Virginia state Del. Bob Marshall, who is running in the Republican senate primary against establishment favorite former Sen. George Allen, is really going the extra mile in his opposition to federal health care reform law, saying the individual mandate to buy health insurance is “akin to forcible economic rape.”
As the Washington Examiner reports, Marshall has signed onto an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the litigation surrounding the law.
And Marshall et al choose to make some remarkable rhetorical arguments, in their declaration that the law is unconstitutional:
In conducting its re-examination of its Commerce Clause jurisprudence, this Court should return to the text of the Constitution as “the supreme Law of the Land” giving no deference to its own decisions, rather examining the issue afresh. Such an examination demonstrates that the individual mandate is not an exercise of power to regulate interstate commerce. The individual mandate is not regulation of voluntary commercial intercourse; it is more akin to forcible economic rape.
And as the arch-social conservative Marshall also insists — keep the government off our bodies:
PPACA is designed to put the government into the health care insurance business. The ramifications of this coercive measure are just now being felt with mandates for abortifacient contraceptives, converting the federal government into the master over the bodies and the morals of a heretofore sovereign people.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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