The arguments advanced for the federal health insurance purchase mandate often came down to some combination of "only mean people oppose nice President Obama's law" or "all really smart and honest people all agree with smart and honest me that Obamacare is like so totally constitutional." Dalia Lithwick's tantrum is an example of the first kind of argument and Jonathan Chait's rant is an example of the second. Lithwick's post is less interesting. It doesn't contain any actual arguments about why the Obamacare mandate is constitutional. She mostly just says that only a horrible person would even think about considering whether such a wonderful law as Obamacare is constitutional. I wonder why Solicitor General Verrilli didn't go with that strategy during oral arguments.
Chait's post is a more telling example of how self-congratulation and group think can weaken one side's argument. Chait writes that the health insurance purchase mandate must be constitutional because health care is interstate commerce and the federal government must therefore be able to compel an individual to contract with a private firm to purchase a product they do not want. Chait specifically takes on the activity/inactivity distinction. Chait argues that the government does regulate inactivity in that it mandates vaccinations and sometimes compels military service. The federal government derives the power to draft from the power to raise armies and navies rather than the interstate commerce clause. The states (not the federal government) have the power to compel vaccinations from the general police power that the federal government lacks.
It's sad to see the results based jurisprudence of Lithwick and Chait virtually unadorned and without any pretense of intellectual or legal argument of any kind. At least General Verrilli had the tact to cloak the core argument in other forms.
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