This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 19th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown at the Cato Institute's annual Constitution Day festivities attorney and Cato Institute's senior

fellow Randy Barnett revisited the big case of the term, the case that decided the fate of

the President's health care law known as Obamacare.

The legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,

commonly known as Obamacare, which I advocated as a law professor before representing the National Federation of

Independent Businesses, one of its lawyers, was about two huge things.

Saving the country from Obamacare and saving the Constitution for the country.

To my great disappointment, we lost the first point in the Supreme Court's 5 to 4 ruling

to uphold the Health Care Act.

But to my enormous relief, we won the second.

Before the decision, I figured that it was all or nothing.

If we lost on Obamacare, it would mean

that the government and law professors reading of the commerce and necessary and proper clause it would have

have prevailed. If we won, it would be because our theories of the

commerce and necessary and proper clauses had been affirmed by the court.

But as it happened, although we did not succeed in invalidating

Obamacare, our view of the commerce and necessary

and proper clauses were affirmed by five justices.

If before the case was decided you had put a gun to my head

and mandated that I choose one of these outcomes

over the other, I believe I would have picked the Constitution.

...