Thursday, April 1, 2010

I Like Being Right

The other day, I wrote a dialectic in determining whether the new healthcare reform insurance requirement was constitutional or not and concluded that it was.

Seems that my conclusion is so widely held that a recent "debate" on the subject at the esteemed University of Washington Law School couldn't find a single law professor to come in and say that it wasn't:

The University of Washington billed it as a debate among distinguished law faculty over whether the new federal health-care law is constitutional.

But while the four panelists at a packed event Tuesday may have differed on some of the finer points, they all agreed on the big question: They said the new law passes constitutional muster and that various lawsuits arguing the opposite — including the one joined last week by state Attorney General Rob McKenna — have little merit or chance of success.

Even John McKay, the former Republican U.S. attorney for Western Washington said that while he sympathized with some of the political issues in play, he thought the lawsuits lacked merit. In fact, he questioned the timing and thrust of the cases: "One way to say it is, that this has to be seen as a political exercise," he said.

Moderator Hugh Spitzer noted the lack of a vigorous dissenting voice. "I will say that we tried very hard to get a professor who could come and who thinks this is flat-out unconstitutional," he said.

...

The panelists seemed to agree that if any of the cases make it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices would be hard-pressed to find the law unconstitutional, given some recent precedents they have set in other cases.

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