Bill Clinton Fibs on Obamacare Constitutionality

Former president Bill Clinton said today on MSNBC that Obamacare shouldn’t be struck down by the Supreme Court – he actually said it wasn’t unconstitutional in any “way, shape or form” — and instead suggested that the only reason it would be struck down is pure politics.

The oral arguments, Clinton said, were:

unusually politicized … Nobody knows how well it’s going to work, because it’s just now being implemented. But I don’t think it was unconstitutional in any way, shape or form. Even in the 1790s, George Washington mandated that shipping companies insure their employees, he signed a bill mandating that able-bodied citizens have firearms in their home because they thought the British were coming again, John Adams signed a bill to mandate that individual seamen have hospitalization insurance. To me, it’s hard to take the constitutional argument seriously, so I think there’s a little more politics.

This, of course, is absolutely wrong on the merits. The original U.S. Congress did require shipping companies to buy insurance for their employees, but that’s the same as requiring that you buy insurance if you want to drive a car – it’s not a mandate connected to breathing, as health insurance is. The Militia Act of 1792, requiring that able-bodied citizens arm themselves for militia training, is based on the Militia Clause of the Constitution; Obamacare’s individual mandate is based on nothing. Adams’ bill with regard to seamen buying hospitalization insurance is once again non-analogic: that statute created a tax to be withheld by the employer, forced the taxes to be turned over to the Treasury, and then forced those tax dollars to be spent to support sick and injured seamen. But the act didn’t, as Clinton states, “mandate that individual seamen have hospitalization insurance.” That’s simply incorrect.

But this is how the left plays the Constitution game – they cite cases that have nothing to do with anything, and claim that they provide “precedent.” They don’t. The only people politicizing Obamacare are the liberal judges, who pretend that the Constitution allows the federal government to do anything and everything. The left is attempting to reverse that truism in order to promote Obama’s re-election campaign. He’s planning on running against the Supreme Court. That’s his prerogative. But that doesn’t mean the left won’t fib to do it.