ObamaCare Confronts a Hard Reality

by Mr. Curmudgeon | Apr 3rd 2012

I Dream Things that Never Were …

-Robert F. Kennedy

A recent New York Times article contemplates the unthinkable:

"For the White House and the president's re-election team, the challenge begins immediately. They must publically defend the law's [ObamaCare's] constitutionality and push back against suggestions that the battle is already lost, even as they privately piece together a contingency plan if the law – or part of it – is overturned."

The excerpt above is a masterpiece of Orwellian "double-think," the ability to hold diametrically opposed ideas within a single thick skull. But it beautifully expresses the divide between storybook fantasy and cold reality, demagogic politics and analytic law, tyranny and freedom.

"Well," said President Obama in a 2009 address before a joint session of Congress, "the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together, and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care."

There were two major flaws with the president's calculations:

1. A majority of Americans opposed ObamaCare from its inception. Who doesn't recall the stream of YouTube videos showing boisterous town hall meetings of constituents giving their erstwhile representatives an earful, sounding like Patrick "give me liberty or give me death" Henry. Obama's congressional allies came off sounding like Prince John's sniveling henchmen in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

2. The second problem, one the media's talking heads insisted posed no problem at all, was whether nationalizing one-sixth of the economy, creating a government-run health insurance market and forcing every American into this clattering Rube Goldberg contraption, fell within the confines of the Constitution's enumerated powers; you know, that funny term used by the guys in the powdered wigs who convened in Philadelphia in 1787 and insisted their new government was legally obliged to do only those things allowed, well, by law.

Many legal analysts, CNN's Jeffrey Toobin for one, assured Obama's nervous re-election team – by which I mean virtually every editor and writer in virtually every newsroom in America – that James Madison, Gouverneur Morris, John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson's enumerated powers were the intellectual jet fuel behind Mao Tse-Tung's Great Leap Forward. Toobin told the vacant-headed interviewer Charlie Rose that the U.S. Supreme Court would sanction the president's little experiment in totalitarianism by a 7-to-2 or an 8-to-1 vote.

The Brick Wall of Reality …

The first hint that ObamaCare was in trouble was when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi pleaded for her Democratic colleagues to "pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy."

In saying this, she telegraphed two important realities: Transforming a free society into one that is not is very complicated – ObamaCare represents 2,700 pages of scintillating reading; and, second, America's transformative shift from representative government to a Czar-directed regime that renders congressional service to constituents superfluous.

When Pelosi's Democratic majority overwhelmingly voted not to read the bill, by passing it, many Americans realized there was something terribly wrong with our two-party system. With Republicans profoundly disinterested in resisting Obama and Pelosi's power grab, it fell to ordinary citizens to wage a two-front war against both political parties in the name of one overriding principle – restoring Constitutional normalcy to America.

Tea Party America unseated many a Pelosi Democrat and compliant Republican-in-Name-Only (RINO). The disastrous 2010 midterm elections, dubbed the "shellacking" by Obama, helped change the conversation in America from "What can government do for us" to "What can we do to shield ourselves from imperial government."

Somebody Call the Cops …

"When the President does it," the disgraced Richard Nixon famously said, "that means that it is not illegal."

A presidential pardon saved Nixon from testing his novel theory in open court, sparing him an embarrassing perp-walk and time behind bars. Much to Nixon's credit, his criminal inclinations tended toward the petty: Break-ins, wiretaps, and using the police powers of the FBI, CIA and IRS to harass political enemies. He never attempted to change America's more than 200-year constitutional arrangement between a free people and its elected government.

Nixon was tricky … but not that tricky.

The real trick was convincing lawmakers and the public that ObamaCare was just a benign way for Congress to nudge the country into engaging in a little regulated interstate commerce – even if Congress created that market, its main product and its readymade customers. This arrangement seemed at odds with a free society and more familiar in practice with the illicit powers exercised by New York City's mafia crime families.

Tell It to the Judge …

When Solicitor General Donald Verilli stood before the U.S. Supreme Court to defend ObamaCare, he had trouble getting the words out. He repeated himself, coughed, cleared his throat and stopped to drink a glass of water. He was undoubtedly nervous. Not for arguing the government's case before the nation's high court, he has done so 17 times before. It was that his argument took previous misguided Supreme Court rulings to their logical conclusion, and in defense of one principle: The power of Congress is infinite.

Supreme Court rulings since the heyday of the New Deal have expanded federal authority through novel interpretations of the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause. Under this argument, economic activity links us to one another, like the oxygen we breathe or the rays of the warming sun.

Karl Marx sought to place the "means of production" in the hands of the state, by which he meant factories. ObamaCare, through its individual mandate, covets the individual by radically redefining us as necessary cogs in the machine of government-created "commerce." ObamaCare perceives what Marx failed to see: That free men and women are the means of production.

