I’ve been told repeatedly that we must elect Mitt Romney, come what may, because the country won’t survive Obama for another four years. Whether this assertion is true, those who hold this point of view invariably follow up with a claim that I now find utterly laughable. I am told: “Besides, if Romney wins, we’ll be able to hold his feet to the fire, and get him to do our bidding…” I wonder if the people who express this view realize how thoroughly nonsensical that position really is. There is only one way to hold a President’s feet to the fire, and it is by being able to exert electoral control, but as of the Rules Committee report of Tuesday at the RNC, that option is now all but effectively gone. I would like those who claim that we conservatives will be able to exert some influence over a President Romney to explain to me with precision how that is to be accomplished, apart from vague platitudes: How can we expect to “hold his feet to the fire?” By what mechanism?
First of all, what fire? Romney hasn’t pledged much except to repeal and replace Obama-care. Replace? Yes, “replace.” For those of you who practice self-deception, you might not have heard him say that, but now I ask you: “Replace with what, precisely?” Here we are delivered more vague platitudes about market-based solutions, but not once does Romney offer what those solutions will be. More platitudes. More vague generalities. It’s a load of hogwash. Welcome to Romney-care 2.0. Welcome to Romney 3.0.
Let us assume, however, that there is some magical laundry list of things Mitt Romney had promised with some specificity. Even if he has, could some brave soul please explain to me the method by which he is to be made to perform as promised? What will you do if he refuses? Will you “primary” him in 2016? Fat chance. The power grab begun in the RNC’s rules committee consisted of making that nearly impossible. What will you do? Deny him campaign funds? The advent of SuperPACs has made this an irrelevant point. Karl Rove will merely scare up a few hundred million dollars and spend it on his behalf. Why should he care? Now, if Karl Rove were to get mad at him, that would be a different thing. What are the chances that he won’t do the bidding of his masters?
Right. Now you’re catching on.
Once you understand that there is no method by which you will be able to even lean on Mitt Romney, except in the court of public opinion, you must also realize that this notion of “holding his feet to the fire” is as vaporous as spilled acetone. There is nothing you can do to affect Mitt Romney if he is elected. Nothing. The influence any party and its voters exerts over a President is already slim once they obtain that high office, but in the case of Romney, given the rigging carried out on at the Republican Convention, but frankly throughout this primary season, there is virtually nothing short of an actual coup d’etats that would pry him from his positions, whatever they may be.
Amnesty? Abortion? Romney-care? What are you going to do about it once you elect him, having effectively given him the power to re-write the rules of the convention at will? You’re going to whimper and cry, and you will be stuck with eight years of his liberal tendencies, and as almost half the span of yet another generation will have elapsed believing that this had been conservatism, your country will be lost. Even now, Governor Romney is out on the campaign trail explaining that he will not repeal all of Obama-care, but will instead opt to keep some of it. This is what we are told is conservative? This man, it is said, can be held to perform the promises he’s made? It hasn’t been two weeks since the convention, and he’s already ditching promises.
One can’t help but observe that the GOP establishment is bound and determined to give us candidates who are not conservative, but who will claim the label long enough to win in primaries before becoming full-bore mush. For a man who had described himself as “severely conservative,” whatever that means, the rush to retreat from his promise to repeal all of Obama-care is breath-taking. For those of us who hadn’t believed him, the only thing breath-taking about it has been the predictability of the matter, and the gullibility of all those who have assured us it wouldn’t go that way. Put another way, the Mittster has shaken up the Etch-a-Sketch, and he’s drawing a new picture. Post-convention Mitt will now advocate a modified Obama-care rather than a full repeal.
Will anybody who claims to be a conservative please explain to me in unvarnished terms how it is that we will “hold his feet to the fire” on this issue? This is the enduring problem with Mitt Romney, and it puts the lie to the claim by some who argue that despite his clear attachment to liberal positions on a variety of issues, we conservatives will somehow be able to exert some sort of governing force over him. It simply isn’t so, and the delusions attached to such claims are astonishing only in the implicit motives of the claimants. Why pretend? Why not simply deal with the truth? If conservatives expect anything but Obama Lite from a Romney administration, they’ve been led astray. It’s time we begin to contend with the reality at hand: The GOP establishment moderates who are running the party have led it to ruin, and it’s going to be up to we conservatives to rescue the country, not only from the rabid left, but also from their collaborators in the Republican party’s liberal wing.
Every doctor in America who is worth his or her salt should quit. Apparently, given the impending implementation of Obama-care, they’ve been contemplating it. How many? Eighty-three percent! Unfortunately, most of them will not quit, and more is the shame because if we want to defeat Obama-care, that’s the way it could be done. That, or the statists would need to unmask completely and simply enact in law what they intend: Health-care professionals, from doctors to nurses to orderlies must now be the slaves of the state. If you think this is an overstatement, consider the facts. When you are forbidden from negotiating your wages, and must accept whatever some bureaucrat tells dictates, you are a slave. You can pretty it up any way you like, but that’s where all of this will lead. Eventually, those skilled enough, smart enough, and diligent enough to be doctors will realize they would be better off doing something else. Instead, the ranks of doctors and nurses will begin to be filled with the incompetent, the slothful, and the under-qualified. This is what always happens under socialized medicine, and every one of these would-be slaves has the same moral right to refuse this servitude, and the sooner they do, the better the chance that they will spawn a movement in opposition.
If you’re not a doctor or nurse, and you’re not a skilled radiologist, and you haven’t the foggiest about how to operate an MRI machine, you might want to hold on a moment before joyfully proclaiming your new “right to medical care” under the Affordable Care Act(a.k.a “Obama-care.”) Those who foolishly believe they will maintain some form of private health insurance over the longer haul ought to pay attention too. Let us imagine everybody has insurance, as the Utopian masterminds behind Obama-care promise. Then what? It is not only money that can be inflated out of all value. An insurance to purchase a service that is in shortage isn’t much of an insurance, is it? Imagine having auto insurance of this sort. You have your fender-bender, and your insurance company estimates the damages, sending you out in search of a shop to perform the repairs. What if you can’t find one? What if you sit there with the check from your insurer, satisfying your claim in full, but there exists no shop to perform the work, or so few, that you will be without your vehicle for weeks or months, or perhaps longer. How will you maintain your job? How will you get to the grocery store?
