Court Opinion

ID: 9770639
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 16:15:36.217761+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:37:23.790752
License: Public Domain

SUTTON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part.
The National Government is “one of enumerated” and limited “powers,” a feature of the United States Constitution “universally admitted” in 1819, McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 405, 4 L.Ed. 579, and still largely accepted today. “But the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted, is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise, as long as our system shall exist.” Id.
So it has. Section 1501 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 requires most Americans to buy a minimum level of medical insurance and, if they do not, to pay a monetary penalty instead. Today’s “question” about the “extent of the powers” granted to Congress goes primarily to its commerce power to compel individuals to buy something they do not want (medical insurance) as part of a regulatory system that a majority of elected representatives do want (national health care).
The claimants’ case. As the claimants see it, Congress’s authority to “regulate” interstate “commerce” extends only to individuals already in the stream of the relevant commercial market, in this instance health insurance. It no more permits Congress to conscript an individual to enter that market on the buy side than it permits Congress to require a company that manufactures cars to peddle health insurance on the sell side. Not only the words of the Commerce Clause undercut the validity of the individual mandate, so too does custom. Congress has never exercised its commerce power in this way, and nothing suggests that this tradition reflects 220 years of self-restraint. If the commerce power permits Congress to force individuals to enter whatever markets it chooses, any remaining hold on national power will evaporate, leaving future limits to the whims of legislative restraint, the epitome of a system without restrictions, balance or any other constraints on power. If Congress does not have a “blank check” in passing war-on-terror legislation, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 536, 124 S.Ct. 2633, 159 L.Ed.2d 578 (2004) (plurality opinion), it should not *550have a blank check in passing healthcare legislation. Even if the commerce power has “evolved over time” in favor of greater congressional power, Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1, 15-16, 125 S.Ct. 2195, 162 L.Ed.2d 1 (2005), that need not invariably be the case, lest each expansion of federal power beget another, piling one inference of an unlimited national police power onto another.
The federal government’s case. The issue is not that simple, the government responds. What has principally changed over the last two centuries is commerce. As means of travel and communication have advanced, any meaningful distinction between local and national commerce has essentially disappeared, and the Court’s tolerance of congressional regulation of local activity reflects this modern reality as much as it reflects a changeable conception of the commerce power. The minimum-essential-coverage mandate fits within the Supreme Court’s commerce clause jurisprudence. Even accepting the claimants’ characterization of the law as regulating “non-activity,” the law still concerns individual decisions that, when aggregated, have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Individuals cannot disclaim the need to obtain health care and to pay for it, as virtually everyone at some point will consume healthcare services. In this sense, it is hard to characterize self-insurance as non-action, as opposed to one of many possible actions an individual may take in determining how to pay for health care. Whether looked at as a mechanism for providing affordable medical care for all or an unprecedented act of national paternalism, both characterizations of the individual mandate go to a policy debate that the American people and their representatives have had, and will continue to have, over the appropriate role of the national government in our lives, the merits of which do not by themselves provide a cognizable basis for invalidating the law.
I.
Before refereeing this complex debate, it is worth asking whether there is another way to resolve it — -whether the insurance mandate can be sustained under a different source of authority: Congress’s power “To lay and collect Taxes ... to ... provide for the ... general Welfare of the United States.” U.S. Const, art. I, § 8, cl. 1. Would that it were so. That would simplify our task, as it is easy to envision a system of national health care, including one with a minimum-essential-coverage provision, permissibly premised on the taxing power. Congress might have raised taxes on everyone in an amount equivalent to the current penalty, then offered credits to those with minimum essential insurance. Or it might have imposed a lower tax rate on people with health insurance than those without it. But Congress did neither of these things, and that makes a difference.
Under the taxing power, a “ ‘tax’ is an enforced contribution to provide for the support of government.” United States v. La Franca, 282 U.S. 568, 572, 51 S.Ct. 278, 75 L.Ed. 551 (1930). The central objective of a tax is to “obtain[ ] revenue.” Child Labor Tax Case, 259 U.S. 20, 38, 42 S.Ct. 449, 66 L.Ed. 817 (1922). A “penalty,” by contrast, regulates conduct by establishing “criteria of wrongdoing and imposing its principal consequence on those who transgress its standard.” Id. In placing a law on one side or the other of this divide, courts consider “the intent and meaning of the legislature” based on “the language of the act.” A. Magnano Co. v. Hamilton, 292 U.S. 40, 46, 54 S.Ct. 599, 78 L.Ed. 1109 (1934).
The individual mandate is a regulatory penalty, not a revenue-raising tax, *551for several reasons. First, that is what Congress said. It called the sanction for failing to obtain medical insurance a “penalty,” not a tax. Words matter, and it is fair to assume that Congress knows the difference between a tax and a penalty, between its taxing and commerce powers, making it appropriate to take Congress at its word. That is all the more true in an era when elected officials are not known for casually discussing, much less casually increasing, taxes. When was the last time a candidate for elective office promised not to raise “penalties”?
Second, the legislative findings in the Act show that Congress invoked its commerce power, not its taxing authority. “The individual responsibility requirement,” Congress explained, “is commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce.... ” 42 U.S.C. § 18091(a)(1). Other findings come to the same end. See id. § 18091(a)(2)(A) (“The requirement regulates activity that is commercial and economic in nature: economic and financial decisions about how and when health care is paid for, and when health insurance is purchased.”); § 18091(a)(2)(B) (“Health insurance and health care services are a significant part of the national economy.”); § 18091(a)(3) (“In United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Ass’n (322 U.S. 533 [64 S.Ct. 1162, 88 L.Ed. 1440] (1944)), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that insurance is interstate commerce subject to Federal regulation.”). The findings say nothing about, or even suggestive of, the taxing power.
Third, Congress showed throughout the Act that it understood the difference between these terms and concepts, using “tax” in some places and “penalty” in others. The statute not only says that the consequence of failing to obtain healthcare coverage leads to a “penalty,” but it also proceeds to use the word at least 17 other times in the individual mandate provision, see 26 U.S.C. § 5000A, and by our rough count 180 or so times in the rest of the Act. In other parts of the law, Congress imposed “taxes,” using that word 620 or so times. Congress respected the distinction between the words throughout the Act, and so should we. See Russello v. United States, 464 U.S. 16, 23, 104 S.Ct. 296, 78 L.Ed.2d 17 (1983).
