by Jeremy Leaming
The arguments lodged against the health care law’s minimum coverage provision have been described by constitutional law experts as radically libertarian or terribly misguided. But during oral argument before the Supreme Court, the right-wing bloc, led by Justice Antonin Scalia appeared eager to en
dorse the challengers’ arguments against an integral provision of the Affordable Care Act. We’ll likely know sometime in June whether the high court’s conservative wing was indeed persuaded by the challengers’ arguments.
In a guest post for Balkinization, Rob Weiner, a partner at Arnold & Porter LLP, provides greater detail to the attacks on the health care law’s minimum coverage provision writing they “reflect an effort to codify nostalgia as legal doctrine.”
The “most obvious throwback” is the liberty argument, Weiner says. Opponents of the health care law attack the minimum coverage provision as a serious affront to liberty. The minimum coverage provision will require some Americans starting in 2014 to purchase a minimum amount of health care insurance.
The affront to liberty, Weiner writes “is the right not to obtain insurance – by any other name, freedom to contract.”
In the Supreme Court’s 1905 Lochner v New York opinion, the majority held that the freedom to contract was “part of the liberty of the individual protected by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution.” Weiner notes that Lochner thus barred New York from regulating conditions of some workers. And in its 1923 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital opinion, the Court relied on this so-called freedom to contract to protect employers from adhering to the minimum wage law.
A year later, Citizens United still looks like the modern 
onservative jurisprudence 30 years ago, its core watchword has remained invariant: abhorrence for "activist" judges who "legislate from the bench." To showcase their hostility to activism on the right as well as the left, court-focused conservatives have repeatedly denounced the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision Lochner v. New York. Lochner launched and has come to symbolize the notoriously anti-regulatory activism of the first third of the 20th century; the case held that maximum-hours regulation violated employers' and employees' "freedom of contract," a "right" that the five-justice majority divined in the Fifth and 14th amendments' ban on deprivation of liberty without due process of law. Bork called the ruling an "abomination." Meese agreed that the "activist Court of the Lochner era was as illegitimate as the Warren Court." More recently, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., at his 2005 confirmation hearing, said, "Reading that opinion, it's quite clear that they're not interpreting the law, they're making the law."