United Liberty

The point of CPAC, from what I gathered in my visit last year, is fire up the conservative movement and provide them, through the various panels and discussions with the intellectual firepower to sway people they interact with back home. But Ilya Shapiro notes that there are no lawyers sitting on the panel on ObamaCare:

One thing I noticed about this year’s [CPAC] program — other than that my colleague Neal McCluskey is on an education policy panel at 10:30am on Friday — is that there’s a panel on the constitutionality of Obamacare (1:25 on Friday).  Curiously, there aren’t any lawyers on this panel.  C’mon, CPAC, I know this isn’t a Federalist Society convention, but it would seem useful to have people actually grappling with the legal issues educating your attendees about it.  Not all of us have problems communicating with non-JDs; do I have to issue another Obamacare debate challenge?

The panel will include John C. Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, whose main focus is healthcare policy; but, he’s not a laywer. That seems to be an important element missing from the panel, especially when you consider that the Supreme Court will take up this case next month to determine the constitutionality of the individual mandate, not whether or not ObamaCare is good healthcare policy.

If it’s any consolation to Shapiro and my libertarian friends braving the unwelcome atmosphere at CPAC this year, the panel on “Islamic Law in America” doesn’t feature any lawyers or judicial experts either. It does, however, include noted Islamaphobe and birther Pamela Gellar.