Randy Barnett, the Georgetown University law professor acknowledged by many as the leading legal intellectual arguing against President Obama’s health care overhaul, spoke at the Cato Institute Monday about the timing of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the law. It’s good, he said, because “we have an election teed up in order” to “reverse Obamacare.”
“It is within the power of the electorate to reverse Obamacare,” Barrett said. “It’s not going to be easy and it’s not a guarantee, but it’s something that can be done and we have an election teed up in order to do that. The timing of this was actually quite good for that. … There is reason for hope and it’s counterproductive for conservatives and libertarians to be completely pessimistic and have nothing but doom and gloom about what happens or what is likely to happen.”
Barnett said he wasn’t “surprised necessarily that we lost,” but was “surprised about how we lost.”
“Everyone assumed — and I mean everyone, including those on the other side — assumed that we would either win on both of these issues or lose on both of these issues,” he explained. “In other words, that in order to prevail in our challenge to the constitutionality of the individual mandate, we would have to prevail on our commerce clause issues.”
“If that’s what we were told by those who believe in the living Constitution, then under those rules of engagement we have five votes for the proposition that both the government is of limited enumerated powers, that the commerce clause is restricted in the way that we maintained from day 1, and that the individual insurance mandate exceeded that restriction. Now, I consider that to be major, because the alternative would have been so much worse.”
Videography by Sarah Hofmann