Fourth, the central function of the mandate was not to raise revenue. It was to change individual behavior by requiring all qualified Americans to obtain medical insurance. As Congress explained in its findings, a key objective of the Act is to broaden the health-insurance risk pool by requiring more Americans to participate in it before, not after, they need medical care. See, e.g., 42 U.S.C. § 18091(a)(2)(I). That is why the Act generally requires uninsured individuals to buy private insurance, a requirement that will not raise any revenue for the government. And that is why the penalty is capped at an amount pegged to the price of private health insurance. See 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(e)(l). The penalty provision, to be sure, will raise revenue. But it strains credulity to say that the proponents of the Act will call it a success if the individuals affected by the mandate simply pay penalties rather than buy private insurance.
Other legislative findings bear this out. They say nothing about raising revenue, the central objective of imposing taxes. They instead focus on the law’s regulatory motive — to “achieve[] near-universal coverage” by adding “millions of new consumers to the health insurance market.” 42 U.S.C. § 18091(a)(2)(C). While describing the requirement as “commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affecting] commerce,” there is no mention of a desire to “provide for the support of *552government,” La Franca, 282 U.S. at 572, 51 S.Ct. 278. The Act, indeed, seeks to do the opposite: to encourage everyone to carry health insurance, leaving no one subject to the penalty (and no revenue to boot).
Fifth, case law supports this conclusion. The Act operates by starting with a substantive provision that “adoptfs] the criteria of wrongdoing,” Child Labor Tax Case, 259 U.S. at 20, 42 S.Ct. 449, which states that every “applicable individual shall” have health insurance. 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(a). The Act then spells out the “principal consequence on those who transgress its standard,” Child Labor Tax Case, 259 U.S. at 38, 42 S.Ct. 449, which is to impose a penalty on an individual who “fails to meet the requirement of’ § 5000A(a), giving the minimum-coverage mandate the “characteristics of regulation and punishment,” Dep’t of Revenue v. Kurth Ranch, 511 U.S. 767, 779, 114 S.Ct. 1937, 128 L.Ed.2d 767 (1994), not taxation.
The government offers several contrary arguments, all unconvincing. That the minimum-coverage requirement will raise revenue when individuals fail to obtain coverage — at a rate of $4 billion a year, predicts the government, U.S. Br. at 59-60— does not convert the penalty into a tax. Otherwise, every monetary penalty, no matter how regulatory or punitive, would be a tax. Cf. Kurth Ranch, 511 U.S. at 778, 114 S.Ct. 1937 (“Criminal fines, civil penalties, civil forfeitures, and taxes all ... generate government revenues, impose fiscal burdens on individuals, and deter certain behavior.”).
That Congress placed responsibility for enforcing the penalty with the IRS does not make the minimum-coverage provision a tax. The IRS enforces other regulatory penalties, see, e.g., 26 U.S.C. § 9707 (penalty for mining operators who fail to pay retirement health benefit premiums); § 5761(c) (penalty for domestic sales of tobacco labeled for export); § 527(j) (penalty for failure to make required election-related disclosures), yet that does not transform them all into taxes. Congress, at any rate, had practical reasons for housing enforcement of the mandate in the IRS. The IRS already has an enforcement regime in place, under which individuals must file returns once a year, creating a ready-made vehicle for annual reports about whether they have purchased the requisite insurance. Whenever Congress creates a new penalty, it need not create a new federal agency to enforce it.
Even then, the Act does not treat the mandate like a tax, as it prohibits the IRS from using its most salient enforcement tools in collecting the penalty. The IRS may not place a lien on the property of an individual who does not comply with the mandate and does not pay a penalty. See id. § 5000A(g)(2)(B). Not so for individuals who fail to pay their taxes. See id. § 6321. The IRS may not use its “levy” authority, prohibiting it from garnishing wages or seizing property from individuals who fail to obtain insurance. See id. § 5000A(g)(2)(B). Not so for individuals who fail to pay their taxes. See id. § 6331. And the IRS may not initiate a criminal prosecution against individuals who fail to buy insurance. See id. § 5000A(g)(2)(A). Not so for individuals who fail to pay their taxes. See id. § 7201. As it turns out, all the IRS may do to enforce the penalty is set off unpaid penalties against an individual’s refund (if there is one) or launch a civil action against the individual. See id. §§ 6402(a), 6502(a), 7401 et seq. The government does not traditionally collect taxes in this way.
That Congress has a “comprehensive” and “plenary” power to tax, U.S. Br. at 58, shows that, if the legislature had used taxes in this part of the Affordable Care *553Act, the Act likely would be constitutional. But that does not tell us whether Congress invoked this power or whether the penalty is a “Tax[ ]” under Article I of the Constitution. It did not, and it is not.
That the constitutionality of a law “does not depend on recitals of the power which it undertakes to exercise,” Woods v. Cloyd W. Miller Co., 333 U.S. 138, 144, 68 S.Ct. 421, 92 L.Ed. 596 (1948), changes nothing. In enumerated-power cases, there often will be a question whether Congress invoked its powers under the Commerce Clause, § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Spending Clause or the Taxing Clause, and Woods establishes that congressional recitals provide sufficient grounds for invoking a power but not the exclusive means for doing so. None of this alters the reality that each power has distinct substantive predicates and distinct substantive terms, and the courts may not simply label a law something it is not.
That the penalty in its “practical operation,” U.S. Br. at 58, shares traits of a tax and that the opposite is sometimes true— taxes occasionally resemble regulatory penalties — do not change things either. From an economic standpoint, the line between regulatory penalties and taxes may sometimes blur: Taxes and penalties both extract money from individuals; both shape behavior as a result; and every tax penalizes people by imposing an “economic impediment” on one person “as compared with others not taxed.” Sonzinsky v. United States, 300 U.S. 506, 513, 57 S.Ct. 554, 81 L.Ed. 772 (1937). Many penalties, indeed, might have been enacted in the form and substance of taxes, as indeed could have been the case here. But none of this makes a penalty a “Tax[ ]” under Article I in a given case, and it does not make it so here.
