Watch this one: Roe vs. Obamacare

Most legal challanges to Obamacare are taking the route that Govenment cannot mandate that indivuals buy a particular product, such as healthcare insurance. Predictably, the supporters of Obamacare, rely on New Deal–era precedents that define the Commerce Clause broadly — so broadly, in fact, that Speaker Nancy Pelosi described Congress’s power to regulate health care as “essentially unlimited.”

As noted
here, there is another issue that has been overlooked in all of this.

Strong words. But what Pelosi seems to forget is that every congressional power is limited — by the rest of the Constitution. Therefore, even assuming Congress has the power to regulate health care, it cannot do so in a way that violates fundamental constitutional rights. Congress could not, for example, deny Americans their First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble” even though public assemblies spread germs and, thus, presumably burden the health-care system.

Privacy, like speech and assembly, is a fundamental constitutional right, according to Roe.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Court described Roe as a rule of “personal autonomy” that protects all “intimate and personal choices . . . central to personal dignity” in matters “fundamentally affecting a person.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has argued that abortion restrictions violate the constitutional principle that the law cannot treat a woman “as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices.” Consistent with these broad principles, courts have held that the right to privacy includes, for example, the right to refuse medical treatment — even life-saving treatment — and the right to access acupuncture services.

Because the right to privacy is deemed fundamental, any statute that threatens that right is subject to “strict scrutiny” by the courts. It is difficult to see how the individual mandate would survive such scrutiny. After all, if the right to privacy guarantees our liberty to make “intimate,” “personal” decisions relating to “health,” “dignity,” and “autonomy,” does it not also protect our right not to buy health insurance?

This lawsuit, filed in Mississippi, may have more "legs" than all the others. Stay tuned in.