For those interested, you can read the testimony presented today here.

Some choice excerpts:

JUSTICE KENNEDY:  Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?

JUSTICE SCALIA:  Any self purchasing? Anything I — you know if I’m in any market at all, my failure to purchase something in that market subjects me to regulation.

GENERAL VERRILLI:  I think the fundamental difference, Mr. Chief Justice, is that that’s not an issue of market regulation.  This is an issue of market regulation, and that’s how Congress, that’s how Congress looked at this problem.  There is a market.  Insurance is provided through the market system -­
JUSTICE ALITO:  Do you think there is a, a market for burial services?
 GENERAL VERRILLI:  For burial services?
 JUSTICE ALITO:  Yes.
 GENERAL VERRILLI:  Yes, Justice Alito, I think there is.
 JUSTICE ALITO:  All right, suppose that you and I walked around downtown Washington at lunch hour and we found a couple of healthy young people and we stopped them and we said, “You know what you’re doing? You are financing your burial services right now because eventually you’re going to die, and somebody is going to have to pay for it, and if you don’t have burial insurance and you haven’t saved money for it, you’re going to shift the cost to somebody else.” Isn’t that a very artificial way of talking about what somebody is doing?
GENERAL VERRILLI:  No, that -­
JUSTICE ALITO:  And if that’s true, why isn’t it equally artificial to say that somebody who is doing absolutely nothing about health care is financing health care services?

JUSTICE KENNEDY:  Could you help — help me with this.  Assume for the moment — you may disagree. Assume for the moment that this is unprecedented, this is a step beyond what our cases have allowed, the affirmative duty to act to go into commerce.  If that is so, do you not have a heavy burden of justification? I understand that we must presume laws are constitutional, but, even so, when you are changing the relation of the individual to the government in this, what we can stipulate is, I think, a unique way, do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show authorization under the Constitution?

Take a read through it and try telling me that in all the flailing that General Verrilli does trying to defend the bill, that Justice Ginsberg doesn’t become a second advocate in front of the court as well.  Essentially she begins arguing for the bill rather strongly.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.