From the Archive: The late Supreme Court Justice Scalia put his right-wing ideology above any respect for the Constitution’s Framers, even resorting to a made-up view attributed to Alexander Hamilton in Scalia’s dissent to the landmark upholding of the Affordable Care Act, wrote Robert Parry in 2012.
By Robert Parry (Originally published on July 4, 2012)
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, 2012, 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.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
That sounds pretty authoritative, doesn’t it? Here’s Hamilton, one of the strongest advocates for the Constitution, offering a prescient warning about “Obamacare” from the distant past of 1788. Except that Scalia and his cohorts are misleading you. In effect, they turned Hamilton’s observation inside out.
In Federalist Paper No. 33, Hamilton was not writing about the Commerce Clause. He was referring to clauses in the Constitution that grant Congress the power to make laws that are “necessary and proper” for executing its powers and that establish federal law as “the supreme law of the land.”
Hamilton also wasn’t condemning those powers, as Scalia and his friends would have you believe. Hamilton was defending the two clauses by poking fun at the Anti-Federalist alarmists who had stirred up opposition to the Constitution with warnings about how it would trample America’s liberties. In the cited section of No. 33, Hamilton is saying the two clauses had been unfairly targeted by “virulent invective and petulant declamation.”
It…