Category Archives: Constitution

The Powers Of Obama’s ‘Politburo of Proctologists’

Barack Obama, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Regulation, Socialism

Not even the US Solicitor General Donald Verrilli can muster a spirited defense of ObamaCare. Said Verrilli, almost apologetically, on Tuesday before the Supreme Court: “Maybe they were right, maybe they weren’t, but this is something about which the people of the United States can deliberate and they can vote, and if they think it needs to be changed, they can change it.” [Oh really?]

Our state’s Attorney General Rob McKenna sees this as the most important case of our lifetime on Federal power under the Commerce clause. The Supreme Court was treating it very seriously, as have all the courts so far, in ruling on the individual mandate. The power to order individuals into private contract, says McKenna, is made up. It’s not as if it had been lying around undiscovered.

It’s a shame that McKenna seems to both support and anticipate ‘severability”—an outcome whereby the individual mandate is severed from the rest of the law, which is upheld.

To the fatuous point of the health-care market being unique, and thus requiring special treatment by the state, McKenna counters that uniqueness is not a constitutional principle.

The issue here is not healthcare policy but Federal power, he says, intimating that Obama’s “politburo of proctologists” cannot “create commerce in order to regulate it.” This is a first, claims McKenna.

As was pointed out in “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured,” the number of uninsured, by choice or not by choice, is grossly exaggerated.

“The key legal thinker in developing the case against the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate” is Facebook Friend Randy Barnett. Randy is “the originator of the activity/inactivity distinction” being used in the arguments against Obamacare.

Here is Randy’s interview on Ezra Klein’s WaPo’s blog.

Especially pertinent, in the Klein interview, is Randy’s distinction between “the government’s power to tax in order to pay for Medicare, which is a single-payer insurance program that [you’ll] get when over 65,” and the same entity’s constitutional authority to compel the individual to “self-insure on the private market before [he’s] 65.”

RB: “There are several answers, but I’ll limit myself to two. First, there’s the text of the Constitution itself. The text of the Constitution itself gives Congress the power to levy taxes on people and on income. We can’t dispute that. It does not give Congress the power under its commerce power, at least not expressly, to make them do business with private companies.
The second point I would make is that the duty to pay taxes is part of your duty to support the government in return for the protections the government gives you. What the government is claiming here is this power — and this ought to disturb people on the left — to make people do business with private companies when Congress thinks it’s convenient.”

It’s safe to say that even libertarians like Randy who might uphold the elaborate public works sprung from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses as constitutional, have to agree that Thomas Jefferson would probably be appalled with it all.

RELATED:

* “LIBERTARIANISM & FOREIGN POLICY: A REPLY TO RANDY BARNETT”
* “Whither HellCare?”
* Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Cases
* Wednesday Transcript & Audio: Supreme Court: The Health Care Law And Medicaid Expansion

Whither HellCare?

Barack Obama, Constitution, Healthcare, Law, Political Philosophy, Regulation, Socialism

As freedom lovers know, the case pitting the DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES against FLORIDA, ET AL is simply one more stage on the road to socializing the means of health-care production. Americans already labor under, as one wag put it, “a seeming patchwork of indemnity insurance arrangements, managed care, private payment, and charity.”

Increasing interventionism is always accompanied by the use of brute force, the legitimacy of which the nation’s Supreme Politburo Of Proctologists (the SCOTUS) is currently debating.

Not surprisingly, “the four jurists appointed by Democratic presidents — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — seemed sympathetic to the government’s defense of the [ObamaCare], at times offering Solicitor General Donald Verrilli helpful answers to their colleagues’ questions,” reports the National Journal’s Margot Sanger-Katz. “Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia — who had been considered by some Court watchers to be in play — seemed to stand firmly with the challengers.”

Equally predictable: “Chief Justice John Roberts, whose questions suggested a discomfort with the health care law, … also defended the government’s argument at times.”

Both Kennedy and Roberts will probably find a way to make ObamaCare palatable by papering over arguments against it. While they “seemed particularly concerned about the question of whether upholding this law would mean that Congress’s authority to pass regulation would be virtually unbounded, [t]hey repeatedly asked Verrilli to identify a limiting principle that would allow this mandate to go forward without opening the door to requirements to purchase other products.” [NJ]

The gist of the case being argued:

The 26 states challenging the mandate say it is an unprecedented demand, one that regulates economic “inactivity” and forces people into purchasing a product they do not want. If the government can compel the purchase of health insurance, they argue, then nearly any sort of purchase mandate could also be permitted. The administration counters that there’s basically no avoiding the health care market: Everyone needs health care at some time, often with little warning or financial preparation. Health insurance is not a standalone product, but merely a means of regulating the financing of that activity, it says

[NJ]

The elaborate public works sprung from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses are unconstitutional. However, despite the fact that there is no warrant in the Constitution for most of what the Federal Frankenstein does, the Proctologists will find a way around what is already a dead-letter document.

