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The Roberts Court v. America
How the Roberts Supreme Court is using the First Amendment to craft a radical, free-market jurisprudence.
For all these reasons, the First Amendment has helped the Supreme Court do for the consumer capitalism of the Information Age what freedom of contract did for the Industrial Age: constitutionally protect certain transactions that lie at the core of the economy. This makes unequal economic power much harder for democratic lawmaking to reach, because there are only a few ways to reduce the effects of economic inequality: redistribute wealth, guarantee certain goods (such as education or health care) regardless of wealth, and limit what the wealthy can do with their money. Constitutional protection of marketing and spending takes the last option off the table at a time when the other two are politically embattled. Whether in elections or in marketing and the vast data economy behind it, the market itself, with all its inequality, is ever more thoroughly constitutionalized as a realm of freedom.
This development is a milestone in the Court’s march away from a principle that it accepted with the New Deal: Buying and selling enjoy no special constitutional status, and legislatures can regulate markets and businesses to make life more equitable, safe, or healthful. When these policy decisions are opened to constitutional attack, the wealthy interests burdened by legislation can appeal from the political process to the Supreme Court. If they win, they send lawmakers back to square one, and, win or lose, they delay regulation and raise its costs. Moreover, these cases give wealthy interests a rhetorical leg up: They can denounce regulation as “censorship” with the Supreme Court and the Constitution behind them.
Health-Care Reform and Nanny-State Hysteria
Nominally, the courts that have found some or all of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) unconstitutional are ruling on the limits of Congress’s authority to regulate the economy. Near the heart of these opinions, though, is the idea that the Constitution must protect, even indirectly, the autonomy of the consumer deciding how to spend her money. Although this is a very weak constitutional argument, it is revealing: It shows that the judiciary’s turn against a law that would have been uncontroversial not long ago is part of the intellectual taste for a laissez-faire consumer capitalism.
The federal courts’ sharply divided judgments on the constitutionality of health-care reform, and the dawning realization that the Supreme Court will likely take the constitutional challenge seriously, make this a strange moment, and one that might be momentous. The argument against the ACA that two federal district courts and one appeals court have accepted at the time of writing is that Congress lacks power to require individuals to buy insurance—the so-called “individual mandate” that is designed to put young and old, healthy and sick alike into the insurance pool. The Constitution assigns Congress a limited set of powers, and, in theory, it cannot act outside those. Therefore, Congress always faces two sets of constraints. It cannot do some things because those things are forbidden by rights-protecting language like the First Amendment, and others because, although they are not prohibited, they are not authorized by the Constitution’s list of Congress’s powers. The ACA’s opponents argue that the individual mandate violates the latter principle.
Congress’s go-to power for 70 years, since the Supreme Court embraced the New Deal, has been the power “to regulate commerce…among the several states,” generally just called the Commerce Clause. Although the bare language would seem to support a narrow reading of the power, the Court has interpreted it to authorize nearly any legislation that touches on economic activity, even very tenuously, such as the federal ban on home production of medical marijuana for personal use (in 2007’s Raich v. Gonzales). But on the ACA, three federal courts have pleased conservative activists by holding that Congress cannot require people to buy insurance. The general principle of these cases is that the Commerce power does not authorize Congress to require people to make purchases, or perhaps to take any affirmative act at all, in a field of economic life that they have not already voluntarily joined. Become a farmer, the argument goes, and you may be subject to all kinds of regulations, quotas, and so forth. The initial choice to enter the field means taking on its regulatory burdens. But a passive citizen, just by being, has done nothing to subject herself to the insurance mandate. Once she enters the field of health-care consumption, courts have conceded, she could be required to buy insurance; but as long as, like Winnie-the-Pooh, she just is, Congress cannot reach her.
