This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

Today marks one year since President Obama signed the law now known as Obamacare,

but what a difference a year makes.

Its popularity has sunk, and the law's constitutional pedigree

is at best highly suspect.

Attorney David Rivkin represented plaintiffs

in Florida versus HHS, in which Judge Vincent found the entire act unconstitutional.

Rivkin spoke at the Cato Institute on Monday.

Now tackling the substance first, the individual mandate which is situated at the very heart of Obamacare. the more importantly in the view of our district court the most fundamental

constitutional principles. It violates centuries of settled case law. It is

fundamentally different from every law regulating commerce that Congress has

been acted from the first day of our

Republic up to now. Indeed, on the flip side of it, ladies and gentlemen, if a mandate were

to be constitutional, much of the famous drafting of the original

Constitution and of a bill of rights and all of our Congress's subsequent

Congress's legislative work in the centuries hence at best is largely incoherent and it were superfluous.

Thus I was not engaging in hyperbole when I stated during the

December 16 war argument before Judge Roger Vincent and I cross motions with summary judgment,

but the individual mandate in the Act, chairmanly referred to as PPACA, for those of you

who are like acronyms, which it is the key part of a single most

unconstitutional piece of statutory language in our history. I also said at the time that

it's one of most badly drafted statues I've ever seen but that's a

...