Charles Gray | Sleepless in Washington D.C.

As a student, it’s impossible not to feel powerless in D.C. The ineffective federal bureaucracy and out-of-touch politicians are on full display there. For that reason, I have always been hesitant to enter the federal district.

But last Tuesday, I couldn’t avoid it. The two sides that I root for — the underdog and the guardians of limited government — were once again one and the same as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding the constitutionality of Obamacare.

Around 1 a.m., a blog monitoring public spots to hear the oral arguments (that I had been refreshing for hours) reported that there were still spots available. I immediately decided to travel to the capital. After standing in line for four hours in front of the Supreme Court, I was only able to get in for about five minutes of the oral argument. But that was enough for me.

The petitioners were in for a fight. History has shown that as republics develop, the threats to freedom and success evolve.

New countries are vulnerable to external threats. So at first, they are principally concerned with defending themselves militarily. But as wealth grows, another equally dangerous threat develops from within. Individuals start believing that centralization and government is the answer to their problems.

The antidote to the two respective threats is different. The external threat is defeated with arms and brute force. But the internal one must be defeated through wisdom and superior judgment on the part of a nation’s citizens and its elected representatives.

Unsurprisingly, America has begun to succumb to this internal threat. Since Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, American history has been a story of continual growth in the power of federal government (aside from a brief respite in the 1980s). Increasingly, the federal government is viewed as the solution to our problems. This viewpoint allows the economic and political power of Washington D.C. to grow.

The idea of limited government and its defenders are underdogs in this maze.

Tuesday’s proceeding was devastating for the federal government’s case to uphold the healthcare law. The swing vote on the court, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, seemed to express sympathy for striking down the law’s mandate for individuals to buy health insurance.

The argument he seemed to support is beautiful in its simplicity. If Congress has the power to force individuals to purchase health insurance, then what prevents it from mandating other goods that it deems important for its citizens, like broccoli? Under this framework, there would be no limiting principle to the federal government’s power under the commerce clause.

Paul Clement, the principal lawyer for the 26 states challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare, made an impressive case as justices peppered him with questions during the session. He was performing on all cylinders.

Clement is one in a team of underdog lawyers who brought this case to its conclusion after the law was passed in 2010.

Throughout the debate surrounding the bill, few Republicans in Congress stated that it might be unconstitutional. When states filed the case against the federal government anyway, legal scholars and academics believed it was dead on arrival. The challenge was even called frivolous. Eighty-five percent of those surveyed by the American Bar Association predicted the Supreme Court would uphold the law.

But the underdogs would not give up.

Two years later, the case has reached the Supreme Court and I think there is at least a 50-percent chance that the individual mandate will be overturned.

It is a potential turning point in the narrative of Washington D.C. — when the outsized and outmatched reaches his or her fullest potential and fairly defeats the arrogant and overconfident federal government.

Key moments where external threats have been stopped are ingrained in our nation’s history. For example, at the Alamo in 1836, a ragtag group of individuals defended Texas against the external threat of an outside army.

Last week, Clement and his fellow lawyers defended the republic from its equivalent internal threat. They used the power of their minds to show how a law violates the principles of limited government that our country was founded upon.

On my way back to catch a train to Philadelphia, I turned around one last time to look at the Court. I couldn’t help think that this may be the Alamo of our generation — the beginning of an opportunity for underdogs to curb the obsessive growth of our federal government.

Charles Gray is a College and Wharton senior from Casper, Wyo. His email address is chagr@wharton.upenn.edu. The Gray Area appears every other Wednesday.

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