But totalitarianism is beset with many internal contradictions. During the first day's oral arguments, the government lawyer insisted the courts had no legal authority to rule on the issue. He reasoned that the individual mandate was a tax and that Congress was simply exercising its taxing authority. Since no one has paid a fine for running afoul of the individual mandate (scheduled to begin in 2015), no injury has been inflicted and the courts cannot hear the case (the Anti-Injunction Act of 1867). The very next day, Verilli argued ObamaCare was not a tax but an Interstate Commerce and Necessary and Proper clause issue.

In one ironic moment, Verilli argued that the individual mandate required the IRS to function like a bill collection agency to guarantee that health care recipients "pay" for what they get. After all, Verilli insisted, many currently receive "health care service anyway as a result of social norms … to which we've obligated ourselves so that people get health care." Justice Antonin Scalia's answer to that was simple – "Don't obligate yourself."

Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered the high court's swing vote, framed his comment, Jeopardy-like, in the form of a question, "When you are changing the relation of the individual to the government in this, what we can stipulate is, I think, a unique way, do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show authorization under the Constitution?"

You're Such a Burden ...


Ah, yes, the "burden of justification … under the Constitution." That statement by Justice Kennedy caused shivers to run up the collective spines of American Progressives. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne was apoplectic, "Last week's Supreme Court oral arguments on health care were the most dramatic example of how radical tea partyism has displaced mainstream conservative thinking."

Dionne then expressed the darkest fear lurking in the hearts of his Progressive brethren, "It's not just that the law's individual mandate was, until very recently, a conservative idea. Even conservative legal analysts were insisting it was impossible to imagine the court declaring the health care mandate unconstitutional, given its past decisions."

For modern Progressives, American history begins with FDR's New Deal, and the subsequent Supreme Court rulings upholding the expansion of federal power under creative reinterpretations of the Constitution's clear language and meaning ("penumbras and emanations"). If you have no reasonable expectation of amending the founding document through the democratic process, the next best thing is to dub it a "living Constitution," leaving the amending to a nine person star chamber.

But Supreme Court justices read the newspapers just like the next guy – even the Washington Post. They would be hard pressed not to notice American Progressivism, which views the welfare-state police powers of Congress as infinite, is moving our nation inexorably toward fiscal ruin and a decidedly more authoritarian government.

If, as the Post's Dionne suggests, five Supreme Court justices are listening to the ruminations of the tea party, it's not the clamorous souls of the 2010 midterm elections … it's the guys in the tri-cornered hats who threw tea into Boston Harbor on a cold winter's eve in 1773. They predate today's meaningless left/right debate.

And that's the point. The Founder's believed the best way to preserve individual liberty was to create a national government of limited and enumerated powers while granting the various states unlimited power. This way, if a so-called "conservative" like Gov. Mitt Romney should enact a health care law with a totalitarian mandate in Massachusetts, free spirits could simply vote with their feet, fleeing to a nearby liberty-loving state. A national government with unlimited power forces its view on the whole nation, eliminating the safety our constitutional diversity of states was designed to provide. Obama and Pelosi's mandate was meant to be the final blow to that constitutional arrangement.

Politics are a lot like a magic act. Its success has more to do with the dazzling and distracting props of the magician – not to mention his deft sleight of hand. More importantly, the audience is predisposed to being fooled.

Law, on the other hand, relies on fact and precedent. Unlike the magician's audience, practitioners of the law are supposed to be predisposed skeptics who rely on reason and sound argument to arrive at the truth before dispensing justice.

The creeping totalitarianism of American Progressivism is about to get a swift kick in the pants by the very court that conjured the beast now threatening us.

I'm The Bad Guy?

At the end of the movie Falling Down the Michael Douglas character asks this question. He just could not fathom how he was the one being portrayed as the bad guy. My friends and I always joke around using this line but here and now it is very serious. Much like the character I cannot fathom, in this day and age, how a racist becomes president and then be allowed to nominate a racist that assuredly will be confirmed to the Supreme Court for a lifetime. Those of us on the right are being portrayed as racist because the nominee is a latina even though we oppose her on on intellectual grounds or her lack thereof. Dude, I could give a shit if she was three headed quadruple amputee with the blood of every nation running through her veins. I do not see race, no one on the right sees race, only liberals categorize people because it is easier to rule over them that way. This Roseanne Barr looking (I do see ugly though)America hater is as racist as he is but even worse she is as socialist as he is. Now there is not one republican in the world with the balls to call this spade a spade for fear of being called a racist or a bigot. Real men would stand up and fight this fight on racial grounds and her judicial record because both are a joke. The Supreme Court has over ruled this retard 5 out of 6 times how can she possibly, seriously be a part of The Court?!?!?! She has no idea how to apply the rule of law she only knows how to apply what is going on in her pathetic little mind and trying to make it law and call it a precedent. Hey, puta the legislative branch makes laws not the judicial.

