I always find it troubling when I disagree with Matt Franck, but at least partial disagreement is where I find myself today.  In a post on Bench Memos, he discusses what he believes to be the judicial role in evaluating the constitutionality of the federal health care bill.  He doubts that there is a proper role for the courts in evaluating the health care bill, including the individual mandate that the law would impose.  I believe that the mandate does fall within the scope of judicial review, though not on the basis of anything Roger Pilon or George Will had to say.

The basic function of the judicial process is to determine what law applies to a given set of facts.  In making that determination, courts look to the laws passed by Congress, to the dictates of treaties and other legally binding agreements to which the US is a party, and to the Constitution to determine which laws are applicable.  Courts have a number of ways to deal with laws that conflict with one another.  Among statutes, or between statutes and treaties, the usual rule is that whatever happened most recently overrides older law if the conflict is unavoidable.  The famous exception to this usual rule applies when a law comes up against the Constitution; in that case, the Constitution overrides the statute or treaty. Determining whether the Constitution has overridden some other law is what we know as Judicial Review.  And, while we regularly talk about courts “striking down” laws, my understanding of the physics of that action are really closer to a court saying “we cannot apply this law to any set of facts.”  The statute still exists, but the law it creates is unusable.

Implicit in that entire process is the fact that what the courts are evaluating are, indeed, laws.  Because the (originalist) Constitution only enables Congress to pass laws within certain enumerated categories, it naturally follows that anything which does not follow from that authority cannot be considered a law. Because courts are not in the business of applying things which are not laws, it must follow that the courts cannot find constitutional any penalty which results from a law beyond the federal government’s authority to create.

In other words, the government may very well impose an individual mandate and hope that most people comply, and their doing so would seem to be just outside the realm of court review.  But the instant they impose a penalty on people who do not obey the individual mandate — the instant they seek to impose a fine — the courts now have a subject to address which is well inside the proper judicial role.  The courts can, and should, find the individual mandate unconstitutional because it imposes penalties which the federal government has no authority to impose.

Tags: constitution, healthcare