No, Roberts Did Not Say the Mandate Violated the Commerce Clause

A lot of people, in describing the recent health care ruling by the Supreme Court, say things like, "Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion ruled that the individual mandate violated the Commerce Clause, but that didn't matter because the mandate was a valid exercise of Congress' power to levy taxes." Jon Stewart said something similar in his segment on the Court's ruling, or more specifically on news coverage of that ruling. But the thing is, this isn't true. You can't "violate the Commerce Clause." The Commerce Clause is not a prohibition on anything. It's a grant of power. Now, you can fail to be within that grant of power, but that's a different thing. If it weren't, here's a partial list of things that would "violate the Commerce Clause": the issuance of federal debt, coining money, punishing counterfeiters, establishing the Post Office, creating patents, creating the lower federal courts, declaring war, creating the military, and governing the District of Columbia. Now, all of those things are constitutional, and obviously so: they're each pretty much the central application of one or more of Congress' other enumerated powers. But declarations of war, for instance, are in no conceivable way supported by the Commerce Clause itself. This doesn't matter, because that Clause is only one part of a broader grant of power to Congress. To fall outside of Congress' enumerated powers, you need to fail to be supported by all of them at once. Essentially no act of Congress is ever supported by more than a handful.

What Roberts ruled was that the individual mandate fell within Congress' enumerated powers, along with the rest of the Affordable Care Act. He also clarified that, in his opinion, the mandate was justified by the Taxing Power but not by the Commerce Clause. That doesn't mean it was "unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause, but valid under the Taxing Power," or something. As far as I know, if an act of Congress actually does violate one of the provisions of the Constitution, in a manner deserving that term, it is unconstitutional. For instance, many things might be within the meaning of the phrase, "The Congress shall have the power ... to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes," but also be prohibited by the phrase "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State," from Article 1, Section 9. Such an Act would be valid under the Commerce Clause but invalid under the "not taxing exports from a state" Clause, which doesn't really have a name because it hasn't been very important in constitutional jurisprudence, and it would be unconstitutional and get itself struck down. But going the other way doesn't happen. If you fall outside of one of Congress' enumerated powers, but within another, you're valid. If you fall outside of any of Congress' enumerated powers, then you violate the Constitution by being unsupported by anything in that document. But you can't "violate" one part of a grant of power; it's just not what the words mean.

A minor point, but it's kept bugging me in the coverage of this whole affair.