Patrick McKinley Brennan, The Individual Mandate, Sovereignty, and the Ends of Good Government: A Reply to Professor Randy Barnett (pdf) (via MoJ)

At this point, while this deserves a response from a learned proponent of American federalism, I don't really have the drive to type anything... sovereignty may be a problematic notion (if Maritain is correct, but is Bodin's conception of sovereignty the only one that is operative in modern nation-states?); would it be wrong to say that Brennan is one more Catholic who has embraced a Nationalist understanding of the Constitution?

If a Catholic is going to subject the American political system to Natural Law and the science of politics in order to change it, then he would do well to look first at the basics and deal with the question of sustainability, before defending the welfare state as the ideal with respect to the size and scope of the "Federal" government.