This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 15th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

At the heart of the case against Obamacare is the assertion that it's a violation of

the Commerce Clause to the Constitution, which is supposed to allow the federal government to assure

that commerce is regular.

So why do so many Conservatives believe that the Commerce Clause must be reined in for

Obamacare, but viewed expansively when it comes to states setting their own drug laws.

Cato Institute Legal Policy analyst David Ritker's comments.

Both liberals and conservatives like to use an expansive reading of the Commerce Clause power.

When it suits their political goals, but right now we have a crop of Republican legislators coming into Washington, some of them in

relatively senior positions who in the past have used the commerce power to

reach intrastate drugs in the name of the drug war and now they're taking the position that Obamacare is an unprecedented

Federal power grab when they have in fact made almost parallel claims to reach goals that they wanted.

Looking to the Supreme Court, which may well hear an Obamacare challenge soon, what do we know about the jurisprudence of the high court in the

last hundred years or so when it comes to the Commerce Clause?

Well the Commerce Clause certainly it has been interpreted more broadly than the founders envisioned.

And in Wickard v. Philburn, which is this is a New Deal case, and this is about a farmer who's growing wheat and he's feeding his cattle with this wheat that he's growing and he's trying to to

Cabin off this wheat from federal regulation because it's not leaving his farm.

Yet the federal government says, no, we can apply this wheat that you're using towards your quota,

because it is impacting the the market that the government is

regulating and so as we you know we've progressed through the decades, this substantial effects test as it is termed currently,

it can reach into basically any activity.

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