Legal Commentary

My Appearance on C*SPAN?s Washington Journal

By Randy Barnett

Here is my discussion of the constitutionality of the individual mandate with Simon Lazarus on C*SPAN?s Washington Journal this morning:

I was a little frustrated with the format. Lazarus, who is a perfectly nice man, was able to make long speech-like points, but because the host then moved to a phone call or tweet without inviting me to respond, a lot of what he said went unrebutted. Perhaps I should just have jumped in, but this seemed to violate the well-mannered spirit of C*SPAN.

UPDATE: This is from David Yerushalmi, who represents Thomas More Law Center in its lawsuit challenging the individual mandate that is now on appeal to the Sixth Circuit:

You indicate in your VC blog that Lazarus is a ?perfectly nice man.? You have more patience for raw dishonest polemics than I have. While he is superficially ?polite,? he was being purposefully dishonest and branding you and the rest of us as dangerous radicals. That might cut it on MSNBC or Fox News where discussants are expected to marginalize the adversary, in a CSPAN format where you were playing by the rules to a fault, he took advantage. We can all disagree about next steps in the nationalization of all gov?t regulation and the destruction of federalism, but to describe any of the serious arguments we have all raised against the Individual Mandate in the way Lazarus did is destructive of serious discourse and pure gutter level polemics.

Readers can judge for themselves by watching the program. As an academic, I suppose I am used to these sorts of polemics.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on December 19, 2010 (boomark / email).