Naturally, if you’re a welfare leech, you’re not much worried about that, but if you’re a working American with bills to pay, you’d better begin to think about it now. Under Obama-care, slowly, but surely, this will become the inevitable conclusion: Care will be of poorer quality, more scarce, and since everybody will have their coverage, there will be no advantage by offering more in payment. How long before a black-market medical system develops? Do you deny the possibility of all of this? Are you stuck on the notions of what you have known, rather than what can(and likely will) now come to pass? What happens when it’s your six-year-old daughter down at the emergency room with a fractured wrist, in a line that stretches up and down the hallways and side corridors, because there exists a severe shortage of medical professionals? Will your wishes mute your daughter’s agony?
You think doctors and nurses are endless, bottomless pits of human compassion, but they’re not, and no person is, because it’s simply not possible. More, if you want their compassion, shouldn’t you offer them yours? Why do you wish to have them work as slaves to your needs? Isn’t that what this whole corrupt system has become? Tax-payers must be slaves. Doctors and nurses and orderlies must be slaves. Everybody must be slaves but he who has nothing to offer, and no intention of offering it, since he has no intention of obtaining it by his own efforts.
Am I being too crass, and too obnoxiously terse in my appraisal? Brother, you haven’t seen the half of it yet. Wait until doctors are unionized, since it will be the only way to protect their diminishing wages, and they look at you and your suffering child, parent, or spouse and say simply: “I’m on break.” At the ends of their shifts, they will walk away, as carelessly as the country has walked away from them. What do you think is the meaning about the endless delays in Medicare payments, and the inaction of Congress year after year in adjusting reimbursements to doctors? Were I a physician, I wouldn’t have a single patient who is in a government system of any sort. Why would one wish to accept patients whose payment will always be less than it ought to be, while robbing from paying patients in order to subsidize the government-paid accounts?
Imagine running any other enterprise like this for long. All of your paying customers would abandon you. You wouldn’t be able to carry off this sort of con-game, because they’d price-shop the matter and move briskly to another provider, whether the product is a widget or the service is the measurement of blood-pressure. What Obama-care offers, and indeed what all forms of socialized medicine promise is to deliver something many people desperately want without regard to their ability to pay. That’s it, in a nutshell, and if I were a physician, I’d be looking to set up a clinic somewhere off-shore where I could live out my life unmolested by big government mandates. Nobody should be compelled to labor. Neither you, nor I, and certainly not doctors. We’d better begin to consider if we wish to coerce the people who we expect to save our lives.
Back in 1978, Dr. Milton Friedman discussed all of this at length. I’ve provided his talk on the matter, in six pieces, here:
One of the things I love about the United States Constitution is that it is a living document, but its life is breathed into it not by some magic power to change its meaning, or change the meaning of the words in its text, as leftists do, but by the rules laid down within it, we have the ability to amend it, or replace it altogether, through the amendment and convention processes, respectively. These are quite difficult and potentially dangerous processes, but this is why progressives have used dishonest means to change the impact of the Constitution on law. They figure that the best way to get what they want is to place justices on the court who will undo the meaning of the Constitution. The recent Supreme Court decision has left strict constructionists in a bit of a quandary: Here we have a wayward element within the court, the Chief Justice, no less, and it seems we’re to be stuck with him, probably for a long, long time. What most people don’t realize about the Court, however, is that its size and most of the rules determining its power are set by Congress, and that the Constitution gives Congress said power. There is a way to fix the court, but it would require a Congress with guts. Imagine that such a creature were to exist. What could Congress do to repair the Court?
Most people don’t study the Constitution, never mind history, so they’re unaware that Congress has the power to set the number of justices on the Supreme Court. There is nothing locking us into the number nine, and there is nothing sacred about it. As a cost-saving measure, since we now have another mindless entitlement program for which to pay, Congress could reduce that number to seven. The Congress could apply the LIFO(Last In-First Out) rule to determine who stays. This would lop off Kagan and Sotomayor, they having most recently joined the court. In a punitive mood? Want further cost savings? We could make that number three, and by applying the LIFO rule, this would leave us with Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas. I would like to know which of you conservatives wouldn’t favor that?
In 1937, the New Deal was getting hammered in the Court. President Roosevelt’s agenda was running into resistance much as Obama’s has encountered conservative resistance these days, but with a two differences: He owned both houses of Congress, but the Supreme Court at the time was busily overturning vast portions of the New Deal. FDR’s plan was to push his agenda through by increasing the number of justices on the court until he had a liberal ruling majority. The Senate cried foul, and momentarily, and FDR’s plan was halted. He naturally found another manner to accomplish his ends, and it was to sweeten the retirement pot for Supreme Court justices, inducing some of the older members to retire, and after the passage of the Supreme Court Retirement Act. This ultimately led to the rapid retirements of several members, FDR made his appointments, and then the New Deal began to be upheld. (The Retirement Act permitted Supreme Court Justices to retire with 100% of their last salary.)
Congress organized the Court that year with the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1789. It specified the Court’s original and appellate jurisdiction, created thirteen judicial districts, and fixed the number of justices at six (one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices).
Since the passage of the Judiciary Act, Congress has occasionally altered the size of the Supreme Court, historically in response to the country’s own expansion in size. Membership was decreased in 1801 to five, then increased to seven members in 1807, to nine in 1837, and to ten in 1863. It was then reduced to seven in 1866. In 1869, Congress set the Court’s size to nine members, where it has remained since.
As you can see, there were quite a number of modifications, but the salient point is that there is nothing sacred about the number nine(9). It could just as easily be three(3), or even one(1).
This may seem a radical solution, but as you can see from the history, it’s only because we’ve become accustomed to there being nine justices. If we reduced the number to three, it is true that we would lose Samuel Alito, but that could be repaired by a conservative president upon the retirement of one of the others. My point to readers is that there is a solution available to us, but the question is: How badly do we want it, and can we live with the dangers? Given the ruling of John Roberts, I am of a mind to pursue this. I’d like to send him packing. I’d like to send his leftist friends with him.
All we need to accomplish this is bullet-proof conservative majorities in both houses of Congress, but therein lies the problem. If we are to have any chance to repair this, we must own both the House and the Senate. This makes taking the Senate our most important priority in the Fall elections, but it also means that we must be sure to place conservatives in office. Of course, one could argue(and some will) that if we capture both houses of Congress, and the Presidency, we would have no need of this ‘solution’ to our problem, but I must thoroughly disagree. Our Supreme Court is damaged, and in subsequent rulings, it will be worse if we don’t repair the court. Can you imagine the lawsuits liberals will bring even if we do overturn Obama-care as a matter of statute? What would this Supreme Court do with that? With the mindless and idiotic ruling of John Roberts, inventing law out of whole cloth, I can imagine him finding some way to overturn a Repeal Act. Statists don’t care about logical consistency, after all, or they wouldn’t be statists.