Pressing the point, the government goes one step further. It submits that there no longer is a tenable distinction between Congress’s taxing and commerce powers in this setting, invoking the Supreme Court’s statement that it has “abandoned” the “distinction[ ] between regulatory and revenue-raising taxes.” Bob Jones Univ. v. Simon, 416 U.S. 725, 741 n. 12, 94 S.Ct. 2038, 40 L.Ed.2d 496 (1974). But it is premature, and assuredly not the job of a middle-management judge, to abandon the distinction between taxes and penalties. The language from Bob Jones is the purest of dicta, as the case involved the Anti-Injunction Act, not the taxing power, and was not even necessary to the statutory holding. The taxing-power cases, it is true, are old. Yet cases of a certain age are just as likely to rest on venerable principles as stale ones, particularly when there is a good explanation for their vintage. All of these decisions, as it turns out, pre-date the Court’s expansion of the commerce power, which largely “rendered moot” the need to worry about the tax/penalty distinction. Laurence H. Tribe, 1 American Constitutional Law 846. Nonetheless, the line between “revenue production and mere regulation,” described by Chief Justice Taft in the Child Labor Tax Case, 259 U.S. at 38, 42 S.Ct. 449, retains force today. Look no further than Kurth Ranch, a 1994 decision that post-dated Bob Jones and that relied on the Child Labor Tax Case to hold that what Congress had labeled a tax amounted to an unconstitutional penalty under the Double Jeopardy Clause. See 511 U.S. at 779-83,114 S.Ct. 1937.
Before giving this distinction a premature burial, moreover, it is worth remembering that it parallels other constitutional inquiries. Courts must distinguish taxes from fees when construing the Export Clause, see United States v. U.S. Shoe Corp., 523 U.S. 360, 367-70, 118 S.Ct. 1290, 140 L.Ed.2d 453 (1998), the States’ implied *554immunity from federal taxation, see Massachusetts v. United States, 435 U.S. 444, 462, 98 S.Ct. 1153, 55 L.Ed.2d 403 (1978), and the National Government’s immunity from state taxation, see United States v. City of Huntington, 999 F.2d 71, 73 (4th Cir.1993). The inquiry also is a kissing cousin of statutory questions frequently raised about the tax/penalty and tax/fee distinctions under the Anti-Injunction Act, see Mobile Republican Assembly v. United States, 353 F.3d 1357, 1362 & n. 5 (11th Cir.2003), the Tax Injunction Act, see San Juan Cellular Tel. v. Pub. Serv. Comm’n, 967 F.2d 683, 685 (1st Cir.1992) (Breyer, J.), and the Bankruptcy Act, see United States v. Reorganized CF & I Fabricators of Utah, Inc., 518 U.S. 213, 226, 116 S.Ct. 2106,135 L.Ed.2d 506 (1996).
That the constitutional-avoidance doctrine permits courts to construe statutes to sidestep difficult constitutional questions also makes no difference. The doctrine does not allow a court to avoid a difficult constitutional question by diluting the meaning of another constitutional provision — the meaning of “Taxes” under Article I. It allows courts only to choose between a decision with a constitutional ruling and one without a constitutional ruling, see Clark v. Martinez, 543 U.S. 371, 381, 125 S.Ct. 716, 160 L.Ed.2d 734 (2005), not between two constitutional questions of varying degrees of difficulty. At the end of the day, this penalty is not a “Tax[ ]” under Article I of the Constitution, and Congress’s taxing power thus cannot sustain it.
II.
A.
The Constitution empowers Congress “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” U.S. Const, art. I, § 8, cl. 3. And it permits Congress “[t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” the commerce power. U.S. Const, art. I, § 8, cl. 18. Taken together, these grants of power permit Congress to regulate (1) the channels of interstate commerce {e.g., rivers and roads), (2) the instrumentalities of interstate commerce {e.g., ships and cars) as well as persons or things in it, and (3) those other economic activities, even wholly intrastate activities, that “substantially affect” interstate commerce. United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 558-59, 115 S.Ct. 1624, 131 L.Ed.2d 626 (1995).
A short history of decisions in this area shows that the Court has given Congress wide berth in regulating commerce, frequently adopting limits on that authority and just as frequently abandoning them, all while continuing to deny that Congress has unlimited national police powers.
Congress may create a national bank. In 1819, the Court held that, even though no enumerated power authorized Congress to create a national bank, the Necessary and Proper Clause gave Congress “incidental [and] implied powers” to do so. McCulloch, 17 U.S. at 406, 421. Still, “[w]e admit, as all must admit, that the powers of the government are limited, and that its limits are not to be transcended.” Id. at 421.
Congress may regulate intrastate activities — relations between workers and employers — that have a substantial relation to interstate commerce. In 1937, the Court held that Congress could regulate intrastate employment activities that had “a close and substantial relation to interstate commerce.” NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1, 37, 57 S.Ct. 615. Still, the commerce power does not “embrace effects ... so indirect and remote that to embrace them ... would effectually obliterate the *555distinction between what is national and what is local and create a completely centralized government.” Id.
Congress may regulate activities— growing wheat for on-the-farm consumption — that do not involve the production, manufacture or mining of products and materials and that have only indirect effects on interstate commerce. In 1942, the Court abandoned any distinction between activities that had “direct” and “indirect” effects on interstate commerce and between “commerce,” which Congress could regulate, and “commercial activities” such as production, manufacturing and mining, which it could not. Wickard v. Filbum, 317 U.S. 111, 119-20, 124, 63 S.Ct. 82. Still, the Court did not deny that “[t]he subject of federal power is ... ‘commerce’ and not all commerce but commerce ... among the several states.” Santa Cruz Fruit Packing Co. v. NLRB, 303 U.S. 453, 466, 58 S.Ct. 656, 82 L.Ed. 954 (1938).
Congress may not regulate non-economic activities — possession of firearms in school zones and gender-motivated violence. In 1995 and in 2000, the Court held that Congress may not “regulate noneconomic ... conduct based solely on that conduct’s aggregate effect on interstate commerce.” United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598, 617, 120 S.Ct. 1740, 146 L.Ed.2d 658 (2000); see also Lopez, 514 U.S. at 567, 115 S.Ct. 1624. But the force of these decisions remains unclear in view of two subsequent developments. First, soon after Lopez, Congress modified the Gun-Free School Zones Act, 18 U.S.C. § 922(q), to proscribe “knowingly ... possessing] a firearm that has moved in or that otherwise affects interstate ... commerce ... [in] a school zone.” See Pub.L. No. 104-208, § 657, 110 Stat. 3009, 3009-370 (1996) (codified at 18 U.S.C. § 922(q)(2)(A)). All of the courts of appeals to consider the question have upheld the amended statute against commerce clause challenges. See, e.g., United States v. Dorsey, 418 F.3d 1038, 1046 (9th Cir.2005); United States v. Danks, 221 F.3d 1037, 1039 (8th Cir.1999) (per curiam). Second, in 2005, the Court held that Congress could regulate home-grown and home-consumed marijuana, even when state law prohibited it from entering any markets. Raich, 545 U.S. at 28-29,125 S.Ct. 2195.
