I came across an old complaint about the Affordable Care Act during my Googlings, which criticized a law professor’s attempts to alleviate concerns about the penalty aspect of the individual mandate. Walter Dellinger told the Senate Judiciary Committee back in 2011, according to Ann Althouse:

There’s a misimpression out there that… federal agents arrive in black helicopters dressed in fully equipped armed ninja costumes, kick down your bedroom door and drag you off at the point of bayonets to an insurance agency.

In fact, what — all that happens is that for those who are not otherwise exempted and — when they’re filling out their federal income tax return, if you’re not maintaining minimum coverage, you have to pay an additional 2.5 percent, much less than Social Security. That’s all that happened.

So in that sense, this great intrusion on liberty doesn’t approach any slippery slopes or exceed any understood limits in our legal culture.

The concern seems to be that the government will exercise its police power against people who refuse to cooperate with the insurance mandate, pay the fine, or respond in any way to what the law says. Believe me, I am very sympathetic to the argument that we must be vigilant against expansions of the government’s police power, but this is not one of those instances of government going too far. Besides that, I’ll be more sympathetic to concerns from the right over police overreach when they get more consistent about it. Continue reading →