Half a century ago, the federal government adopted a policy that sparked vitriolic protest, cost almost 60,000 American lives and left a black granite scar on the National Mall. Yet the Supreme Court resisted the temptation to rule the undeclared war in Vietnam unconstitutional. Debate about that use of the nation's war power proceeded in the political arena, where it belonged.

Neither widespread outrage at a federal policy nor even a consensus that it is wrong makes it unconstitutional. Being controversial, unwise or even loathed is one thing; being unconstitutional is quite another. Only the latter is within the purview of the court. It does not sit as a klatch of busybodies to second-guess the government's policy making.

But that is what the people challenging Obamacare's individual mandate are asking the court to do: Use the Constitution as a pretext to set aside an unpopular policy. Just as the Warren court denied anti-war protesters that indulgence in the 1960s, so the Roberts court should deny it to tea partiers today.

America faces a crisis of Cold War proportions. With nearly one in every 10 Americans unemployed and protests growing in the streets, the nation stands on the brink of a global financial meltdown and a second deep recession. Congress and President Barack Obama face fury in their bases as they struggle with budget chasms that have threatened the creditworthiness of the United States.

Yet the challengers want the court to barge into the committee rooms and executive offices of the other branches and micromanage the power to safeguard the economy. They say the Constitution denies the country's leaders the choice of means in deciding how best to confront the fiscal threats that pervade one-sixth of the nation's economy -- the very kerosene fueling the debt crisis and an anvil crushing the country's competitiveness.

The challengers cannot be right.

Indeed, they are watering seeds in a forest fire. They have fixated on remote precedents about guns in school zones and nonsense hypotheticals about broccoli-eating mandates. That is no way to frame this important constitutional issue.

The times are rare when Congress needs to make people buy something. Indeed, this is the first time it has really tried. So there are not any specific precedents to consult. The novelty of the individual mandate compels a resort to first principles, as drawn out of the Constitution two centuries ago by Chief Justice John Marshall.

One is that it is a constitution we are expounding. By its very nature, the Constitution paints with only broad strokes and commands a robust interpretation. To endure for the ages, it gives the government ample power to respond to crises both foreseeable and unforeseeable. It is not a straightjacket.

Second, the federal power over commerce is sweeping. The Constitution empowers Congress to establish rules for any commercial intercourse, however local, that affects "more states than one." The challengers do not even dispute that Congress has power to control costs in the sprawling health care sector of the economy.

Third, the grant of great powers to Congress includes great discretion in using them. Congress need not choose the most simple or direct means to achieve its goals. Rather, as long as the ultimate goal is within its power, Congress may choose any means that are "plainly adapted" to that goal. No one seriously doubts that having people buy health insurance takes direct aim at the goal of controlling health care costs.

A fourth and final principle is that a law enacted by Congress and the president -- the court's equals -- comes to the court with a heavy presumption in favor of its constitutionality. Unless a law violates civil liberties, which the challengers do not allege, Congress and the president are to receive every benefit of the doubt. A law's unconstitutionality has to be plain, and the individual mandate's is not.

These first principles of constitutional law lead inexorably to the conclusion that the individual mandate, though novel, is constitutional. In fact, it isn't even a close call. From the power to wage war to the power to safeguard the economy, the Constitution created a formidable federal government.

With great powers, of course, comes the potential for grave abuses. The court knows that. But it rightly gives the democratic process the leeway to correct itself when civil liberties are not at stake.

Opponents of the individual mandate have been pressing for a democratic correction. Scores of politicians who voted for the mandate have been removed from Congress. The President who signed it into law faces precarious odds of re-election. Under our Constitution, the political arena is exactly where this raging debate belongs. Not in court.

J. Stephen Clark, J.D., is a professor at Albany Law School, where he teaches constitutional law.