This abridged history captures the difficulty of the task at hand. At one level, past is precedent, and one tilts at hopeless causes in proposing new categorical limits on the commerce power. But there is another way to look at these precedents— that the Court either should stop saying that a meaningful limit on Congress’s commerce powers exists or prove that it is so. The stakes of identifying such a limit are high because the congressional power to regulate is the power to preempt, a power not just to regulate a subject co-extensively with the States but also to wipe out any contrary state laws on the subject. U.S. Const, art. VI, cl. 2. The plaintiffs present a plausible limiting principle, claiming that a mandate to buy medical insurance crosses a line between regulating action and inaction, between regulating those who have entered a market and those who have not, one that the Court and Congress have never crossed before.
B.
In my opinion, the government has the better of the arguments. Mindful that we at the court of appeals are not just fallible but utterly non-final in this case, let me start by explaining why existing precedents support the government.
*5561.
The nature of this challenge — a pre-enforcement facial attack on the individual mandate in all of its settings, as opposed to just some of them — favors the government. In most constitutional cases, the claimant challenges the constitutionality of a statute “as applied” to specific parties and circumstances. That is “the preferred route” for litigation because it confines judicial review to a “discrete factual setting.” Warshak v. United States, 532 F.3d 521, 529-30 (6th Cir.2008) (en banc); see Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 168, 127 S,Ct. 1610, 167 L.Ed.2d 480 (2007).
Facial challenges, by contrast, seek “to leave nothing standing” — to prevent any application of the law no matter the setting, “no matter the circumstances.” Warshak, 532 F.3d at 528. They are “disfavored” because: (1) “they raise the risk of premature interpretation of statutes on the basis of factually barebones records,” Wash. State Grange v. Wash. State Republican Party, 552 U.S. 442, 450, 128 S.Ct. 1184, 170 L.Ed.2d 151 (2008); (2) they undermine “the fundamental principle of judicial restraint,” which counsels that “courts should neither anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it nor formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be applied,” id,.; and (3) they run the risk of “a judicial trespass,” in which the court strikes down a law “in all of its applications even though the legislature has the prerogative and presumed objective to regulate some of them,” Connection Distrib. Go. v. Holder, 557 F.3d 321, 335 (6th Cir.2009) (en banc). For these reasons, a facial attack is “the most difficult challenge to mount successfully,” requiring the plaintiff to establish “no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.” United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 745, 107 S.Ct. 2095, 95 L.Ed.2d 697 (1987).
The judicial-constraint values underlying this doctrine apply equally to enumerated-power cases (like this one) and individual-liberty cases (like Salerno). The Court has said as much, noting that this “demanding standard” governs challenges to Congress’s exercise of enumerated powers under Article I, § 8. Sabri v. United States, 541 U.S. 600, 604-05, 608-09, 124 S.Ct. 1941, 158 L.Ed.2d 891 (2004). None of this means that the distinction makes a difference in every case or with respect to every argument. Some theories of invalidity necessarily apply to all applications of a law. Others do not. This case, as shown at various points below, falls in the latter category, as some of plaintiffs’ theories of invalidity — particularly their proposed action/inaction limitation on congressional power — do not cover many applications of the mandate.
2.
On the merits, this case presents two distinct questions: Does the individual mandate survive the substantial-effects test? And, if so, is there something about the novelty of this law — compelling the purchase of health insurance — that warrants striking it down nonetheless?
The initial question is the easier of the two, as the breadth of the substantial-effects doctrine and the nature of modern health care favor the validity of this law. No matter how you slice the relevant market — as obtaining health care, as paying for health care, as insuring for health care — all of these activities affect interstate commerce, in a substantial way. Start with obtaining medical care. Few people escape the need to obtain health care at some point in their lives, and most need it regularly. That explains why health-related spending amounted to 17.6% *557of the national economy, or $2.5 trillion, in 2009. 42 U.S.C. § 18091(a)(2)(B). Virtually all of this market affects interstate commerce, and many aspects of it — medical supplies, drugs and equipment — are directly linked to interstate commerce. Id.
What then of paying for health care or insuring to pay for it? These are two sides of the same coin. Life is filled with risks, and one of them is not having the money to pay for food, shelter, transportation and health care when you need it. Unlike most of these expenses, however, the costs of health care can vary substantially from year to year. The individual can count on incurring some healthcare costs each year (e.g., an annual check-up, insulin for a diabetic) but cannot predict others (e.g., a cancer diagnosis, a serious accident). That is why most Americans manage the risk of not having the assets to pay for health care by purchasing medical insurance. See id. § 18091(a)(2)(D). The medical insurance market is large, id. § 18091(a)(2)(D), (J), and is inextricably linked to interstate commerce, see id. § 18091(a)(2)(B); United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Ass’n, 322 U.S. 533, 541, 64 S.Ct. 1162, 88 L.Ed. 1440 (1944).
The rub is the other method of paying for medical care: self-insurance. There are two ways to self-insure, and both, when aggregated, substantially affect interstate commerce. One option is to save money so that it is there when the need for health care arises. The other is to save nothing and to rely on something else— good fortune or the good graces of others — when the need arises. Congress found that providing uncompensated medical care to the uninsured cost $43 billion in 2008 and that these costs were shifted to others through higher premiums. See 42 U.S.C. § 18091(a)(2)(F). Based on these findings, Congress could reasonably conclude that the decisions and actions of the self-insured substantially affect interstate commerce.
In choosing how to regulate this group, Congress also did not exceed its power. The basic policy idea, for better or worse (and courts must assume better), is to compel individuals with the requisite income to pay now rather than later for health care. Faced with $43 billion in uncompensated care, Congress reasonably could require all covered individuals to pay for health care now so that money would be available later to pay for all care as the need arises. Call this mandate what you will — an affront to individual autonomy or an imperative of national health care — it meets the requirement of regulating activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.
