Democracy in America !

I get very irritated by arguments of the form "If the government had the power to do apparently reasonable thing x, it could do crazy thing y." In many cases, the government really does have the constitutional power to do crazy things. Congress has the power to levy taxes and spend them on pretty much whatever it wants. Congress could tax all income at 98% and spend the money to build a golden palace for its pet toucan Horace. That would be pretty awful. But even though the courts cannot rule that taxing income at 98% or building golden palaces for pet toucans is unconstitutional, fret ye not! Congress is never going to do anything like that, because if it did, it wouldn't be re-elected, and because (our sometimes overheated commentary notwithstanding) members of Congress are not as a rule entirely crazy, nor are the majority of the people who elect them.
As a sub-point, the formulation in Judge Roger Vinson's ruling "Congress could require that people buy and consume broccoli at regular intervals" is a huge sneaky elision. Congress probably could require that people buy broccoli at regular intervals, if it were crazy and didn't want to get re-elected. Whether it could require that people consume broccoli raises some obvious Bill-of-Rights concerns. Though nothing in the Bill of Rights actually specifies that people have a right to decide what food they put in their own bodies, and anyone who felt that such a right must exist would probably have to find it in the document's "penumbra", which might be an uncomfortable stance for constitutional originalists like Judge Vinson.

P.S: my sister helped lol