If sometime this month the Supreme Court rules ObamaCare unconstitutional liberals will need a scapegoat to blame for what would be not just a defeat for the president’s signature legislative achievement but a historic turning point in the struggle against the aggregation of federal power. But according to the New York Times, the culprit won’t be congressional Republicans or the Tea Party. Instead, it will be the humble green vegetable that many Americans profess to hate: broccoli.
According to the Times’s James Stewart, the turning point in the battle to overturn the health care law was the moment a simple argument illustrating the way liberals have been using the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to expand federal power took hold of the public imagination. It is, as he writes, the “defining symbol” of the debate. As Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out from the bench during oral arguments on the issue earlier this year, if Congress can require every citizen to purchase health insurance simply because it was perceived to be in the national interest, then it could make people buy broccoli, too. Stewart traces the origins of the analogy that has been raised repeatedly by libertarians since President Clinton’s attempt to ram a national health insurance bill through Congress in the 1990s. But while liberals dismiss it as simplistic, it actually goes straight to the heart of the issue. Indeed, if ObamaCare is overturned and the Court begins a rollback of the way liberals have been abusing the Constitution for a century, it may be that broccoli will have played a key role in preserving American liberty.
