Your April 1 editorial “The Roberts Court Defines Itself,” critical as it was of the willingness of the court’s conservative justices “to replace law made by Congress with law made by justices,” didn’t go far enough. It was nothing less than astonishing for conservative justices to suggest that approval of the mandate to buy health insurance under the Commerce Clause would allow Congress to mandate that we eat broccoli. Indeed, why should the conservatives on the court insist that proponents define a bright line to distinguish which mandates might be allowable or not under the Commerce Clause? This is not a case about drawing bright lines. No one is arguing that mandates should be tolerated for ordinary public policy issues that can be addressed in alternative ways. Health care is, far and away, the most challenging domestic issue our country faces. All of us need health care now or will need it in the future. No one should be a free rider who can afford to pay something imposing on others costs he should bear. The failure of “markets” couldn’t be clearer. Indeed, the threat to our nation’s security posed by our health care crisis is like a plague, gradually endangering all other government programs. That Congress should act under the Commerce Clause should be expected. And mandating that everyone obtain coverage or pay a fine is entirely reasonable and necessary. JOHN O. FOX
Amherst, Mass., April 2, 2012 The writer, a former tax lawyer, is a visiting professor at Mount Holyoke College. To the Editor: Partisans on both sides of the health care litigation insist with predictable symmetry that the Constitution is clear — and that it mandates a decision in their favor. In fact, there are no clear precedents, and as in most cases that reach the Supreme Court, there are plausible legal arguments on both sides. In such a case, none of the justices, liberal or conservative, are wholly immune from the pressures of their own political philosophies. That inescapable fact is no grounds for disparagement of the court or its members. Of all the justices on the court, Anthony M. Kennedy is probably the one most able to separate his views on the merits of the law as a matter of policy from his analysis of its constitutionality. DOUGLAS M. PARKER
Ojai, Calif., April 2, 2012 The writer is a retired lawyer who has lectured and written about the Supreme Court. To the Editor: In your editorial you state: “A split court striking down the act will be declaring itself virtually unfettered by the law. And if that happens along party lines ... the court will mark itself as driven by politics.” This court has so repeatedly marked itself as driven by politics that it is no longer viable as an unbiased interpreter of the Constitution. For the court to retain its stature as the rightful determiner of constitutional rights, it will need to start functioning as a body of nine and not a body of “gee — I wonder how Justice Kennedy will decide.” When a body of nine becomes, in reality, a body of one, our system of separation of powers is badly in need of overhaul. RUTH KARTER
Coconut Creek, Fla., April 1, 2012 To the Editor: Voluntarily or otherwise, all of us are or will be consumers of health care. If the Roberts court strikes down the individual mandate as unconstitutional and thereby eviscerates the Affordable Care Act, perhaps the next move should be to repeal the law that says hospitals must provide services to anyone arriving for care. When enough middle-class Americans arrive at the emergency room after a car accident or in the throes of a heart attack only to find that they are denied care because of an inability to pay, perhaps then, as a society, we will engage in the larger moral debate about the role that health care plays for all of us as a community and how to pay for it. It may be, however, that too many of my fellow citizens agree with the audience members at the Republican debate in Tampa, Fla., who cheered when Wolf Blitzer of CNN asked if an uninsured person should be left to die. TODD THAMES
San Antonio, April 1, 2012
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