The Un-Constitutionality of Health Care ‘Reform’ was detailed September 29, 1993 in the Wall Street Journal, page A19. One of the few locations of the article on-line is here. Some selected quotations:

If the legality of a health-care package featuring federally mandated universal participation is litigated (and we can bet it will be), and the system is upheld, it will mark the final extension of this originally modest grant of federal authority. Thereafter, Congress will be able to regulate you not because of who you are, what you do for a living, or whether you use the interstate highways, but merely because you exist. …

One of the fundamental tenets underlying the Constitution of 1787 was that the federal government was a government of limited powers. Unlike the states, which had more general authority to regulate their citizens, the federal government was to be limited to those powers found within the four corners of the Constitution. In particular, Congress could exercise only that authority specifically granted to it by the people and the states.

There was a list — and not a very long list. One of the powers enumerated on it was the “Power . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations and among the several States.”

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If the courts uphold Congress’s authority to impose this system, they must once and for all draw the curtain on the Constitution of 1787 and admit that there isnothing that Congress cannot do under the Commerce Clause. The polite fiction that we live under a government of limited powers must be discarded — Leviathan must be embraced.

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The implications of this final extension of the commerce power are frightening. If Congress can regulate you because you are , then it can do anything to you not forbidden by the handful of restraints contained in the Bill of Rights. For example, if Congress thinks Americans are too fat — many are — and this somehow will affect interstate commerce — who’s to say it doesn’t? — can it not decree that Americans shall lose weight? Indeed, under the new system, any activity that might increase the costs of health care might be regulatable.

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Once Congress’s power is extended to every individual not because of his activities, but because he is, limits on its power will depend upon the fortitude and creativity of the courts. No American, whatever his policy views on health-care reform, should rejoice at the disappearance of the last fragments of the principle that the federal government is one of limited powers. It is indeed ironic, and sad, that as the rest of the world is discovering the virtues of limiting their governments, the U.S. seems hellbent on unleashing its own.