I realize my proposal will fall on deaf ears, and I know too that we have far too few staunch conservatives in either house of Congress to actually carry this out, but I’m merely telling you what could be done, legally, under our Constitution. After all, the worst part of this Supreme Court ruling isn’t merely that Obama-care has been upheld, but the sinking realization that liberals effectively have a ruling majority with which we will be stuck for a long, long time. Nothing is more dangerous to the country than a court that will not act as a brake on tyranny. Let’s call it the Three-LIFO plan and be done with it.
There, I’ve said it, though I will be damned for it. The problem we have had in the Republican party comes to surface at times like this, and I’m not going to participate in the reckless concealment. There are those of political motives, who care not for the disaster that is the Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act(a.k.a “Obama-care”) because it serves their political ends. Within some circles of the elite Republican establishment – that thing George Will assures us does not exist while telling us this ruling is really a ‘victory’ – there are those who are absolutely giddy with anticipation in the wake of this ruling, though they must presently conceal it. It comes down to two things: Some of them are purely fifth-column statists, who actually want this law, and others are motivated solely by the opportunity they see in the political sphere. After all, what better way to unite wayward Republicans and conservatives then to hit them with a true disaster? If you’re a Republican party hack driven by purely political considerations and motives, this ruling is a gift from on high that will help drive the vote.
Sure, it does horrendous damage to the body of case-law. Yes, it does gut the constitutional limits on Congressional power. Absolutely, it permits Congress to tax in any way it likes so long as some moron in a black robe can dismiss its unconstitutional aspects as irrelevant or insignificant. True, it really has no manner of a silver lining if you’re an actual conservative, but so what? At least it will help Mitt Romney get elected by driving the herd! It will permit the Republican establishment to foist their own version of it upon us, tinkered-with and massaged as it will be, but still the heart of the bill will remain intact, and the Beltway crowd can be ecstatic that they will have finally killed the meaning of the constitution, the rule of law, and the entire notion of American self-reliance and self-determination. Nevertheless, it also offers the chance to the GOP establishment to round up the herd, and get them all running in the same direction. That it had been an establishment Republican who sabotaged this ruling should be the dead giveaway.
I would ask my conservative brethren to consider the evidence. Even a flimsy, often obtuse Anthony Kennedy ruled our way, so absurd is this law. A man who is able to imagine that Arizona has not the authority to protect its own citizens from foreign invaders, as in Arizona v. United States was not able to imagine the Affordable Care Act as constitutionally permissible. Think of that! This law is so preposterous, and the arguments of the administration so bizarre and absurd that Anthony Kennedy could not sustain them, but John Roberts, Bush appointee, did. Do we think John Roberts is truly the idiot that his ruling implies? Do we believe John Roberts is so intellectually vacuous that he could not see the absurdity of his ruling? If we believe this, why are we not demanding Boehner and the beltway boys impeach this man as an incompetent? Why? I’ll tell you why: Because Boehner and his toadies would never do it anyway.
We are being herded. We are being driven. We are being run through the political squeeze-chutes of the GOP establishment. These people are worse than our open enemy, the leftists. They are using subterfuge and stealth to reorganize our society into their global vision of statism, a nanny-state version in which you have little freedom to choose, and even less money or property with which to exercise that choice. We are descending into a death of one-thousand cuts, and we have Republican party bosses who are gleeful that we are angry, because they intend to use that as the fuel to recapture power, not for conservatism or freedom, but for the aggrandizement of their own statist vision, complete with open borders and vast social programs to which we are all enslaved, but as a bonus, with our votes, too!
How else does one explain the servile pronouncements by some conservative commentators that the ACA ruling had been a victory? How else does one discount the accurate assessments of stalwarts like Mark Levin, who sees this monstrosity clearly? How in the name of most unholy Hell does one derive the notion that this is anything but a national tragedy? In some respects, I place this ruling above Pearl Harbor Day. In terms of the long-term damage it will do to America, I place it above 9/11. I place it as the greatest attack on the United States and her people since before its current constitution had been adopted. It will certainly lead to the death of more Americans. It was certainly a plot hatched against us. The delivery of the fatal blow was no less a shock. I must go all the way back to General Benedict Arnold to find an apt analog for the sort of sabotage this infamy represents, and all brought to you by a bi-partisan Washington DC establishment that seeks to rule over you.
Remember, when some conservatives reflexively screamed at the notion of the appointment of Harriet Miers, many felt relief when George Bush put up John Roberts, who was seen as more reliably conservative and eminently more qualified, as was my pet goat. That was the sham in all of this. Roberts is no conservative, and his ruling in this case makes that plain, lest there be any confusion. Harriet Miers was a throw-away nomination, and Roberts was the goal all along. This is how politics is done. I was astonished at the speed at which the reaction to the Miers controversy was brought to a head, and more astonished still at how quickly they dropped the ostensibly reliable Roberts on us. Do you remember who screamed first and loudest at the Miers nomination? I do. Odd how that critic is now a rabid Romney-bot these days, isn’t it? I hate conspiracy theories, but I always thought it odd how that whole situation turned out, with Rehnquist retiring just in time to re-nominate Roberts for the Chief Justice position.
Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that the GOP establishment exists to keep us in check, to keep us to a dull roar as the statists reorganize our nation into their vision of global, social, welfare-statism. The GOP establishment advances the ball(never spiking it, of course,) and we permit them to manage us like puppets. If you accept their talking points these last three days, you’re playing directly into their hands, and you had better believe that they see this as a victory, because for their agenda, it is. They will be immune to Obama-care. They won’t worry about death panels. They won’t worry about government-enforced rationing. They won’t be waiting in the endless lines. They won’t have any need to concern themselves with the entirety of the system they’re building, because they are above it, after all.
The same people who tried at every turn(and often succeeded) to blunt the conservative Reagan revolution are once again making political hay over this decision, as they now know you have no alternative. They engineered it that way. Feel free to believe what you want, of course, but for me, the matter is clear. I have seen suppositions that somehow, Obama bullied Roberts into this decision, but I find that unlikely. Roberts was placed in this position to uphold Obama-care. There are those who will become apoplectic at the mere suggestion, but for me, the matter is now painfully obvious: If we do anything short of replacing the Republican Party, this nation will be damned. I’ll not be kept in line any longer. The Republican Party must rip this law out from the roots, or we must make a new party.
Some are still convinced that there exists a win in all of this. They offer as evidence that we are still free, this moment, and that this affords to us a chance, somehow. This is akin to saying that as the last breath escapes your lips, the hooligans choking the last of your life from you, there is still some chance. Technically? Sure. Practically? No. Violence is being done to us, and the best we get from most Republicans indicate that many of them don’t mind, in fact, although there are a few notable exceptions. On the 11th of July, we will have a pointless exercise of repeal in the House of Representatives, a tale told and believed only by idiots, that for all its sound and fury, will signify nothing. The GOP establishment loves a charade, and too many of us likewise adore one.
