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With the Supreme Court about to rule on the constitutionality Obama's Affordable Care Act (aka, "Obamacare"), the New York Times has been running a series of articles leading up to the announcement later this month. This one, entitled,"How Broccoli Landed on the Supreme Court Menu" is insightful for the power of activism - this time by the Libertarian community of activists:

Broccoli, of all things, came up in the Supreme Court during arguments over the constitutionality of the Obama administration's health care legislation. If Congress can require Americans to buy health insurance, Justice Antonin Scalia asked, could it force people to buy just about anything -- including a green vegetable that many find distasteful?

"Everybody has to buy food sooner or later," he said. "Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli."

Since then broccoli has captured the public imagination and become the defining symbol for what may be the most important Supreme Court ruling in decades, one that is expected any day and could narrow the established limits of federal power and even overturn the legal underpinnings of the New Deal.

And where did this line of reasoning come from?

It turns out that broccoli did not spring from the mind of Justice Scalia. The vegetable trail leads backward through conservative media and pundits. Before reaching the Supreme Court, vegetables were cited by a federal judge in Florida with a libertarian streak; in an Internet video financed by libertarian and ultraconservative backers; at a Congressional hearing by a Republican senator; and an op-ed column by David B. Rivkin Jr., a libertarian lawyer whose family emigrated from the former Soviet Union when he was 10.

Read on for all the gory details, and stay tuned for the biggest decision of the Supreme Court in a generation.

PS: We'll find out if this article is correct, which claims that oral arguments don't hold much sway over these decisions. We all know how the U.S. Solicitor General - Donald Verrilli - supposedly botched his oral argument. Bud did he really?

We'll find out in a week or so.

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