The Court has upheld other federal laws that involved equally substantial, if not more substantial, incursions on the general police powers of the States and the autonomy of individuals. If, as Wickard shows, Congress could regulate the most self-sufficient of individuals — the American farmer — when he grew wheat destined for no location other than his family farm, the same is true for those who inevitably will seek health care and who must have a way to pay for it. And if Congress could regulate Angel Raich when she grew marijuana on her property for self-consumption, indeed for self-medication, Raich, 545 U.S. at 6-7, 125 S.Ct. 2195, and if it could do so even when California law prohibited that marijuana from entering any state or national markets, it is difficult to see why Congress may not regulate the 50 million Americans who self-finance their medical care. See U.S. Census Bureau, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009, at 23 tbl. 8.
The individual mandate also steers clear of the central defect in the laws at issue in Lopez and Morrison. Health care and the *558means of paying for it are “quintessentially economic” in a way that possessing guns near schools, see Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 115 S.Ct. 1624, and domestic violence, see Morrison, 529 U.S. 598, 120 S.Ct. 1740, are not. No one must “pile inference upon inference,” Lopez, 514 U.S. at 567, 115 S.Ct. 1624, to recognize that the national regulation of a $2.5 trillion industry, much of which is financed through “health insurance ... sold by national or regional health insurance companies,” 42 U.S.C. § 18091(a)(2)(B), is economic in nature. Nor does this approach remove all limits on the commerce power. As Lopez and Morrison suggest, a majority of the Court still appears' to accept the line between regulating economic and non-economic conduct, which is why a general murder or assault statute would exceed congressional power. Measured by these conventional commerce clause benchmarks, the minimum-essential-coverage provision passes.
C.
None of this matters, plaintiffs claim. However broad Congress’s commerce power may be, it is not unlimited, and one limit on that power is that it applies only to individuals already engaged in commerce. The Clause permits the legislature to “regulate” commerce, not to create it. Put another way, it empowers Congress to regulate economic “activities” and “actions,” not inaction — not in other words individuals who have never entered a given market and who prize that most American of freedoms: to be left alone.
1.
Of all the arguments auditioning to invalidate the individual mandate, this is the most compelling. The Court, for one, has never considered the validity of this type of mandate before, at least under the commerce power. True enough, Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U.S. 241, 85 S.Ct. 348, 13 L.Ed.2d 258 (1964), sustained Congress’s power to compel affirmative acts — to require the owner of any “inn, hotel, motel or other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests” to offer lodging to all on nondiscriminatory grounds. Id. at 247, 85 S.Ct. 348. But the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies only to service providers already in the. relevant interstate market. If covered entities offer lodging in interstate commerce, Congress tells them how to do so and requires action in the process. Congress did not try to solve this policy problem by compelling individuals to open inns in the first instance.
The same is true of the Wickard and Raich plaintiffs. The laws regulated individuals who chose to grow wheat and marijuana on their own — by punishing individuals who grew too much of one product (wheat) and any of the other (marijuana). In Wickard and Raich, it is true, the Court permitted Congress to regulate individuals who did not offer to buy or sell anything, who merely raised their crops and plants at home, who consumed them at home and who in one instance (Raich) were prohibited from buying and selling the product in any market. Yet that reality confirms only the breadth of the substantial-effects doctrine. It does not show that Congress may compel individuals to buy products they do not want.
Not only has the Court never crossed this line, neither has Congress, as the reports of two federal agencies confirm:
(1) “The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.” CBO Memorandum, The Budgetary Treatment of an Individual Mandate to Buy Health Insurance, at 1 (Aug.1994); *559(2) “[W]hether the individual responsibility requirement would be constitutional under the [Commerce Clause] is a challenging question, as it is a novel issue whether Congress may use the clause to require an individual to purchase a good or a service.” Congressional Research Service, Requiring Individuals to Obtain Health Insurance: A Constitutional Analysis, at 8-9 (Oct. 15, 2010).
The efforts of the government and its amici to counter this point serve only to confirm it. That Congress may conscript individuals to serve in the military, 50 U.S.C. app. § 453(a), or to pay taxes, see 26 U.S.C. §§ 7201 et seq., proves only that Congress may require individuals to undertake tasks under other enumerated powers, not under the commerce power. That the Second Congress not only required certain individuals to serve in the military but to arm themselves as well (by purchasing a gun and ammunition), Second Militia Act of 1792, 1 Stat. 271, § 1, comes to the same end: It amounts to a necessary, proper and utterly sensible means of implementing Congress’s authority to raise an army. To argue that Congress’s power to enlist individuals to defend the country’s borders proves that it may enlist individuals to improve the availability of medical care gives analogy a bad name. There is a difference between drafting a citizen to join the military and forcing him to respond to a price quote from Aetna.
One other point dignifies the plaintiffs’ argument. Legislative novelty typically is not a constitutional virtue. More than once, and quite often in separation-of-powers cases, the Court has said that a “[l]ack of historical precedent can indicate a constitutional infirmity” in a congressional act. Va. Office for Prot. & Advocacy v. Stewart, 563 U.S. -, 131 S.Ct. 1632, 1641, 179 L.Ed.2d 675 (2011); see also Free Enter. Fund v. Pub. Co. Accounting Oversight Bd., 561 U.S. -, 130 S.Ct. 3138, 3159, 177 L.Ed.2d 706 (2010) (“Perhaps the most telling indication of the severe constitutional problem with the PCAOB is the lack of historical precedent for this entity.”); Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 905, 117 S.Ct. 2365, 138 L.Ed.2d 914 (1997) (“[I]f ... earlier Congresses avoided use of this highly attractive power, we would have reason to believe that the power was thought not to exist.”).
2.
The plaintiffs thus present (1) a theory of constitutional invalidity that the Court hás never considered before, (2) a legislative line that Congress has never crossed before, and (3) a theory of commerce power that has the potential to succeed where others have failed: by placing a categorical cap on congressional power. Why not accept the invitation?
The first point proves only that the Supreme Court has considerable discretion in resolving this dispute. It does not free lower court judges from the duty to respect the language and direction of the Court’s precedents, particularly in view of the reality that this law has the purpose and effect of regulating commerce and in view of the save-before-destroy imperatives of reviewing facial challenges. The Supreme Court can decide that the legend of Wickard has outstripped the facts of Wickard — that a farmer’s production only of more than 200 bushels of wheat a year substantially affected interstate commerce. See Wickard, 317 U.S. at 114, 63 S.Ct. 82. A court of appeals cannot. The Supreme Court can decide that Raich was a case only about the fungibility of marijuana, see Raich, 545 U.S. at 18-19, 125 S.Ct. 2195, not a decision that makes broader and more extravagant assertions of legislative *560power more impervious to challenge. A court of appeals cannot.
