Historic Supreme Courts--Obamacare (thread 8), Epsiode 6: Taft vs. Obamacare: When the Court Clung to Old Order

Imagine sitting with a friend and telling them how a court anchored in 19th-century assumptions would freak out at Obamacare—not because it was flawed, but because it admitted modern life had outgrown those old rules. Taft's justices wanted order and limits, and the ACA's acceptance of collective solutions would have felt like a constitutional betrayal.

This episode walks through how the Taft Court’s insistence on restraint, states’ power, and fixed categories of commerce would likely have doomed the individual mandate, and why their fear was less ideological zeal than institutional worry about rewriting the Constitution.