The Republic that is our constitutional, representative form of government stands upon a precipice. We have a President who has undertaken to set aside the constitution at every turn. We have a Congress divided, split between a Senate controlled by a maniacal shill for the President, and a House of Representatives led(and I use that verb very loosely) by a Speaker who is unwilling to do battle with the President, unwilling to attempt even the most basic defense of our Constitution, and incapable even of holding an outrageous Attorney General to account without much hand-wringing and waffling. We have a United State Supreme Court that has most recently ruled that States have no sovereignty to speak of, and not even the authority to protect its own citizenry. We are told by the presumptive Republican nominee that he will repeal Obamacare, despite implementing a similar program in the state he governed, while his various mouthpieces talk about “replacement.”
Do you think we face long odds? Do you believe our Republic can survive or recover? The decision expected from the Supreme Court on Thursday will either re-shape our country forevermore, or allow us one more opportunity to restore it. Make no mistake about it: If the court upholds the Affordable Car Act, the Republic is dead.
I have given this a good deal of thought, busy as I have been these last two months, and as we’ve all waited to see what tomorrow will bring, I’ve decided that if the Supreme Court of the United States upholds this legislative abomination, a de facto state of war exists between the United States Federal Government and the people whose rights it had been constituted to defend. Those who will perceive this as true will be branded enemies of the state, in one fashion or another, and the decline of this Republic will accelerate at a breathtaking pace. There can be no recovery of the Republic if this law is allowed to stand, and the urgings to repeal it from we citizens, with platforms large and small, will fall on the same deaf ears that have ignored our pleas for more than two years. If this law stands, there is no constitutional, representative republic.
If the law is overturned, even then, our jeopardy will only have begun, because this President will ignore the ruling of the court, as he has done repeatedly, and as he has done remorselessly. He will attempt to impose his program anyway, and even should our milquetoast House of Representatives act to impede him, he will turn to incitement, outright. He will attempt to raise a mob, and force his will by virtue of threats and violence. He will do everything in his power, and many, many things beyond their legitimate exercise in order to create chaos. Barack Obama will not rest, and none of the looters or moochers who ride upon his coattails will allow this to be overturned. We may see what can only be termed a civil war, and it will be bloody.
This is the direction in which this nation has been lurching for generations, since the so-called “progressives” took over both parties. We have been led into a box canyon, from which none may escape unscathed. Today, idiotic former Democrat Congressman from Rhode Island, and latest family ne’er-do-well, Patrick Kennedy warned:
“If the Court upholds the law, dangerous Tea Party extremists will go on a rampage.”
We should be so lucky. The truth is that if the court upholds this law, Tea Party types will not go on a rampage, because they are not dangerous, although they probably should have been.
Rampage or not, civil war or not, this piece of legislation and all that has followed in its wake serve to demonstrate how fragile our Republic has become after a century of unceasing statist agitation. In the 1930s, we could have sustained this condition had our court exhibited such staying power as to have overturned all of the New Deal legislation, because the American people were still a moral people by a vastly overwhelming majority. By “moral,” I mean specifically in the sense that they respected the notion of property rights, the idea of self-sufficiency, and the concepts that once buttressed our constitutional foundation. Who now can claim this description would apply?
I spent most of the first decade of my adult life serving under an oath by which I swore to uphold and defend the United States Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I have never yielded on my oath, neither for comfort nor for ease; neither for the sake of a false unity nor for the sake of familial peace. Sadly, many of my countrymen no longer even understand what principles that oath had been constructed to honor, and to protect, but still, I observe it, while our Supreme Court ignores it, our President demolishes it, and our Congress abandons its defense. No branch of government seems interested in upholding it any longer, and by this procedure, they have slowly stolen our Constitution from us. Thursday, we will learn if we shall have even one more chance to resurrect our Republic, but if we are given that chance, we must neither squander it nor revel too long in our temporary reprieve. “Rampage?” Indeed, we of Tea Party orientation must rampage at the polls, where we must not permit even the most thuggish brigands of the President to deter us from our electoral duties. We must now walk back the entire statist menu, or watch our Republic perish. If the Supreme Court does not present a sentence of death, we must make the most of any temporary stay. We must undo it all, or be undone by it.
The question has been asked here on this site, and on others what will become of the state of health-care if Obama-care falls. I’ve heard the gnashing of teeth among those who think we need some kind of health-care reform, and while I agree, I doubt most would agree with my own prescription. Cold-hearted. Selfish. Greedy. These are all the terms that would be used by statists to describe my own visions of health-care reform. Even a few alleged conservatives can’t quite bring themselves to endorse my view because at heart, they’re not free market capitalists. You shouldn’t be surprised, as there are many self-proclaimed “conservatives” who are really nothing of the sort, and who would just as readily inflict and impose their vision of “fairness” as any left-wing socialist radical. The difference is that they claim to be motivated by other ideas, or beliefs, but what remains universally true is that to impose them, they too must destroy liberty. I oppose any such plan, plot, or program, irrespective of the source, and I think it’s time we had this little talk lest there be some confusion: I don’t support government involvement in any aspect of healthcare. None.
The first thing one must know about the free market is that it is destroyed the moment government becomes involved. If you want to destroy innovation, efficiency, and industry within any segment of any market, introduce government as a buyer. This is because government is a terrible consumer because it is not spending its own money, but instead yours. It’s also because the government has undue leverage in a market where it is not the ultimate consumer. Of course, there will be those of you who will demand to know the fate of the poor, with the stabbing of a pointed finger against my chest, since the poor, by definition, don’t have a good deal of money with which to purchase health services. As ever, those who wish to control others rely upon the poor to furnish the excuse for their power. The question is not “what should we do about the poor,” as Ayn Rand famously observed, but “should we do anything about the poor?” This is where the compassion-fascists show up to berate free-marketeers, claiming that the advocates of this viewpoint are heartless and mean-spirited and greedy. Balderdash!
In order to have any sort of system in which various “necessities” are provided, it is first necessary to obtain them. Once government is placed in this role, it is inevitable, and in fact a prerequisite that the government employ cruelty against others, from whom the necessities (or the money to purchase them) will be taken. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no escape from this, and when I observe statists of either left or right political persuasion making this argument, I remind them first of the inescapable, inexorable moral breech: Government has only force and on that basis, government becomes a murderous villain in the hands of a statist. Pay, or die. There are those who enjoy shading the black and white behind a curtain of gray fog, but the simple, undisguised fact is that for any such program to exist, government must become evil. That’s right, I wrote it: Evil. I take it as an act of evil whenever one initiates force against another, or threatens force, in order to make material (or other) gain. If one is an advocate of a government-funded, implemented, or regulated healthcare system by any name, one must admit from the outset that one is in favor of robbery through an agent.