The second point favors the claimants, but it does not dispose of the case. The novelty of the individual mandate may indeed' suggest it is a bridge too far, but it also may offer one more example of a policy necessity giving birth to an inventive (and constitutional) congressional solution. The substantial-effects doctrine invites, rather than discourages, unconventional laws, making it difficult to draw conclusions from a legislative effort to shoehorn a new policy initiative into such a capacious theory of federal power.
The third point is the critical one: Does the Commerce Clause contain an action/inaction dichotomy that limits congressional power? No — for several reasons. First, the relevant text of the Constitution does not contain such a limitation. To the extent “regulate,” “commerce,” “necessary” and “proper” might be words of confinement, the Court has not treated them that way, as long as the objects of federal legislation are economic and substantially affect commerce. All three methods of paying for medical care (private insurance, public insurance and self-insurance) meet this modest requirement. And if Congress may prescribe rules for some of these methods of payments, as plaintiffs seem to agree, it is difficult to see why these words prohibit it from doing the same for all three.
Second, the promise offered by the action/inaction dichotomy — of establishing a principled and categorical limit on the commerce power — seems unlikely to deliver in practice. Level of generality is destiny in interpretive disputes, and it remains unclear at what level plaintiffs mean to pitch their action/inaction line of constitutional authority or indeed whether a workable level exists. Does this test apply to individuals who have purchased medical insurance before? Those individuals have not been inactive in any sense of the word when it comes to the medical-insurance market, yet plaintiffs say that Congress may not regulate them.
What of individuals who voluntarily have insurance on the day the mandate goes into effect? One of the plaintiffs in this case, Jann DeMars, now has insurance, yet she claims Congress has no right to require her to maintain that coverage. It is not clear what the action/inaction line means in a setting in which an individual voluntarily (and actively) obtains coverage and is required only to maintain it thereafter. As to this group of individuals, why can’t Congress regulate them, even under plaintiffs’ theory of the case? We no longer are talking about a mandate imposed on the mere status of “existence” in the United States but on individuals who have voluntarily purchased medical insurance in an interstate market and who must maintain only what they chose to buy. At a minimum, this application of the law is constitutional.
How would the action/inaction line have applied to Roscoe Filburn? Might he have responded to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 by claiming that the prohibition on planting more than 11.1 acres of wheat on his farm compelled him to action — to buy wheat in the interstate market so that he could feed all of his animals? And is it any more offensive to individual autonomy to prevent a farmer from being self-sufficient when it comes to supplying feed to his animals than an individual when it comes to paying for health care? It seems doubtful that the Wickard Court would have thought so. See Wickard, 317 U.S. at 129, 63 S.Ct. 82 (acknowledging that the law “forcfed] some farmers into the market to buy wheat they could provide for themselves”). How would the action/inaction line apply if someone like *561Angel Raich sold her house, marijuana plants and all? The Controlled Substances Act would obligate the new owner to act (by removing the plants), see 21 U.S.C. § 844, but it seems doubtful that he could sidestep this obligation on the ground that the law forced him to act rather than leaving him alone to enjoy the fruits of inaction.
There is another linguistic problem with the action/inaction line. The power to regulate includes the power to prescribe and proscribe. See Lottery Case, 188 U.S. 321, 359-60, 23 S.Ct. 321, 47 L.Ed. 492 (1903). Legislative prescriptions set forth rules of conduct, some of which require action. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 2250 (sex-offender registration); id. § 228 (child-support payments); see also United States v. Faasse, 265 F.3d 475, 486-87 (6th Cir.2001) (en banc). The same is true for legislative proscriptions. Take the drug laws at issue in Raich, where Congress regulated by prohibiting individuals from possessing certain drugs. A drug-possession law amounts to forced inaction in some settings (those who do not have drugs must not get them), and forced action in other settings (those who have drugs must get rid of them).
An enforceable line is even more difficult to discern when it comes to health insurance and the point of buying it: financial risk. Risk is not having money when you need it. And the mandate is one way of ensuring that all Americans have money to pay for health care when they inevitably need it. In this context, the notion that self-insuring amounts to inaction and buying insurance amounts to action is not self-evident. If done responsibly, the former requires more action (affirmatively saving money on a regular basis and managing the assets over time) than the latter (writing a check once or twice a year or never writing one at all if the employer withholds the premiums). What is more, inaction is action, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, when it comes to financial risk. When Warren Buffett tells shareholders that “[w]e continue to make more money when snoring than when active” or that “[ijnactivity strikes us as intelligent behavior,” Chairman’s Letter to Shareholders (Feb. 28, 1997), ¶¶ 72-73, available at http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/ 1996.html, he is not urging the Board of Directors to place him in a Rip Van Winkle-like stupor for the next year. He is saying that, of the many buy and sell recommendations that came across his desk that year, the best thing he could have done is the informed, even masterful, inaction of saying no to all of them.
No one is inactive when deciding how to pay for health care, as self-insurance and private insurance are two forms of action for addressing the same risk. Each requires affirmative choices; one is no less active than the other; and both affect commerce. In affidavits filed in this case, the individual plaintiffs all mention the need to make current changes in their spending and saving practices to account for the need to pay for medical insurance in the future. Saving to buy insurance or to self-insure, as these affidavits attest, involves action. E.g., Ceci May 27, 2011 Deck, ¶ 7 (“Due to the added financial pressure [of the mandate], I have cut back on discretionary spending, such as costs associated with entertainment, like going to the movies, a restaurant, or sporting events.”); Hyder May 28, 2011 Deck, ¶ 8 (same).
How, moreover, would an action/inaction line work with respect to individuals living in States that already mandate the purchase of medical insurance or States that conceivably might do so in the future if the mandate is invalidated? One of the central premises of the claimants’ argument is that, under the Framers’ design, the regu*562lation of health care and health insurance is primarily, if not exclusively, a prerogative of the States. That is why the claimants presumably believe that, when the States exercise this power, they have broad discretion to try out different ways to regulate health care. And that is why the claimants apparently have no constitutional objection to States that seek to solve this problem with individual mandates or something similar. Yet individuals in such States already would have entered the health-insurance market, permitting Congress to regulate them further by increasing the minimum coverage already required by state law or by requiring them to comply with other components of the Affordable Care Act. How strange that individuals who live in States with mandates would be subject to federal regulation but others would not be — with the difference in treatment having little to do with the concerns about federal intrusions on individual autonomy that led to this challenge in the first place. How strange, too, that, if other States opted to enact individual mandates in the future, the federal commerce power would spring into existence as to individuals living there.
