How Scalia Distorts the Framers
Exclusive: In
rejecting the Commerce Clause as the constitutional foundation for the
Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court’s right-wing justices distorted
America’s founding narrative, including one made-up view attributed to
Alexander Hamilton, writes Robert Parry.
By Roberet Parry
Antonin Scalia and the three other right-wing justices who sought to
strike down health-care reform cited no less an authority on the
Constitution than one of its key Framers, Alexander Hamilton, as
supporting their concern about the overreach of Congress in regulating
commerce.
In their angry dissent on
June 28, the four wrote: “If Congress can reach out and command even
those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the
market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or
in Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws . . .
spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.’”
They footnoted Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 33.
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