*Drilling down to the conservative justices apparent objection to health care law

Here's a cogent - and quite disconcerting - assessment from NY magazine's Jonathan Chait:

The debate seems to have centered around a "limiting principle." If you haven't closely followed the arguments, here is what it means. The challengers have managed to wall off the health-care law from overwhelming precedent that would uphold it by defining the individual as something wholly different from other regulations -- a regulation of "inactivity," as opposed to "activity." The distinction itself lacks any legal or even intellectual precedent. Having accepted a shaky series of premises, this has led the Court to settle on what it regards as the central issue of the case: If Congress can force you to purchase health insurance, why can't it make you buy broccoli, or anything at all? (And since this would be bad, then obviously Congress can't be allowed to make you buy health insurance.)

[CUT]

To even accept this as the central question at hand is to accept a very strange way of looking at the law. Certainly, the Court needs to be mindful of setting a dangerous precedent. But the Court does not habitually strike down any use of government power that could conceivably, when stretched to its maximal limit, have nasty results. As Akil Amar notes, if Congress can tax income it could tax income at 100% percent. If you can conscript 18-year-olds into the army, you can conscript them for 25-year terms like the Czars did. You could put them into the Army Corps of Engineers and turn them into a vast pool of government slave labor. But such hypothetical possibilities don't normally dominate jurisprudence the way they have at the Court this week.

Chait argues that something even more destructive could be unfolding at the conservative-controlled court: The view that government involvement at nearly all levels should be curtailed.

*Very interesting New Yorker podcast with Jeffrey Toobin and Ryan Lizza discussing this week's oral arguments.