The great attraction of Substantive Due Process as a substitute for more specific constitutional guarantees is that it never means never—because it never means anything precise.

Justice Scalia, Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Dep’t of Envt’s Prot., 130 S. Ct. 2592, 2608 (2011).

The Supreme Court has begun its epic consideration of the “most important case ever” — the one reviewing the constitutionality of Obama’s health care reform. Under established law, the case is neither difficult nor very interesting. The challenge is to Congress’s power to impose a (modest and essentially compensatory) penalty on those who do not purchase health insurance as a necessary step to its objective of guaranteeing health insurance coverage for more Americans. As many, many people have written, this is surely a necessary and proper means for regulating the interstate, commercial markets in health insurance and healthcare in order to ameliorate the severe problems suffered by and imposed on others by the uninsured. (Whether it is a wise or good means is not a question that the Court has the power to consider.)

I see the case as a kind of constitutional oddity, where we’re just left with jaws gaping, wondering how we got to this point. The point where the specter of government forcing you to buy broccoli is bandied about as a serious reason to dismantle the post-Great Depression understanding that Congress has power to attempt real solutions to national problems.

The vehemence of the debate is made both possible and inevitable by the uncertainties embedded in the Constitution. The words of the Constitution do not provide absolute constraints on their application. Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce and to do all things necessary and proper to regulate interstate commerce. What’s commerce? What’s necessary? What’s proper?

When words have such open texture, there is room to locate within them many different outcomes in concrete cases. If you hate Obamacare, you’re drawn to thinking of it as illegitimate, surely representative of government excess. And here’s the clause of the Constitution that defines that power, doesn’t grant unlimited power, and so must contain a limit — of some kind, right?

When constitutional or statutory language is unrestrictive, disagreements about how to apply it is played out in a predictable fashion. Not being able to settle the dispute definitively using language, text, and intention, the debate shifts. Legitimacy, not correctness, is the criterion for victory. Tactics in such debates include pointing out the personal inconsistencies of the debaters, breaks with tradition, or slippery slopes. We saw all this on display in the Obamacare litigation.

While the opinions may well sharply differ from the views their questions implied, the conservative members of the Court insisted: that there just must be some judicially enforceable limit to the commerce power, that personal liberty to refrain from commerce is implicit from an unwritten, vague penumbra of constitutional provisions, including the commerce clause itself and the Tenth Amendment’s reservation of unspecified rights to the states and people, and assertions concerning the unprecedented nature of the individual mandate.

The liberals pointed to the routine nature of commercial regulation, the particularities of this market (impliedly noting that most regulations are particularized for certain markets and that health care is an especially odd market), the history of judicial restraint in reviewing economic legislation, etc. And many of us have marveled at the suggestion of unwritten, penumbral individual rights on display in Scalia’s questions, a glaring, personal inconsistency if embraced as doctrine.

Indeed, if the questions reveal his thinking (a big “if” and so I use his name for discussion purposes not to criticize views he has not yet claimed as his own), Scalia has neither precedent nor personal consistency on his side. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong here. He’s using a document that provides few constraints to infer concerns about the extent of federal power that trump concerns about the ability to solve national problems.

We liberals typically see in the Constitution’s structure and historical development a concern for federally protected individual rights and a gradual realignment in favor of broad federal prerogatives to the detriment of state sovereignty — and the counter-majoritarian uses, rather than elite-protecting ones, of federal courts. These broad principles lead us to find, in the uncertain language of due process and perhaps other clauses, a right to privacy and more robust protections for criminal defendants and others who are not likely to be able to protect themselves in the political process.

Scalia doesn’t think much of doctrines like substantive due process and the right of privacy that he perceives as unmoored from the constitutional text. These doctrines, he maintains, provide no limits on judges and permit them to make essentially political judgments on a case by case basis.

But here in the Obamacare cases, as in cases striking down congressional acts in the name of “Our Federalism” rather than specific provisions, Scalia might find his own roving, super-textual mandate for expunging legislation that interferes with economic rights and property. Indeed, the last couple of decades have seen a wave of conservative attacks on the post-Depression legal order: attempts to restore judicial protections of states rights and individual, economic and property rights. From Citizens United, to the conservative reaction to Kelo v. City of New London, to efforts to expand the reach of the takings clause, to the effort in Lopez to reinstate commerce clause limits, to the sovereign immunity and anti-commandeering cases, to the subtle shift from suspect classes to suspect classifications in Equal Protection law. These threads come together in the health care cases. But only because conservatives have chosen to bring them together.

If Obamacare feels, deeply and intuitively, excessive, as I assume it does for some libertarian-minded conservatives, it’s natural to find it inconsistent with a constitutional scheme aimed to cabin excess. First, you just assume there must be a “limit” to what Congress can do under the commerce clause, a limit beyond the existing ones (the Lopez limit to commercial activities when aggregating individual activities to find a substantial economic effect) and the protections against rights violations. But the direction and magnitude of this limit a not specified, a principle beyond “The Federal Government Must Be Limited” is not made clear. Under such conditions, any use of federal power lies on some vector from the origin, along which we can argue at some point lies “too far.” If we have no principle to tell us what purposes the limit serves and what it demarcates, then for any law we can scan around us, 360 degrees, to find the direction in which their is a downward slope, and we can call it slippery.

So what’s the alternative? Originalism or textualism? No. Scalia’s right to look at the power-conferring and rights-protecting language of the Constitution and wonder what structure it implies. It sets out ideas, ideas that reflected and gave birth to practices, and ideas that set the terms of debate. But absolutely nothing in the clauses themselves provides a definitive answer, even in these very easy cases. (I don’t mean here to imply I’m providing any kind of rebuke to recent academic writing concerning the various sorts of originalist interpretive theories. It’s true that I don’t think they work, but this isn’t an argument to that effect.)

What’s odd is not that Scalia does this but that he worries about such odd things. There’s a reason, for example, to worry that textualist elimination of the right of privacy would unleash governmental power inconsistent with the Constitution’s own structure. Not only is it a possibility that government could do all kinds of bad things without the protection of judicially enforced privacy rights, it has actually happened. There are reasons to believe that majority-controlled legislatures filled with culturally and religiously homogeneous legislators might not respect the integrity of the private lives of political minorities.

But what reason do we have to fear that government might force us to engage in unwanted economic transactions that similarly threaten to undermine the anti-authoritarian aims of the Constitution? Is any actually worried that this law is indeed a stepping stone to one forcing us all to buy broccoli or to exercise? In a nutshell, what reason is there to think that the political processes, elections and such, aren’t good enough to protect us from such things? And, most importantly, can you think of any areas where the political processes would indeed fail but where the rights to autonomy contained within and among the Bill of Rights and Civil War amendments would be inadequate to the task?

Politically, I see Obamacare as an attempt at compromise, an attempt to do something about the millions of uninsured while leaving as much to private markets as possible. I’m left to scratch my head and wonder what opponents wish to do actually to solve this problem. Do they understand the extent of problems many Americans have in this market? Consider this:

[Young people without health insurance] aren’t stupid. They’re going to buy insurance later. They’re young and need the money now. …. When they think they have a substantial risk of incurring high medical bills, they’ll buy insurance like the rest of us.

Justice Scalia, at oral argument (emphasis added). And there it is.