This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 28, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Today at the High Court, day three of oral arguments over the President's health care

law, specifically, to what extent can the federal government

compel state behavior by threatening to withhold funds for Medicaid.

Tim Sandifer is principal attorney the Pacific Legal Foundation and co-author

of one Cato Institute brief filed in the

Obamacare case.

We spoke earlier today.

Today the issue before the court was whether Obamacare's expansion of Medicaid is constitutional under the spending

clause of the Constitution which allows Congress to spend money by giving

states grants but then attaching strings to those grants and telling the

states if you want this money you have to do what we say. And what limits

exist on on that power that the government has now? We really don't know.

There's really only two cases that talk about it.

There's the Butler case from 1936, which being so old doesn't really get much attention.

And then there's the Dole case in 1987, which said that although the federal government can place conditions on the grants of federal funding, if it goes too far, it would count as coercion and it would interfere with state autonomy and

therefore violate the federalist system.

Okay, so in order it seems for the court to say that there's any limit at all on the government's power to compel state

behavior through dangling money, they would actually have to establish some kind of limit here.

That's right, they would have to come up with some rule.

And I think the big challenge for opponents of Obamacare here is to explain why this goes

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