A Scalia Tea Leaf on the Healthcare Law?

by Beverly Mann
from The Annarborist

A Scalia Tea Leaf on the Healthcare Law?

Judicial decisions, like the Constitution itself, are nothing more than “parchment barriers,” 5 Writings of James Madison 269, 272 (G. Hunt ed. 1901). Both depend on a judicial culture that understands its constitutionally assigned role, has the courage to persist in that role when it means announcing unpopular decisions, and has the modesty to persist when it produces results that go against the judges’ policy preferences. Today’s opinion falls far short of living up to that obligation—short on the facts, and short on the law.

—Antonin Scalia, yesterday, dissenting in Michigan v. Bryant

The tea-leaf-reading on how two or three of the justices will vote on the constitutionality of the PPACA has become a bit tiresome, I think, but I’ll engage in it here anyway.

As most people who’ve followed the issue closely know, in 2005 the Supreme Court held (in a case called Gonzales v. Raich) that Congress had the authority under the Commerce Clause to criminalize the production and use of marijuana even when the marijuana is home-grown and used only by the grower, and therefore never enters interstate commerce, because marijuana grown for the personal use can have a substantial effect on the marijuana trade in interstate commerce.

Also as people who’ve followed the PPACA-constitutionality tea leaf-reading debate know, Scalia wrote a separate opinion in that case concurring in the majority’s result. The Commerce Clause alone, he said, does not give Congress that authority, but that Clause coupled with the Necessary and Proper Clause—the clause that gives Congress the power to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof,” including the power to regulate interstate commerce—do.

A fine distinction that only constitutional law nerds think about, but it is the distinction that is at the heart of the debate about the constitutionality of the PPACA.

Michigan v. Bryant is not a Commerce Clause case. It is a Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause case. The Sixth Amendment gives criminal defendants certain specific rights, including the right to confront (i.e., cross-examine) the prosecution’s witnesses under oath at trial. And seven years ago, in a case called Crawford v. Washington, the Court reversed a 1980 opinion that had carved out a chasm of an exception to that right by allowing the admission of hearsay statements if the statement bears “adequate ‘indicia of reliability.’ ”

Scalia wrote the Crawford opinion. Since then Scalia has been at the forefront of the Court’s expansion of Crawford to kill prosecutors’ use at trial of various types of hearsay evidence, and apparently had been able to run interference internally within the Court to kill attempts by prosecutors to overturn Crawford at least in part. Until yesterday, when he lost that battle to, of all justices, Sonia Sotomayor.

Scalia, in a dissent eloquent both in its logic and its passion, masterfully deconstructs Sotomayor’s opinion. I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in issues of this sort or who wants to see Scalia in a context beyond the sort of public caricature he has, seemingly deliberately, become. That opinion is very understandable to non-lawyers, I think.

But its importance to the issue of the constitutionality of the PPACA is not just the paragraph I quoted from it but that he wrote it in defending a constitutional right dearer to the political left than to the political right. The paragraph is the second-last one. The very last one says:

For all I know, Bryant has received his just deserts. But he surely has not received them pursuant to the procedures that our Constitution requires. And what has been taken away from him has been taken away from us all.

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Scalia’s dissent is here. Sotomayor’s opinion is at here.