Why Obamacare is unconstitutional

Ted Cruz & Mario Loyola have this for the Texas Public Policy Foundation:

Obamacare is an unconstitutional federal overreach and violation of Tenth Amendment rights, in at least two ways:

Individual Mandate. The mandate that indi- viduals purchase health insurance would be the first time that the federal government has re- quired citizens to purchase a good or service as an exercise of the commerce power. Under Lo- pez, health insurance is neither a channel nor an instrumentality of interstate commerce, so the mandate would have to rest on the argument that health insurance is an activity that substan- tially affects interstate commerce. The mandate, tied to a penalty, may also violate the Due Pro- cess Clause of the Constitution.

Mandatory State Medicaid Expansion/Health Insurance Exchange. Obamacare requires that States dramatically expand their Medicaid pro- grams, and establish new health insurance mar- kets to be regulated as utilities for the socializa- tion of health care costs. As such, under Printz, Obamacare may well constitute a “comman- deering” of state agencies and budgets because it turns them into instrumentalities of the federal government. . . .