Call it third-party theft. Call it whatever you will, but when government, on the behalf of some citizens, extorts money from the pockets of other citizens, government has assumed the role of a mafia protection racket. One can dress it up in all the Sunday’s finest of “compassion,” or “brother-love,” but what one is doing is to attack one person for his wealth on the basis that it should be provided to others on the basis of their needs. That’s Marxism, and if one supports this in any measure, he or she is not a conservative. One can claim it. One can prefix it with words like “compassionate” all one pleases, but the simple fact is that to threaten one’s fellow man with injury and death; violence and expropriation; robbery and slavery is as abominable and un-Christian as one can be. There is no mitigation. There is no excuse. There will be a long line of those accustomed to robbing their neighbors who will come forth to claim that they possess some right – yes, they’ll actually claim a right – to do through government what they would never consider doing themselves for fear of eating a shotgun: Robbing their neighbors willy-nilly, and with abandon.
Yes, this is the ugly nature of statism, and it’s why I cannot support any health reform that doesn’t get government out of the health-care business altogether. It is at this point that some will ask me: “But what of veterans?” To the degree veterans have been injured in the performance of their duties, just as with any worker injured or maimed on the job, the employer must carry that cost, and since we are the employers of soldiers, yes, it is proper for us to pay for that healthcare necessary to make them well, to rehabilitate them, and to compensate them for permanent loss/injury. That does not mean we need a vast and inefficient system of providing care to veterans. While it is true that certain afflictions and injuries are not common in the civilian sector, nevertheless, to the degree we can, we should job this out through private providers. Speaking as a veteran myself, and having seen what have been deplorable conditions at VA hospitals when I’ve volunteered my time there, I cannot but think that most of the veterans I saw would have been better served in the private sector.
Everybody else? You’d better figure it out. One has no entitlement, natural or otherwise, to the contents of his neighbors’ wallets. Since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, too many Americans have adopted the notion that it is okay to steal from one’s neighbors, or to steal from one’s grand-children so long as government acts as the agent and instrument of that theft. To steal remotely, through a third party is no less a theft, but it is at once doubly cowardly. Imagine walking next door to one’s neighbor, and demanding a meal, or an aspirin, or a dollar, or to move in. In any civilized society, one making such demands would be laughed at, and if he tried to obtain his demands by force, he would be short-lived indeed. For many millions of Americans, this has become the all-too-common procedure, except that they have the middle-man of government doing their dirty work, never casting the first thought in the direction of the absolute tyranny they’re inflicting on their neighbors, or dismissively concluding that “everyone does it,” which is not only a falsehood, but also a psychological confession of one’s ill intent.
As Rand explained more eloquently, and succinctly, one can do anything one pleases for the poor, out of one’s own pocket, and out of one’s own sense of charity or compassion, and there is naught but good to be born of that approach, be it food, clothing, healthcare, housing, or education. What one must not do is force others to do one’s will in terms of charity or compassion, because it becomes neither, it breeds contempt, and it is a grave evil of its own in the first instance, for which there can be no ethical justification, despite endless rationalizations born of statist delusion.
I’ve been asked what we should replace Obama-care with, if it’s overturned. My answer is simply: A system in which government has no say, and no money in the distribution or provision of health-care, of any sort, as an entitlement for citizens who have done nothing more than breathed. It is only because of governmental involvement that such shameless thugs as the current dictator of New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, can claim to be acting in the public interest when he bans soft-drinks larger than 16 ounces, or table salt in restaurants, or any of the myriad other tyrannical dicta he puts forth, all “for your own good.” That sort of monstrous conduct by a public official is just the beginning, and it’s also why I wait along with millions of other Americans to see whether the United States Supreme Court will do its duty, or whether it will enable the advance of tyranny.
There are those who argue that Obama-care must be replaced by something, and my answer is that it should be: The US Constitution. There exists no entitlement to the wealth of others, whether that wealth is to be taken in order to finance beans and rice or blood transfusions and open heart surgery. Some will ask where is my compassion, but I maintain that my compassion is with those whose property and wealth is expropriated in the name of the compassion of others. Unless and until the United States returns to the rule of Constitutional law, the country will continue inexorably downward. There is no compromise between good and evil, yet what all of this redistributionism endorses is plainly evil. None of my readers would walk next door and demand from their neighbors such provisions as they might from time to time need, but too many Americans are all too comfortable sending a government agent in their stead. That’s not liberty. That’s not freedom. That’s not right.
As the nation awaits the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a “Obamacare,” Speaker of the House John Boehner, (R-Ohio) has issued some advice and counsel to Republicans if the Obamacare law should be struck down. In typical surrender-monkey fashion, Boehner has said that Republican shouldn’t gloat, and shouldn’t “spike the football.” This is typical of Boehner’s temperament: Don’t make waves, don’t stir up trouble, and don’t celebrate victory. During his speech as the health-care bill passed the House, Boehner said, choking back tears, that the law wouldn’t stand. To date, he’s done remarkably little to assist in seeing that promise through. One would think that with so passionate a statement at the time of the law’s passage under the dictatorial control of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat majority in the House, even the tepid John Boehner would be moved to celebrate a bit if the law is struck down by the court.
Unfortunately, Boehner is made of tears but no anger. Americans are rightly angry over the enactment of Obama-care, but for some reason, the GOP insiders in Washington don’t quite grasp it. This is emblematic of the entire GOP establishment, some number of whom want the law to remain in place so they can benefit from crony-capitalism with the state exchanges created under the law. They simply don’t share our passion for liberty, and when it comes right down to it, they don’t really represent we conservatives. I’ve got some bad news for Speaker Boehner, and it’s not recklessly intended, but instead purposeful: If Obama-care is struck down by the courts, I am going to spike the ball. I’m going to carry on an extended celebration in the endzone, and if the referees say anything about it, they might get the ball spiked in their faces too.
“No one knows what the court will decide,” Boehner said in a memo to fellow Republicans. “But if the court strikes down all or part of the president’s healthcare reform law, there will be no spiking of the ball.”
He underlined the last eight words to emphasize his reference to the NFL football end-zone celebration.
Boehner fears Republican gloating over a court victory could detract from the party’s emphasis on the struggling economy and the need for job growth, two campaign issues that consistently trump healthcare as voter priorities in national opinion polls.
