Following the play-by-play of the litigation initiated by numerous states over the new healthcare law’s  “individual mandate” – the part that requires everyone to purchase health insurance whether they want it or not, on pain of paying a penalty to the IRS – can be tough unless you’re keeping an up-to-date scorecard.

We were told initially that the mandate was justified under the Constitution’s “Commerce Clause.” (Art. I, Section 8, clause 3) The bill itself included 10 “findings” supporting the mandate’s connection to interstate commerce. Conservatives like Randy Barnett were laughed at for arguing that the Commerce Clause couldn’t go the distance.  Like a coach faced with a starting pitcher that can’t make it through the first inning, however, the Administration has already abandoned the Commerce Clause and trotted out a reliever named “Tax and Spend power”  (Art. I, Section 8, clause 1) to silence the bats of those umpteen state attorneys general who are challenging the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Barnett’s doing his well-deserved victory dance here.

The individual mandate was tough for liberals to defend even while the healthcare bill was still in Congress. You may recall that I highlighted how CNSNews.com made sport of liberal congressional representatives who couldn’t figure out what, if any,  “enumerated power” (Art I, sec 8 ) of the Constitution the individual mandate falls under, and most opted for the “of-course-we-can-do-that” non-answer.

The trouble for the Administration now is two-fold: First, the president assured us the individual mandate wasn’t a tax (“It’s absolutely not a tax increase.”) and that he wouldn’t raise anyone’s taxes who made less then $250K a year. Oops. Second, the taxing power doesn’t work as a justification either. According to Barnett, this fall-back argument is worse than the first:

So, like the invocation of the Commerce Clause, this invocation of the Tax Power is factually and judicially unprecedented. It is yet another unprecedented claim of Congressional power. Only this one is even more sweeping and dangerous than the Commerce Clause theory.

As any baseball fan understands, a mid-relief pitcher usually can’t go the distance, and you’re going to need a closer if your mid-reliever starts tiring in the 7th or 8th inning. Thus, the administration says that if the court doesn’t buy the “taxing power” argument, they’re definitely going to call on the “General Welfare” clause (Art. I, Sec. 8, clause 18) to shut down the AG’s challenge, once and for all.

But as Ken Klukowski points out, if you’re going to rely on the General Welfare clause in this case, then you’re really grasping at straws.

Or (more apropos of my baseball analogy) you’d just be throwing hanging curveballs.

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