I refer you to United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association, 322 U.S. 533 (1944).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._South-Eastern_Underwriters_Association
Also Gonzales v. Raich
Among those who have joined in rejecting the century-old, long-defunct decisions on which Judge Roger Vinson's decision rests, are Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Chief Justice Roberts. They will have to twist their prior decisions and statements into pretzels in order to rule the individual mandate or other ACA provisions unconstitutional.
Specifically:
In his concurring opinion in Gonzales v. Raich (2005),
Justice Scalia spelled out in exquisite detail how the necessary and proper clause gives Congress power to do whatever is necessary to make a broader statutory scheme work - whether or not the specific means employed would be, standing alone, valid under the commerce clause. In that opinion he wrote:
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Where necessary to make a regulation of interstate commerce effective, Congress may regulate even . . . activities that do not themselves substantially affect interstate commerce.
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Scalia approvingly quoted Chief Justice Rehnquist in the Lopez decision that limited commerce clause authority: "Though the conduct in Lopez was not economic, the Court [Rehnquist] nevertheless recognized that it could be regulated as ‘an essential part of a larger regulation of economic activity, in which the regulatory scheme would be undercut unless the intrastate activity were regulated."
This is a precise characterization of the role of the individual mandate in relation to the insurance reforms in the ACA.
Scalia wrote that under the necessary and proper clause, the government "possesses every power needed to make [its solution to a national economic problem] effective."
Again, one could not ask for a more precise picture of the mandate.