“We will not celebrate,” Boehner said, during a time of unemployment and rising government debt and healthcare costs.
If you’re a conservative, you probably wonder why it is that an allegedly conservative Speaker of the House might take such a stance, and why there’s anything wrong with a little celebratory “ball-spiking” should the law be overturned. The answer is simple: For those who rule over us in Washington, DC, even the leadership of the party that claims to represent us, liberty is not important. What upset John Boehner to the point of tears over the passage of the Affordable Care Act wasn’t the content of the bill, so much as the way in which it was passed. While it’s true that Pelosi, Reid, and Obama used every device of the villain in order to pass the law, and suspended rules, and played fast-and-loose with House and Senate rules in order to shove this law down our throats, that’s still not the most important part of the matter. At the heart of the matter is the question of liberty, and for that, John Boehner had few tears, and those in the GOP establishment didn’t shed any, either. For Boehner, it was about the process, and how he had been closed out of it, and how then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi(D-CA) shoved a bill through that really had no business coming for a vote. You will doubtless recall the whole “deemed passed” business, and the entire fiasco of passing a bill originating in the Senate as though it had been the House bill all along, in order to sidestep the ordinary legislative process. This is what wrinkled Boehner’s shorts.
The fact that the government was taking over one-sixth of the US economy was not the salient issue in his view. The fact that the American people would now see the intentional destruction of private health insurance and markets was not the cause of his tears. The idea that the government could claim to be regulating non-existent commerce, precisely because it did not exist had not been the source of his discomfort. No, none of these bother John Boehner so much as the way in which the bill was passed. Boehner had been concerned about process. With his focus on the employment situation, one would think Boehner could see that Obama-care is itself a job-killer, and for that reason alone, there would be good cause for celebration if the law is overturned by the court, but as usual, Boehner is worried about process and politics.
If you want to know why it is that John Boehner is urging restraint should Obama-care be struck down, it’s simply because he’s trying to look at the political ramifications. In general, it’s true that nobody likes a sore loser, and few more like an obnoxious winner, but in this case, I believe Boehner and the rest of the political calculators are missing the point. Nearly three-fourths of the American people believe this law is unconstitutional. Three-fourths! If this is even close to accurate, then ball-spiking may not present any particular political dangers, but it also may actually assist Republicans in the Fall. After all, conservatives can now point to the fact that we do have a limited government, despite the usurping proclivities of Barack Obama and the Democrats, and they can further point to all the reasons why any Republican president who would presumably appoint conservative Supreme Court justices must be preferable to the current president who will continue the trend of appointing justices obnoxious to the US Constitution.
The simple fact is that when a people overcomes governmental treachery, and what this author views as treasonous legislation, there is every good justification to celebrate, or “spike the ball.” If John Boehner wasn’t such a predictable, unfailing beltway insider, he too would understand that if this law is turned back by the courts, it will be every reason for the celebration of those who have fought tirelessly against this law, from it’s introduction to its passage, and even beforehand. While John Boehner has whined about being “one-half of one-third of the government,” he has failed to make a stand on behaf of liberty. Instead, he’s been a plodding, tepid Speaker of the House, and he’s done nothing to risk his position, and I believe that’s the trouble: Boehner is risk-averse to a pathological extent. He’s been more apt to stick it to his own party than he has been willing to do battle with the Democrats in the House, or face off against Majority leader Harry Reid(D-NV) in the Senate or the resident at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
All of this talk assumes that the bill will be struck down in part, or in whole, but we won’t know that until the decision finally comes out, sometime later this month. What we must learn from this is that should a Republican majority re-convene next January, we conservatives must exert maximum pressure on our respective House members to ensure that John Boehner is not retained as the Speaker of the House. We simply cannot tolerate this brand of hand-wringing leadership, devoid of the passion for liberty we conservatives share, and to have a Speaker telling his members that they should not celebrate when victorious is abominable. Of course, maybe that’s the problem Boehner has with all of this: If the Supreme Court strikes down Obama-care, Boehner has a whole new problem: How does he manage to re-write the law, if it’s to be written at all? Billions upon billions of dollars have already been spent in terms of the implementation of the law. That money cannot be un-spent. Many things will be left in limbo as a result, and you can bet that left in place, Boehner will fail to pursue the righting of things, particularly if Obama manages to beat the presumptive Republican nominee this Fall.
We need leadership, and that leadership must press advantages, politically as well as legislatively, but to do so requires a principled view of the issues at hand. Boehner’s unwillingness to do a victory dance in the end-zone signifies that he doesn’t understand what moves the grass roots, and average, ordinary Americans, who will be thrilled to hear of it should the court strike down Obama-care. It will be the first sign in more than four years that government is finally being brought under control, and that is most definitely something to be celebrated, but if John Boehner can’t understand that, and thinks it improper, I suggest he do what he does best.
Romney and Leavitt: Healthcare BestFriendsForever?
Monday, NRO published a brief piece referencing a Politico article discussing Mitt Romney’s pick to head his transition team, if he should win, Former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt. The Leavitt appointment raised eyebrows in conservative circles, even getting a mention on the Rush Limbaugh show, because his company has profited handsomely from the start-up of the state Health exchanges under the auspices of Obama-care. That’s right, Leavitt loves the state exchanges, as he’s cashed in on them, and while some have urged me to drop my opposition to Romney and climb aboard his campaign bus, or at least occupy the kennel strapped to its roof, I’ve been unwilling and this is one of the reasons for my resistance. I have no interest in electing another statist to the White House, but more than this, I really don’t wish to be in league with the profiteers who are working overtime to make sure that whomever occupies the White House next year, we will be universally shafted with Obamacare.
NRO picked up on the following in the Politico piece, and it’s significant:
Leavitt has said some relatively positive things about certain elements of Obama’s health reform law, suggesting earlier this year that “Obamacare” empowers the HHS secretary “to do certain things that are clearly aimed at trying to move us in the right direction.”
[Leavitt chief aide Rich] McKeown, who still works with Leavitt at his Utah-based health care consultancy, acknowledged that the former governor does not want to undo one key part of the controversial legislation [Obamacare].
“We believe that the exchanges are the solution to small business insurance market and that’s gotten us sideways with some conservatives,” he said.
The exchanges are not only a matter of principle for Leavitt — they’re also a cash cow.
The size of his firm, Leavitt Partners, doubled in the year after the bill was signed as they won contracts to help states set up the exchanges funded by the legislation.