When is enough, enough? Seriously people when is this fucking country going to wake up and see the internal threats? Oh that is right I am just some crazy right-wing(thank you) kook who warned you people that obama was not the centrist portrayed in the media during the campaign and everyday it gets worse and just proves me right. It is bad enough that we have 2 five foot short third world Asian dictators trying to destroy us now we also have an asshole and and alll of his administration officials trying to destroy us to build a new America in their own image with their new rules; think George Orwell's Animal Farm . They hope to change everything that was bad in the past and at the same time destroy the good. I am just going to come out and say it these people were not raised in normal situations they hate everything we hold dear. He was not even raised here and she was raised in the south Bronx. Have you been to the south Bronx? What has she even done to improve it? Would you live there given the chance? No you would not, just like you would not live in the south side of Chicago where obama was a community organizer. They do not give a crap about God or country they care only about themselves and their careers. You know I have not been fired up in a while but these two assholes have got my fires burning again. She says that she is better suited for the job than a white guy because of her experiences. Really I do not think that anyone with a latino surname drafted, debated or signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Nor do I think that anyone with an islamic middle name and/or african did either. What I do know is that South and Central America are in chaos with most countries been ruled by idiot leftists or dictators or both and Africa and islamic countries are rules by kings, dictators or both or no one at all that has led to multiple genocides continentwide . Your peoples have done a great job in these places by throwing out the white man and returning the country's wealth to its rightful owners. I'm the racist? I'm the bad guy?

5-4

After reading this blog for awhile you all know that I love this country and hold the Founding Fathers up to almost superhero status. Well ladies and gentlemen the Supreme Court has managed to piss me off yet again by basically telling the Constitution to that it is not worth the paper it is written on. Not the whole court mind you but the leftists (who would have thought). Thank God that there are four justices that believe their duty is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution Mr. John G. Roberts Jr., Mr. Antonin Scalia, Mr. Clarence Thomas, and Mr. Samuel A. Alito Jr. Those are the men who believe as you and I do, that the Constitution is relevant and important in today's America, but even more important is they put the words contained in this document ahead of their own personal beliefs. Now the court leftists, like all leftists, put personal thoughts and feelings ahead of their job and decide that the Constitution should be used as a guide to make new laws that they come up with to "help" America. I am of course talking about the two rulings this week.

The first ruling was 5-4 to tell Louisiana to go fuck themselves they could not execute convicted child rapists because the punishment did not fit the crime. That has nothing to do with it, the leftists don't like the death penalty so they ruled against it on that ground. They made up some excuse that is they ruled in favor of the law the child would be killed, clearly they now have an ability to see into the future. Rapists rape and murderers murder. If they were all executed they wouldn't do either. (See previous posts on foreign terrorists for my execution style.) So a state writes the law passes the law and the law is not in violation of ANYTHING in the constitution but the leftists don't like capital punishment so they give Louisiana the finger. State's rights do not exist anymore in America, oh wait, my bad except for gay marriage. People this is Animal Farm type stuff, we are on our way to an Orwellian future unless we can stop it.

The second ruling of 5-4 was a win that said the Second Amendment says what it says it says. It is OK for Americans to own guns. No shit really I didn't know that, I had never read the Second Amendment. "Right to bear arms shall not be infringed." Pretty cut and dry... for anyone with a friggin brain maybe. The leftists don't see it that way, of course. They know that people with guns can fight back against a jurist that thinks he/she knows more that the Founding Fathers. If there are no guns the people can be controlled i.e. Nazi Germany. We are a "Republic of, by, and for the people." These leftists want to rule from the bench however they feel personally. This going to be huge freakin problem. We need a republican President unfortunately there is not one in this years election, yes there is but he is running as a Libertarian. You must work to elect republican senators they vote for supreme court justices.

Look at it this way Obama is President, both houses of Congress is controlled by the leftists, and these 5-4 decisions become even more lopsided and not in our favor. Nice fuckin world we live in huh?

Yes we all know I despise the pinko-commies but at least we can see them coming what I can not stand is a snake in the grass who is only about himself and his place in history. I am speaking of justice Kennedy. On both of these votes he was the "swing" vote and he likes this position it makes him feel important shall we say bigger than the court itself. This is a problem because he does not rule on the law but by what is going to get his name in the media outlets. That is freakin scary. In the end can we Save America from the Supreme Court? It might be something that means something to you they rule against next time. What are you gonna do? They want to know too.