Strange or not, this theory of commerce power at a minimum creates a serious hurdle for a facial challenge. If nothing else, it suggests that the minimum-essential-coverage provision is constitutional as applied to individuals living in States with mandates, undermining the notion that the mandate is unconstitutional in all of its applications.
What of individuals who voluntarily purchased bare-bones insurance before the mandate’s effective date — e.g., catastrophic-care insurance or high-deductible insurance — but are required by the minimum-essential-coverage provision to obtain more insurance? The action/inaction line means nothing to them, establishing another class of individuals against whom Congress could apply the law and presenting another impediment to a facial challenge.
Third, a variation on the action/inaction line — between regulating individuals already in markets and those outside of them — does not seem to work, at least in view of Raich and Filbum. Angel Raich and Roscoe Filburn never entered any markets, whether interstate or intrastate, yet Congress regulated them nonetheless. That is why the decisions upholding this regulatory authority are so far-reaching. To the extent both individuals still did something (grew wheat or marijuana), that takes us back to the action/inaction line and the problems associated with it.
Fourth, still another variation on the action/inaction line — that forced purchases of medical insurance do not amount to “proper” means of regulation, even if Congress could reasonably find them “necessary” — does not seem to work either. One component of the Act and one alternative way of addressing the topic suggest why. Instead of requiring Americans to obtain general medical insurance, the legislature might have required them to buy just catastrophic-care insurance. Here we have a problem — a serious illness or accidents — ■ that most people will experience directly themselves or indirectly through a family member at some point in them lives, and one that virtually no one can afford based on current income and savings. One federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), 42 U.S.C. § 1395dd, and several state laws, see, e.g., Wash. Rev.Code § 70.170.060; Walling v. Allstate Ins. Co., 183 Mich.App. 731, 455 N.W.2d 736, 738 (1990), require hospitals to accept many of these patients without regard to their capacity to pay, and a culture of compassion leads hospitals and doctors to treat many others in the same way. Through EMTALA, Congress *563subsidizes some of these costs. 42 U.S.C. §§ 1395cc, 1395dd. Hospitals and doctors internalize other costs, and they share still others by raising prices. See id. § 18091(a)(2)(F).
If Congress has the power to regulate the national healthcare market, as all seem to agree, it is difficult to see why it lacks authority to regulate a unique feature of that market by requiring all to pay now in affordable premiums for what virtually none can pay later in the form of, say, $100,000 (or more) of medical bills prompted by a medical emergency. Still more difficult to see is the idea that the word “proper” imposes such a limitation. When Congress guarantees a benefit for all (by securing certain types of medical care), it may regulate that benefit (by requiring some to pay for it). One component of the Affordable Care Act, as it turns out, does this very thing: It allows those under 30 to purchase catastrophic-care insurance, and nothing more. See 42 U.S.C. § 18022(e); 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(f)(l). This feature of the law does not exceed congressional power, further showing that the mandate is not unconstitutional in all of its applications.
Congress also would have acted within its commerce power had it opted to regulate insurance coverage at the point of sale, and the word “proper” would not have gotten in the way. The legislature could have said that when non-exempt individuals obtain health care, they are put to a choice: either pay for the care or buy medical insurance from then on. This approach would impose a federal condition (ability to pay) on the consumption of a service bound up in federal commerce (medical care). Yet such a law would be at least as coercive as the individual mandate, and arguably more so. An individual in need of acute medical care, but without the resources to pay for it, is not apt to refuse to buy future medical insurance in order to obtain present care, and a family member (if responsible for the choice) is even less likely to do so. The Act, by contrast, does not regulate individuals at a time of crisis. And it does not compel individuals to buy insurance or even use insurance. They may pay a penalty instead, which in the first several years of the Act, if not throughout its existence, normally will cost less than medical insurance. See 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(c). If one of these laws is legitimate, so it would seem is the other. Requiring insurance today and requiring it at a future point of sale amount to policy differences in degree, not kind, and not the sort of policy differences removed from the political branches by the word “proper” or for that matter “necessary” or “regulate” or “commerce.”
Fifth, the plaintiffs target the breadth of the mandate and Congress’s decision to regulate all of the self-insured together rather than only those who demonstrate an incapacity to pay for medical care and only those who are responsible for the cost-spreading and free-riding at which the Act takes aim. They have a point. Why apply the law to those who can pay for health care and those who have paid for health care in the past? Why impose a “penalty” on those who take care of themselves physically and financially? And why eliminate healthcare free-riding of one sort by compelling free-riding of another sort — by requiring those who paid for their health care in the past to subsidize the healthcare costs of others in the future? Instead of eliminating free-riding, the Act seems to lock it in place.
These objections, however, do not appear to establish a constitutional defect. Congress generally has broad authority under the commerce power to choose the class of people it wishes to regulate, see Raich, 545 U.S. at 26-27, 125 S.Ct. 2195, *564permitting it to group all of the self-insured together, whether they have many assets available for medical care, very few, or something in between, particularly since the financial wherewithal of the self-insured is unlikely to stay put. Individuals lose jobs and obtain jobs, and the value of their assets goes up and goes down, making it appropriate (if perhaps unfair) to regulate this entire group together. The courts do not apply strict scrutiny to commerce clause legislation and require only an “appropriate” or “reasonable” “fit” between means and ends. United States v. Comstock, 560 U.S. -, 130 S.Ct. 1949, 1956-57, 176 L.Ed.2d 878 (2010). Regulating all of the self-insured together does not cross these lines. The Commerce Clause permits Congress to make flawed generalizations, and that at most is what might be said about the overbreadth of this law.
But even if that were not the case, even if the Constitution prohibited Congress from regulating all of the self-insured together, that would not require a court to invalidate the individual mandate in its entirety. It would show only that the law may be unconstitutional as applied to some individuals, not to all of them, and that suffices to defeat a facial challenge. Nothing prevents such individuals from bringing as-applied challenges to the mandate down the road. As to the plaintiffs in today’s case, they have filed only a preenforcement facial challenge, the very point of which is to make the particulars of their situation irrelevant to the constitutional inquiry. See Doe v. Reed, 561 U.S. -, 130 S.Ct. 2811, 2817, 177 L.Ed.2d 493 (2010).