One of the things I warned you about the GOP establishment is that there are those who have not only political sympathies with the left, but also a number of people who have learned how to profit from the big-government mechanisms the left invariably puts in place. These people are nefarious, and in the end, they always undercut conservatives and conservatism. They’re more interested in the deal, and making a buck than in standing on any principle. Conservatives are right to worry when they see Romney appoint somebody to his transition team who is such a thoroughly enthusiastic advocate for the exchanges being set up by Obama-care. Let’s not mince words: There is a class of Republicans who are willing to make money off of governmental actions without respect to ideology, philosophy, or any consideration beyond their own bottom lines, and by all appearances, Leavitt is one of these.
Leavitt is close to Romney, having been Governor of Utah, particularly when Romney was working with the Salt Lake City Olympics, and there can be little doubt that Romney’s choice for transition team may indicate some of the back-scratching that goes on in politics, but I also believe it reflects part of the problem with Mitt Romney. He’s not a conservative, and he’s probably going to work to keep at least some parts of Obama-care, as I’ve contended right along, and he’s effectively admitted it in his previous statements. Once you realize this, it’s an elementary matter, and the importance of the controversy over Leavitt’s appointment to a prospective Romney transition team tells the tale. Back in February, Florida Attorney General and Romney supporter Pam Bondi told us the same thing.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re in real trouble here. If the Supreme Court doesn’t overturn Obama-care in its entirety, we’re never going to see it repealed in full. The Romney crowd simply won’t do it, because they’re making too much money from setting up the state exchanges, and in the final analysis, we won’t be able to get out from beneath the heap they’ll dump on us all. Much as many conservatives have always suspected that Romney would oversee the full implementation of a program that is just like Obama-care, for all intents and purposes, we must now do what I have always stated we would be forced to do if Romney somehow manages to win the presidency: We will have to play self-defense, not merely against the left, but also against a Romney administration.
There’s a good deal of talk about how the oral arguments before the Supreme Court seemed to have gone badly for the government, particularly Solicitor General Verrilli, with a good deal of talk about how unprepared he seemed to make the arguments before him, but let’s be careful about two things: I’m sure Verrilli is an able attorney, but there’s no way to plaster enough lipstick on this pig to disguise its true nature, but more importantly, I don’t think we should take for granted anything about how this or any other court will rule based on their questions alone. If all the people who’ve spent the week trying to read the tea-leaves are wrong, we may be in for a serious disappointment come the end of June. For my part, while the questioning offered some measure of hope, I won’t count my chickens before they’ve hatched, or even count Obama’s before they have gone home to roost.
Listening to the media, you would think Verrilli had been the constant butt of jokes, and while it’s clear that there were a few laughs at his expense, I think this says more about the impertinent character of the Obama-care legislation than it says about Verrilli’s legal scholarship. He was placed in this position by a Congress now long gone, defeated and sent home by voters in 2010, and a President who was willing to sign this tract of tyranny into law despite a 2 to 1 disapproval by the American people at the time, that has only managed to worsen, now just shy of three-fourths of Americans considering the law unconstitutional. As any litigator will tell you, if you have his client with a smoking gun in hand over the dead body with a signed confession, and thirty eyewitnesses, you’re not going to make it far on the defendant’s claims of innocence, but as an attorney, if your client says he will plead not guilty, you must still stand in and defend him. That he’s left you with no conceivable method for doing so isn’t your fault, so I’d prefer we not tread too heavily on Verrilli. He may be a left-wing goon for all I know, but he was doing his job.
The question of severability on Wednesday seemed to cause the greatest stir from the leftist members of the court, because they wanted to find some way, any way at all, to salvage some part of the “Affordable Care Act.” One after the next, they tried to set up questions designed to muddy the water, but fundamentally, the problem is this: If the individual mandate is struck down as unconstitutional, the rest of the bill is eligible because it would be difficult to imagine how the exchanges and the rest of the complex structure of the law operates without the mandate provision. Some have assumed that the court may bounce the remainder of the bill, because Justice Scalia pointed out the impossibility of going through the law and figuring out what stays and what goes without risking larger damage. In other words, keeping some of the Act might well wind up causing more trouble than it fixes.
I think that’s the proper way to view it, and you might wonder in light of this why the liberals on the court are so intent on keeping such parts of it as they are able. The answer is simple enough once you understand their highly political motive: The mandate, if carved out, would merely affect the funding mechanism, but it would not do anything to the spending side. The spending would go on, and the Congress would face deficits even greater than those already envisioned with this irresponsible law, and the entitlement would become firmly rooted in the American culture. Once that happens, repeal becomes almost impossible. For the liberals, therefore, preserving as much as the bill by severing only the mandate becomes the object of the ruling.
The conservatives may not be inclined to tamper with any of it. They may not wish to toss out the entire bill for what will to some be an appearance of a political ruling, but the truth is that no matter what the court rules, it will certainly have political ramifications. The question is whether that matters to all of the justices. We know it drives the liberals on the court, but the problem is the conservatives are generally disinclined to weigh politics in their considerations on rulings. If that is the case, you could well see a bifurcated ruling in which they throw out the mandate but leave the entirety of the remainder in place. This too would constitute a disaster because the spending would commence in full as the law comes into force, with the revenue then [more] uncertain.
It could also happen that the court rules 5-4 that the mandate is constitutional, and if that happens, the country is thoroughly screwed. At that point, the whole severability question is moot, and the law is implemented on schedule. Of course, there are many theories about how this may play out, but the fact remains that we won’t know until late June. Liberals are preparing for the scenario in which some or all of the law is tossed by preemptive strikes in media against various justices, particularly Justice Scalia. I expect those attacks to ratchet up, even though the voting is already complete, and all that remains is to write the ruling and publish.
This process is important to the function of our republic, and yet there are those who disparage it as anachronistic, but I believe that if we are to remain a nation of laws, we must give the process its due. Leftists want to know the ruling now, and you can bet every court clerk is being prodded for answers by media who want to know in advance. I would urge conservatives not to become to happy over what they have heard and read from the oral arguments. Politically, you should remain engaged as though the law is going to be upheld. You won’t be surprised if it is, and you won’t wonder about what to do next.
In Tuesday’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said something in response to a question from Justice Antonin Scalia that I believe was intended to mislead. Scalia was much too clever for Verrilli, and why he didn’t call Verrilli on it, he made it clear that he understood full well what Verrilli was doing with his wording. It might not have been a “lie” in the strictest sense of the word, but it was intended to obfuscate the issue, and to do so in such a way as to shield the government from the very basis on which I have been criticizing the “individual mandate” since its proposal. To understand this “lie,” “misleading statement,” or “obfuscation,” whichever you will prefer to call it, you must understand the basic issues in context. In my view, Verrilli tried to hide something crucial, and you should know it.