This argument is strange, notwithstanding that federal judges have signed on to it. Strictly speaking, it addresses the limits of federal power. Nonetheless, its rhetorical force comes from appeals to the autonomy of the consumer and warnings that a runaway Congress might violate that autonomy. Courts overturning the individual mandate invariably invoke dark fantasies of a paternalistic government requiring citizens to buy American cars, health-club memberships, or vegetables. What’s strange about this parade of nanny-state specters is that, because the Commerce Clause concerns the powers of Congress, not the rights of individuals, a ruling that invalidates the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause simply means that only state governments, not the federal government, can pass such a law. Famously, Massachusetts has already done just that.
There is really no such thing as a constitutionally protected personal liberty that a state can violate but the federal government cannot, or vice versa. The Constitution protects individual rights against all government action, regardless of the source (with a handful of minor exceptions that are not relevant here). The Commerce Clause governs federal but not state power because it is not a rights-protecting clause. The odd thing about the anti-ACA cases is that they proceed as if they were vindicating a constitutional right of consumer liberty, but the Constitution has not been interpreted as securing economic rights since the Supreme Court rejected Lochner. Opponents’ Commerce Clause arguments are displaced Lochner-ism.
I am fearful of our country's future. I do not agree that corporations are individual citizens with all the rights accruing to a flesh and blood US citizen. Corporations are a group of individuals banded together in a common commercial enterprise. A corporation cannot vote in an election, why then, should a corporation have the right to influence elections by virtue of tremendous wealth. Isn't that the same as unregulated lobbying?
Dec 13, 2011, 2:16 PMI am hopeful for our country's future. I have seen that the special interest groups like labor unions which used to have special power over other special interest groups now have come to to play in the planefield as others.
Dec 13, 2011, 3:26 PM"... the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy." is a very telling phrase. The Supreme Court asserts that corporations are a "better" voice than their workers and that corporations are "more significant" than their workers.
It is very sad to live in a society dominated by such ideologically mindless, brainwashed, and greed-driven people.
Dec 13, 2011, 5:48 PM
How soon before the Supreme Court legalizes outright bribery? After all, the fact that I can't buy off politicians and building inspectors is an infringement on my liberty. And of course, the poor and rich equally will have the right to purchase the attention of public officials.
:)
I just wanted you to know that this is one of the best articles I have ever read. It is just outstanding. Thank you for articulating thoughts I have struggled with for years.
Dec 14, 2011, 3:49 AMThere is much going on right now that really makes one consider whether the US is still holding true to its values, more specifically those outlined by the Constitution itself. The vast majority of this has sprouted from the overreaching of Congress over the last 100 years - reaching into the rights and liberties of the States and Citizenry.
While I agree that some level of regulation is necessary - EPA is constitutional since environments of one state do affect that of another thereby de minimis the commerce clause could apply, for example; Congress has often overstepped its boundary from Copyright (DMCA), to now Health Care (individual mandate), and many other ways.
And while you are suggesting that much of the weight of wealth and such is being tossed around due to results of SCOTUS, there is much more being tossed around due to the overbearing and overreaching laws passed by Congress itself.
The Constitution is a wonderful piece of work, and any power/right not explicitly granted to the Federal government is thereby reserved for the States and the people. This means that higher levels of government have more restrictions than lower levels of government in what they can do to control the lower levels of government. And since the States by extension have to have a State Constitution that mirrors the Federal Constitution, this same principle bears the same relationship from State to local governments and the people as well.
However, over the last 100 years Congress has done more and more to pull more power towards the Federal government - from pork barrelling special projects to withholding matching funds for Congressionally mandated work when States do not do as Congress wants. (That in itself should be illegal under the Constitution as Congress is in effect bribing the States to give up power and rights.)
We see this again in the DMCA which not only extends Copyright again - such that is it now well beyond the life of even the author's children and perhaps grandchildren - but makes it easier for corporations to shutdown economic activity as illegal when it would otherwise be legal - e.g. putting a weak 'protection' on copying - thereby forbidding otherwise legal activities (e.g. archiving, changing of storage mediums, etc.) in favor of corporate interests.
