Healthy start

Note to Senate Democrats who have to run for re-election in 2012: Some of you may have blown your last chance:

Efforts to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law died a quick death in the Senate Wednesday, but the GOP got a consolation prize — a bipartisan fix to a tax-reporting requirement in the law that was widely panned by businesses.

A Democratic amendment to repeal the law's new tax-reporting requirements passed, 81-17, with broad bipartisan support. A Republican amendment to repeal the entire health reform law, meanwhile, fell along party lines, 47-51, in a procedural vote.

Even Richard Lugar got this one right.

Over at reason.com, Steve Chapman writes about Judge Roger Vinson's ruling that the individual mandate in Obamacare is unconstitutional:

It's one thing for the government to set rules for people who have chosen to engage in economic activity. It's another to dictate to people who have chosen not to.

"It would be a radical departure from existing case law," wrote Vinson, "to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause." Before the law was passed, even a neutral arbiter like the Congressional Budget Office said the mandate was "unprecedented."

Unprecedented it is—and, if allowed, an important precedent for future lawmakers. Vinson noted that Erwin Chemerinsky, a prominent liberal law professor at the University of California at Irvine, has asserted that Congress could not only force Americans to buy health insurance but also to purchase cars—say, to bolster a vital industry and preserve jobs during a recession.

Chemerinsky acknowledged that a law requiring Americans to eat certain vegetables "might"—might!—infringe on constitutional liberties. But you would not be taking a huge leap to surmise that if and when Congress sees reason to enact such a law, plenty of legal thinkers will argue that the Constitution allows it.