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"There's a misimpression out there that... federal agents arrive in black helicopters dressed in fully equipped armed ninja costumes, kick down your bedroom door and drag you off at the point of bayonets to an insurance agency."

... hyperbolized lawprof Walter Dellinger at yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. (Video here.)

In fact, what -- all that happens is that for those who are not otherwise exempted and -- when they're filling out their federal income tax return, if you're not maintaining minimum coverage, you have to pay an additional 2.5 percent, much less than Social Security. That's all that happened.

So in that sense, this great intrusion on liberty doesn't approach any slippery slopes or exceed any understood limits in our legal culture. 

I thought the point of worrying about approaching slippery slopes is that we would otherwise accept one incremental intrusion after another and never see fit to draw the line and, thus lulled, we would lose our liberty.

Full post as published by Althouse on February 03, 2011 (boomark / email).