Which Poltical Party Maintains That a Health Care Responsibility Law Is Unconstitutional, But Torture Is Not

Can you say Republi-CONs.

To understand why, read the Washington Post, The Supreme Court vs. the Commerce Clause, which notes:

"Wickard v. Filburn is the case in which the federal government fined Roscoe Filburn for growing wheat in excess of the quotas set out in the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. They also forced him to destroy the excess wheat, even though he said it was only for personal use. The Supreme Court backed the government. Key quote:

    Even if appellee’s activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as ‘direct’ or ‘indirect.’

This is, I think, the most honest way to present the argument. Based on existing precedent, the individual mandate is clearly constitutional. Free riders in the health insurance market clearly have 'a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce.'"

The read The New York Times, Bush-Era Torture: A Dissenting View, which comments on a memo that Bush administration ignored, and later "tried to collect all the copies of [the] memo and destroy them":

"We know that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their lieutenants did not like dissenting viewpoints. The justification for the invasion of Iraq depended on the muzzling of anyone who doubted the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and for the most part political appointees fell into line—Jack Goldsmith excepted.

Now there’s evidence that another important voice in the Bush administration resisted certain, shall we say, constitutional excesses. Philip Zelikow, a high-ranking State Department lawyer, argued in a Feb. 15, 2006 memo that international law prohibited waterboarding and other so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' by any American official – whether he was a military interrogator at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, or a C.I.A. operative at a 'black prison' hidden in some foreign country."