And no, the ACA does not resolve the health care issues - it just panders more to large corporations. Reform would be requiring insurance companies to pay out based on the service provided, paying out what the doctor specified, and not allowing them to be able to challenge the doctor so long as the doctor acted within the boundaries of their field. Instead, we have more insurance - more paperwork, and more bureaucracy - all of which means that doctor's will have to charge more to cover the administrative costs, and individuals and companies will have to pay more to cover the same insurance since they are now mandated (illegally) to have insurance.
True health care reform would not require individuals to have insurance, but actually accomplish lowering the costs. ACA does not do that for numerous reasons.
SOPA/ProtectIP currently before the Congress are in similar scenarios - pandering to corporate interests at the expense of the people, codifying it in Federal law. One provision would make some actions that were civil issues under the DMCA criminal issues; others essentially allow corporations to wiretap you without any due process.
It will also be interesting to see how SCOTUS rules on immigration. The Federal Government as designed does not have enough power to enforce all the laws it sets out; thereby it needs to work with state and local communities to enforce all laws. As a result all levels of government have the responsibility for upholding the laws of its locality and that of above it. However, the President is presently refusing to enforce some laws and prohibiting localities from doing so as well, claiming only the Federal government has the authority to uphold federal laws, though that is not the case.
True reform will not be possible under Congress stops pandering to corporate interests, and the courts uphold a Federal government of limited powers.
Dec 14, 2011, 12:52 PMThe problem with the critique of the "free market" is that such critique lacks an alternative. It is still the best method of allocating scarce resources.
Every alternative requires some other actor deciding how resources are allocated, and these actors are seldom objective.
Dec 15, 2011, 12:29 AMFor material goods, the free market works.
But for immaterial goods, things are a lot different. Copyright protected works are not 'scarce'. The internet and computers reduce the price for copying these works to the point where giving one person a copy of the work is just as expensive as giving it to everyone in the whole world.
Yet, the neocapitalist viewpoint is that since we CAN attempt to treat these works like property, we "SHOULD". When all the evidence so far seems to indicate that this model is far from the best we can do, if not downright counterproductive.
What this article points out is the fact that the government is in the business of regulating power. More precisely: Preventing and mitigating inequalities in the balance of power. That Freedom, and Finance, are both forms of Power, and need to be balanced against each other, is a fine point that very few people appear to appreciate.
Jan 9, 2012, 6:40 AMI am refreshed by the author's use of history to develop a perspective that is broad and deep enough to provide a lens sufficiently wide-angle to enable us to see the developing pattern of this court's rulings during the prior three decades. The Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties provide an excellent paradigm for the economic and political conditions that have driven the current SCOTUS's judicial activism since the first Reagan appointees. The irony of this is hilarious, yet, frightening. The Lochner decision and the Courts between 1870 (roughly) and 1936 were activist assaults on the legacy of the Marshall Court. Are we ready for another 20 or 30 years of this trend? I'm not.
Apr 4, 2012, 4:31 PMIf one takes the ultra right idea to its full extent, we end up with those that earn $200K or more and better than anyone below that level. If corporations wish to hire their workers for a $1 an hour, so be it. Those who refuse to work at that rate can live in the streets or the hills, or die of starvation. After all they could have taken the job for $1 per hour but didn't. If there are too many people and some die, so be it--or so they seem to think. After all they got theirs by working hard. Luck or position never had anything to do with it. Just ask Justice Thomas!!! We're going back further than the Gilded age--more like the Medieval ages with lords and slaves--of various caliber. I'm glad I won't live to see it all happen.
Apr 4, 2012, 6:20 PMMr. Dooley is credited with the prescient observation that (notwithstanding its members are appointed and enjoy life tenure) "the Supreme Court watches the election returns."
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Jedediah Purdy is a professor of law at Duke University School of Law.
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