How Scalia Distorts the Framers

July 4, 2012

 

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.