Kagan Pressed on Commerce Clause and Vegetables
During her confirmation hearing yesterday, Elena Kagan was pressed to give her view of the commerce clause by Senator Coburn, who used an extended metaphor about the government forcing individuals to purchase vegetables:
Republicans are pouncing on the less-than-crystal-clear answer Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan gave late in Tuesday's confirmation hearing to a question from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) about whether the government has the right to micromanage Americans' diets.
"If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the Commerce Clause?" Coburn asked.
"Sounds like a dumb law," Kagan replied. "But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it’s constitutional and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless."
That portion of Kagan's noncommittal answer seemed to suggest that Congress had carte blanche to create a nanny state that would regulate Americans' day-to-day lives. "Kagan declines to say gov't has no power to tell Americans what to eat," reads a headline on the video posted by Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans and currently prominently linked on the Drudge Report.
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