printEvery self-respecting banana republic, as the US is fast becoming, operates on an unconstitutional ex post facto basis. The victims of its agencies have no way of foreseeing or controlling how vague laws will be bent and charges conjured in the course of seeking desired prosecutorial outcomes.
An ex post facto law (Latin for “from after the action” or “after the facts”), also called a retroactive law, is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences (or status) of actions that were committed, or relationships that existed, before the enactment of the law. In criminal law, it may criminalize actions that were legal when committed; it may aggravate a crime by bringing it into a more severe category than it was in when it was committed; it may change the punishment prescribed for a crime, as by adding new penalties or extending sentences; or it may alter the rules of evidence in order to make conviction for a crime likelier than it would have been when the deed was committed.
“Two clauses in the US Constitution prohibit ex post facto laws: Art 1, § 9 and Art. 1 § 10.” But the Constitution—itself no great shakes for lasting liberty—is dead.
Via the indefatigable Betsy McCaughey, who knows Obamacare backwards, comes foreboding news about President Camacho’s latest ex post facto exploits. These entail new Obamacare regs making it “a requirement that employers attest to the IRS, meaning under penalty of perjury, that they have not reduced the number of employees or cut hours to shield themselves from the extra costs of Obamacare.”
More on these “bone chilling intrusion into your freedom to run your business”:
Monday’s announcement is actually a hush money scheme. Under the Affordable Care Act, as written, employers are penalized a whopping $3,000 each time one of their workers goes onto the Obama exchanges and gets a taxpayer subsidized plan. Now the administration is offering to waive that penalty, provided employers stop complaining. Employers who want to take this deal must attest that they haven’t laid off workers or cut hours to squeeze under the 99-worker threshold.
Here’s where Big Brother starts running your business. The IRS will forgive you if you make changes “because of the sale of a division, changes in the economic marketplace in which the employer operates, terminations of employment for poor performance, or other similar changes.” It’s none of Big Brother’s business why you hire or fire. This is a bone chilling intrusion into your freedom to run your business.
UPDATE: Idiocracy über alles. And how can an affirmatively appointed judiciary, members of who “confuse the Constitution for the Declaration of Independence,” know the meaning and prohibition on mischief-making with the law?
Both federal judge Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen and the one-time newspaper of record confused the Constitution for the Declaration of Independence during their haste to celebrate the overturning of Virginia’s gay marriage ban Thursday night.
“Our Constitution declares that ‘all men’ are created equal. Surely this means all of us,” wrote Allen in a tautological pronouncement that cited a unilateral assertion of sovereignty penned in response to 18th-century British abuses of power, rather than the supreme law governing the U.S.