Rid Us of Regulation

Constitution, Economy, Labor, Regulation

When BHO or any other politician utters trite promises about creating jobs for the little people, we, their Lilliputian subjects, should be able to pipe-up about the regulatory barriers to entering the workforce erected by the very same people.

A license to speak to tourists without which you go to jail for 90 days
A test to “practice” flower-arranging
$30,000 mandatory outlay for an embalming room, if you want to open a funeral parlor

“How are these laws able to get enacted?” asks RT? “Lobbyists and special interest groups infiltrate politics on the federal and local level. They urge lawmakers to pass regulations that benefit them, and keep the competition out. The result: an America growing increasingly regulated. According to the Institute of Justice, in the 1950’s 1 in 20 occupations required a government permit. Today it’s one in three. And all this red tape is costing taxpayers billions.”

Lewd licensure is not a function of BHO’s administration alone, although he has increased the number of billions transferred from the private economy to the blood-sucking bureaucracy.

I would, however, counter that the culprits here are not the lobbyists, who have not taken an oath to uphold the Constitution and work to benefit not factions, but all folks. Politicians have the power to refuse to enact these laws. However, as always, it seems that, psychologically, it is easier for news agencies and the people to blame corporations, Wall Street and K Street, instead of the bums who capitulate to these special interests.

UPDATED: Rush Limbaugh Pimps Principles (& No One Understands RIGHTS from Wrongs!)

Conservatism, Constitution, Feminism, Gender, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Republicans

In the proud history of conservative serial stupidity, Rush Limbaugh’s latest faux pas takes the cake. An issue concerning constitutional principles fell into his large lap. But the conservative movement’s self-aggrandizing, insufferably pompous Mouth, pimped it.

A privileged Georgetown University law school student named Sandra Fluke was permitted to make the case before a “nonofficial congressional committee” as to why the state should compel the insurance industry to provide sisters with birth-control pills. (Some committee members were in tears listening to this cloistered cow tell of women turning away from the pharmacy counter for lack of funds. Go to the Republic of Biafra for a taste of deprivation, Fluke!)

This flaccid fool was supremely repulsive in her perverse conviction that a woman’s “reproductive rights” were the responsibility of other taxpayer. Fluke is a testament to the destructive role of women in our politics, forever petitioning to expand the power of the state at the expense of individual rights. (Read a corrective about natural rights, here.)

Recall, Limbaugh once launched a sneering assault on a deformed Michael J. Fox, aping Fox’s Parkinson’s-induced spasms, instead of critiquing Fox for petitioning Congress for unconstitutional favors, just like Fluke.

When it came to Fluke, Limbaugh flunked as badly. He began thus:

“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”

Limbaugh then said, “ok, so she’s not a slut. She’s round-heeled.” “Round-heeled” is an old-fashioned term for promiscuity.

This is entertaining, but besides the point.

But here is where the middle-aged, so-called conservative loses it, sounding like a lusty old voyeur:

“So Miss Fluke, if we are going to … pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Game. Set. Match, Sandra Fluke. Limbaugh not only lost the argument to this inconsequential woman, but he also helped anoint a future Democratic, feminist, front-woman and leader.

Conservatives have a hard time with first principles; perhaps they don’t have any. Thus, they can never win an argument with a liberal, for all they have in their intellectual arsenal is a Benthamite utilitarianism (except that Jeremy Bentham was really smart).

Why are conservatives Addicted to That Rush?

UPDATE (March 3): No One Understands RIGHTS from Wrongs! Your point is not the point either, Robert Glisson. The point is that conservatives and liberals alike do not have any mandate to promote responsibility vis-a-vis the legislator. The Fluke female can screw herself silly; quit preaching to her! People are sick and tired of conservatives in their bedroom and liberals in all the other rooms. The only point here is that no taxpayer, coerced by Congress, should be compelled to pay for Fluke’s personal choices, good or bad. I give up on anyone understanding what a natural right means. I do, however, get why people are Addicted to that Rush, who is not “more often right than wrong,” but is both insufferably self-righteous and wrong.