This video discussion (with Senator Orrin Hatch, Eugene Volokh, and Randy Barnett) of the constitutionality of the Health Care Mandate is over an hour long, but really worth watching. I was especially impressed by what Senator Hatch says about the importance of the Constitution as a restraint on government. Renewed my faith to see a senator talk that way. Hatch believes the mandate is unconstitutional because it goes beyond regulation of the marketplace, and requires participation by citizens under penalty of law. The requirement that every American buy health insurance is, argues Hatch, completely unprecedented and such a dramatic departure from constitutional limitations on congressional power that if upheld, it would mean that the Congress could do anything it wanted.

Including, presumably, implementing a planetary one child policy -- recently advocated by a leading Canadian newspaper:

A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

Congress could simply copy and paste the following Canadian editorial language as "Congressional findings":

The world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity's soaring reproduction rate.

[...]

-If only one child per female was born as of now, the world's population would drop from its current 6.5 billion to 5.5 billion by 2050, according to a study done for scientific academy Vienna Institute of Demography.

-By 2075, there would be 3.43 billion humans on the planet. This would have immediate positive effects on the world's forests, other species, the oceans, atmospheric quality and living standards.

-Doing nothing, by contrast, will result in an unsustainable population of nine billion by 2050.

Besides, it relates to health care, so maybe they could attach it to the current bill at the last minute when no one is looking or has time to read.

China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy. Its middle class grows, all its citizens have housing, health care, education and food, and the one out of five human beings who live there are not overpopulating the planet.

For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pastureland into desert as is now the case, or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.

I'd rather enact controls on government sizes.

That was the original theory of the Constitution.

MORE: Via Glenn Reynolds, Jim Lindgren raises the question of whether a planetary one-child policy might doom the welfare state.

A welfare state is in one sense a big Ponzi scheme. Without increasing numbers of people entering the scheme, there is no money to pay the people receiving the money. As Mark Steyn has repeatedly pointed out, you can't run a welfare state without a growing population.