We interrupt your extended Ronald Reagan birthday party to bring you this video of the Gipper's Solicitor General, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, explaining to the Senate Judiciary Committee his thoughts about the Affordable Care Act's health insurance mandate. "I am quite sure that the health care mandate is constitutional," he told the committee. "The mandate is necessary to the accomplishment of the regulation of health insurance."
It isn't exactly earth-shattering news that conservative legal scholars affirm the constitutionality of the bill -- Sen. Kit Bond, for instance, co-sponsored legislation in the 1990s that featured an individual health insurance mandate. But facts haven't exactly gotten in the way of Republican grandstanding on the issue, as you know.
Watch some of Friend's testimony, as posted by ThinkProgress:
Talking Points Memo, The New Republic and The American Prospect have more.
