This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 27, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Today is the second day of oral argument and challenges brought against the Affordable

Care Act, also known as Obamacare, the individual

mandate the requirement that Americans carry a minimum amount and quality of health insurance was

at issue today.

Trevor Burris, a legal associate at the Cato Institute,

comments on today's oral argument.

The first half of this argument was the Solicitor General

making several arguments, one of which is that health care market is different.

As with any Supreme Court argument, he was pretty much on the ropes the entire time,

but it seemed like he actually had some trouble making that distinction. the lower courts, the way in which they sort of try and say that this is business as usual,

this is just a different timing mechanism for when you're going to pay for health care,

well when they start getting pushed on that, and that's of course one of the jobs of a

judge or a justice is to push you on that they've never been able to really

articulate how it is actually different and in the solicitor's argument today, he was on the ropes.

It was the four conservative justices mostly keep him on the ropes, but he was definitely on the ropes.

And Justice Kennedy, for his part, made something of an assertion, although perhaps within the context of a

hypothetical, that the individual mandate, as they've laid it out does change the relationship substantially

between the federal government and the individual. Yes he did and that was a

very very telling thing in the early part of the argument and I think it wasn't a

hypothetical I think that justice Kennedy has many times articulated the

...