affiliated with the Washington Post. This succession of four parts discusses such questions as why the Supreme Court was wrong to characterize the Obamacare insurance penalty as a “tax,” why the apportionment requirement was adopted and […]

Two Overreaching GOP House Bills Show Why We Need a Convention of States

Two bills introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives show that whatever they may say on the campaign trail, many Republicans in Congress don’t have much more respect for federalism, states’ rights, or local control than Democrats do. These two bills also demonstrate, if further demonstration be needed, that Congress has broken almost all constitutional […]

Obamacare’s Constitutionality and the Origination Clause: New Evidence

This article originally appeared at the American Thinker. One of the constitutional disputes triggered by the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, is whether by substituting new material for the original House-passed bill (H.R. 3590), the Senate exceeded its constitutional power to amend the original measure. This, in turn, has provoked a debate over whether the Founders […]

VA Scandals—Only the Latest Example of the Failure of Socialism

To know more about socialized medicine—and our future under Obamacare—check out the Department of Veterans’ Affairs health care scandals. The scandals encompass service failure, egregious cost overruns and delays, and basic failures (such as blood test mixups) that would be comical if not so dangerous. The VA hospital situation in Denver is a case in […]

King v. Burwell: The Latest Obamacare Mess at the Supreme Court

When I first heard about King v. Burwell, the latest Obamacare controversy before the U.S. Supreme Court, I assumed it was the kind of case in which the legislative intent was clear, but for one reason or another the wording of the statute did not match the legislative intent. That would have been an interesting […]

Is Obama Violating the “Take Care” Clause?

The Constitution requires the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This “take Care” language came from 18th century commissions and formal instructions by which higher officials delineated what lower officials were to do. The premier examples were royal instructions to colonial governors, but the Continental and Confederation Congresses used the same […]

More Evidence From Last Term That It’s Not a “Conservative Supreme Court”

Note: This article was first published at cns news. There is a common media myth that the current U.S. Supreme Court, or at least a majority of the current justices, is “conservative.” But if a “conservative” justice is one who consistently interprets the Constitution in accordance with traditional methods of judging—as the Founders intended for […]