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Why Broccoli? Limiting Principles And Popular Constitutionalism In The Health Care Case, Christopher W. Schmidt, Mark D. Rosen

Christopher W. Schmidt

Crucial to the Court’s disposition in the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a hypothetical mandate to purchase broccoli, which Congress never had considered and nobody thought would ever be enacted. For the five Justices who concluded the ACA exceeded Congress’s commerce power, a fatal flaw in the government’s case was its inability to offer an adequate explanation for why upholding that mandate would not entail also upholding a federal requirement that all citizens purchase broccoli. The minority insisted the broccoli mandate was distinguishable.

This Article argues that the fact that all the Justices insisted on providing …