Sixth, the anti-commandeering principle of the Tenth Amendment adds nothing new to this case. True, the Tenth Amendment reserves those powers not delegated to the National Government “to the States” and “to the people.” True also, a critical guarantee of individual liberty is structural and judicially enforceable' — preserving a horizontal separation of powers among the branches of the National Government, INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919, 957-58, 103 S.Ct. 2764, 77 L.Ed.2d 317 (1983), and a vertical separation of powers between the National Government and the States, New York, 505 U.S. at 181, 112 S.Ct. 2408. Odd though it may seem in light of American history, States’ rights sometimes are individual rights. See Bond v. United States, 564 U.S.-, 131 S.Ct. 2355, 2364, 180 L.Ed.2d 269 (2011). Doubt it? Go to any federal prison in the country to see how a broad conception of the commerce power has affected individual liberty through the passage of federal gun-possession and drug-possession laws and sentencing mandates.
But to the extent plaintiffs mean to argue that the Tenth Amendment contains its own anti-commandeering principle applicable to individuals and to all of Congress’s enumerated powers, that is hard to square with the taxing power, which regularly commandeers individuals — in equally coercive ways — to spend money on things they may not need and to support policies they do not like. And to the extent plaintiffs mean to argue that such a principle captures (or reinstates) limitations on the meaning of “property]” “regulat[ing]” interstate “commerce,” that takes us back to the points already made about Congress’s delegated power in this area.
That brings me to the lingering intuition — shared by most Americans, I suspect — that Congress should not be able to compel citizens to buy products they do not want. If Congress can require Americans to buy medical insurance today, what of tomorrow? Could it compel individuals to buy health care itself in the form of an annual check-up or for that matter a *565health-club membership? Could it require computer companies to sell medical-insurance policies in the open market in order to widen the asset pool available to pay insurance claims? And if Congress can do this in the healthcare field, what of other fields of commerce and other products?
These are good questions, but there are some answers. In most respects, a mandate to purchase health insurance does not parallel these other settings or markets. Regulating how citizens pay for what they already receive (health care), never quite know when they will need, and in the case of severe illnesses or emergencies generally will not be able to afford, has few (if any) parallels in modern life. Not every intrusive law is an unconstitutionally intrusive law. And even the most powerful intuition about the meaning of the Constitution must be matched with a textual and enforceable theory of constitutional limits, and the activity/inactivity dichotomy does not work with respect to health insurance in many settings, if any of them.
The very force of the intuition also helps to undo it, as one is left to wonder why the Commerce Clause does the work of establishing this limitation. Few doubt that Congress could pass an equally coercive law under its taxing power by imposing a healthcare tax on everyone and freeing them from the tax if they purchased health insurance. If Congress may engage in the same type of compelling/conscripting/commandeering of individuals to buy products under the taxing power, is it not strange that only the broadest of congressional powers carves out a limit on this same type of regulation?
Why construe the Constitution, moreover, to place this limitation — that citizens cannot be forced to buy insurance, vegetables, cars and so on — -solely in a grant of power to Congress, as opposed to due process limitations on power with respect to all American legislative bodies? Few doubt that the States may require individuals to buy medical insurance, and indeed at least two of them have. See Mass. Gen. Laws HIM § 2; N.J. Stat. Ann. § 26:15-2. The same goes for a related and familiar mandate of the States — that most adults must purchase car insurance. Yet no court has invalidated these kinds of mandates under the Due Process Clause or any other liberty-based guarantee of the Constitution. That means one of two things: either compelled purchases of medical insurance are different from compelled purchases of other goods and services, or the States, even under plaintiffs’ theory of the case, may compel purchases of insurance, vegetables, cars and so on. Sometimes an intuition is just an intuition.
For now, whatever else may be said about plaintiffs’ activity/inactivity theory of commerce power, they have not shown that the individual mandate exceeds that power in all of its applications. Congress may apply the mandate in at least four settings: (1) to individuals who already have purchased insurance voluntarily and who want to maintain coverage, but who will be required to obtain more insurance in order to comply with the minimum-essential-coverage requirement; (2) to individuals who voluntarily obtained coverage but do not wish to be forced (at some indeterminate point in the future) to maintain it; (3) to individuals who live in States that already require them to obtain insurance and who may have to obtain more coverage to comply with the mandate or abide by other requirements of the Affordable Care Act; and (4) to individuals under 30, no matter where they live and no matter whether they have purchased health care before, who may satisfy the law by obtaining only catastrophic-care coverage. The valid application of the law to these *566groups of people suffices to uphold the law against this facial challenge.
While future challenges to the law have hills to climb, nothing about this view of the case precludes individuals from bringing as-applied challenges to the mandate as the relevant agencies implement it, and as the “lessons taught by the particular,” Sabri, 541 U.S. at 608-09, 124 S.Ct. 1941, prove (or disprove) that Congress crossed a constitutional line in imposing this unprecedented requirement. Just as courts should refrain from needlessly pre-judging the invalidity of a law’s many applications, they should refrain from doing the same with respect to their validity.
Any remaining doubt about rejecting this facial challenge is alleviated by the most enduring lesson of McCulloch, which remains an historical, not a doctrinal, one. No debate in the forty years after the country’s birth stirred the people more than the conflict between the federalists and anti-federalists over the role of the National Government in relation to the States. And no issue was more bound up in that debate than the wisdom of creating a national bank. In upholding the constitutionality of a second national bank, not a foregone conclusion, the Supreme Court erred on the side of allowing the political branches to resolve the conflict. Right or wrong, that decision presented the challengers with a short-term loss (by upholding the bank) and set the platform for a potential long-term victory (by allowing them to argue that Congress should not make the same mistake again). There was no third national bank. But see Federal Reserve Act, ch. 6, 38 Stat. 251 (1913).
Today’s debate about the individual mandate is just as stirring, no less essential to the appropriate role of the National Government and no less capable of political resolution. Time assuredly will bring to light the policy strengths and weaknesses of using the individual mandate as part of this national legislation, allowing the peoples’ political representatives, rather than their judges, to have the primary say over its utility.