The Necessary and Proper Clause cannot be utilized to “pass laws for the accomplishment of objects” that are not within Congress’ enumerated powers. As the previous analysis of the defendants’ Commerce Clause argument reveals, the individual mandate is neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution. To uphold that provision via application of the Necessary and Proper Clause would authorize Congress to reach and regulate far beyond the currently established “outer limits” of the Commerce Clause and effectively remove all limits on federal power. As the Supreme Court explained in Printz: "When a “Law . . . for carrying into Execution” the Commerce Clause [violates other Constitutional principles], it is not a “Law . . . proper for carrying into Execution the Commerce Clause.

What letter of the Constitution does the individual mandate violate? Vinson does not say. As for the "spirit," Vinson provides no ghostly clue as to what he is talking about. Vinson talks about monsters, not Constitutional provisions:

[T]he “essential attributes” of the Commerce Clause limitations on the federal government’s power would definitely be compromised by this assertion of federal power via the Necessary and Proper Clause. If Congress is allowed to define the scope of its power merely by arguing that a provision is “necessary” to avoid the negative consequences that will potentially flow from its own statutory enactments, the Necessary and Proper Clause runs the risk of ceasing to be the “perfectly harmless” part of the Constitution that Hamilton assured us it was, and moves that much closer to becoming the “hideous monster [with] devouring jaws” that he assured us it was not.

Chief Justice John Marshall, whose seminal McCulloch v. Maryland decision Vinson brazenly cites, saw it differently:

[S]hould congress, in the execution of its powers, adopt measures which are prohibited by the constitution; or should congress, under the pretext of executing its powers, pass laws for the accomplishment of objects not intrusted to the government; it would become the painful duty of this tribunal, should a case requiring such a decision come before it, to say, that such an act was not the law of the land.

Vinson does not identify any part of the Constitution which prohibits the individual mandate nor does Vinson argue that the ACA was passed for the accomplishment of objects not intrusted to government. Instead, Congress acted within its Constitutional powers as Justice Marshall described it:

Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.

Alexander Hamilton would surely be surprised to see his name invoked to buttress Vinson's reasoning. In his defense of the constitutionality of the First Bank of the United States, Hamilton wrote in 1791:

[E]very power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes, by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power, and which are not precluded by restrictions and exceptions specified in the Constitution, or not immoral, or not contrary to the essential ends of political society.

To find support for his radical view that legislative provisions "essential" to the effectuation of legitimate legislative ends that are not prohibited by the Constitution are not "Necessary and Proper," Vinson should look elsewhere than Hamilton and Marshall.

Speaking for me only