What General Verrilli tried to conceal is the fact that this “cost-shifting” that Obama-care’s mandate is intended to address was created by government statute. Let us start with the transcript, available in full here:
GENERAL VERRILLI: That — that absolutely is a justification for Congress’s action here. That is existing economic activity that Congress is regulating by means of this rule.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Verrilli, you could say that about buying a car. If people don’t buy cars, the price that those who do buy cars pay will have to behigher. So, you could say in order to bring the price down, you’re hurting these other people by not buying a car.
GENERAL VERRILLI: That is not what we’re saying, Justice Scalia.
JUSTICE SCALIA: That’s not — that’s not what you’re saying.
GENERAL VERRILLI: That’s not — not -
JUSTICE SCALIA: I thought it was. I thought you’re saying other people are going to have to pay more for insurance because you’re not buying it.
Now for the key exchange:
GENERAL VERRILLI: No. It’s because you’re going — in the health care market, you’re going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social normsthat allow — that — to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.
Here, Scalia absolutely demonstrates he understands the issue:
JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, don’t obligate yourself to that. Why — you know?
And now, for the slam dunk:
GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I can’t imagine that that — that the Commerce Clause would — would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.
JUSTICE SCALIA: You could do it. But does that expand your ability to issue mandates to — to the people?
Let me explain why I’ve italicized the portions above. When Verrilli argues that the receipt of healthcare by the so-called free-riders is the result of “the social norms that allow,” he stammered through a self-correction, “to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.”
What Verrilli is here talking about is that Congress has enacted laws prohibiting an emergency room from turning away patients on the basis that they cannot show an ability or willingness to pay. Verrilli tried to hide this behind a “social norm,” and later a “deeply embedded social norm,” but in fact, Scalia understood with acute perception why it is that Verrilli would do this, and he spat it back in Verrilli’s face, as was right and proper: “Well, don’t obligate yourself to that.” In other words, if you don’t want people to receive treatment without having paid, repeal the law that provides that treatment must be provided.
Verrilli wasn’t satisfied with this, and he claimed that “[he] can’t imagine that the commerce clause would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.”
Here, Scalia might have asked him: “How deeply embedded a social norm is it that has been enacted within my lifetime,” but he did not, preferring to underscore the larger point:
“You could do it. But does that expand your ability to issue mandates to — to the people?“
What Scalia is asking here is plain enough: The government may claim an interest in taking this “deeply embedded social norm” into account in creating its policy, but a desire to support a “social norm” (deeply embedded or otherwise) confer upon the government the authority to stand in demand of participation in the social norm?
What Scalia here recognized is that which I’ve been telling you all along: The government may enact a law forcing somebody to provide a good or a service(I reject that too, by the way) but the fact that the government creates a legal obligation for itself does not give them an additional claim of authority over you.
A good example is this: You let one of your adult children move their entire family into your home with you, despite the fact that they can or should afford their own domicile on their own, but when you perceive it is too burdensome, you then go to your other adult children and demand they help you support them, since it’s now bankrupting you. Your other adult children would rightly say to you: “Don’t let them live their any longer.”
What kind of mind would actually propose this to their other adult children? The other adult children would be best to remove themselves from the conversation and ignore the demanding parent. The problem is that in this case, it’s the government that’s making the demand, and we(the other adult children) are prohibited from ignoring it.
What Scalia recognized, and every one of you must know, is that there is a cost to the choices one makes, but having made them, there is no authority to shift the costs of those choices onto unwilling others who would have chosen differently. This is at the heart of the entire Obama-care insurance mandate argument: The government voluntarily decides to fund or subsidize something for somebody, and then mandates that you participate in the payment. There is no right to health-care, or any other material commodity or service, and nobody is obligated to pay for it. This should be the basis upon which the entirety of the New Deal and the Great Society are tossed out to the curb, but what’s particularly objectionable about Obama-care’s mandate is that it compels you to purchase an insurance against such costs that you may well never incur.
Understanding this, you should see why it is that what Solicitor General Verrilli attempted to conceal, but Scalia didn’t permit, is that more than “deeply embedded social norms,” these are laws inflicted and imposed upon us by Congress, and that Congress is free to repeal them, but the creation of these obligations does not disparage our liberties. I hope Antonin Scalia lives to be one-hundred-twenty years old, or longer, and delivers us from as much evil as he is able. His agile legal mind, and his clear understanding of the issues at stake is among the best hopes we have for maintaining our liberties, or reclaiming those we have forfeited already. Our lives quite literally depend on it.
Greta Van Susteren interviewed former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Monday night, asking her about a range of issues including the Obama-care case and its relevance to the 2012 election. She was asked what she thought of the effect it would have on Mitt Romney’s campaign, and it was an accurate, and concise answer as usual. Said Gov. Palin: “Romney will have his hands full with this one because he’s now been dubbed the father of Obama-care.” That’s an apt description of things, and I believe it’s the prevailing opinion among conservative voters.
I’ve been looking at some of the information about the case that comes before the United States Supreme Court over the matter of the Affordable Care Act(widely known as Obama-care.) I ran into one story that frankly made me angry, because it’s typical of the sort of lies and misdirections of this administration, and frankly any stink-from-the-head lefty one may encounter. It’s ridiculous to read their arguments and realize that their backward logic is actually the basis for laws in the United States. The Obama administration is full of some very despotic people, but the garbage Neal Katyal spews on behalf of Obama-care is some of the most obnoxious. AFP is reporting via YahooNews a story I find so detestable that it has caused me to spit coffee across the screen. AFP interviewed Neal Katyal who has defended Obama-care as the acting solicitor general, and frankly, leftist double-speak like this needs to be shredded:
“The challengers to the reform say that never before has the government forced people to buy a product. We’re not forcing you to buy a product. Health care is something all Americans consume, and you don’t know when you’re going to consume it. You could get struck by a bus, you could have a heart attack and the like. And if you don’t have health insurance, then you show up at the emergency room. The doctors are under orders to treat you — as any Western, any civilized society would do. And who pays for that? Well, ordinary Americans pay for that. They’re the ones who have to pick up the tab for those who don’t have insurance. We are not regulating what people buy, we’re regulating how people finance it.”
There’s a good deal to tear apart here, but let’s begin with the first premise: Katyal says they’re not forcing you to buy a product. Instead, the claims is laid that they’re merely regulating how you finance it. What if I don’t want to finance it, because I won’t use it? What if I refuse care? What if I want to finance it differently? What if I’m in a car wreck tomorrow and killed before I ever use any? Do I get my money back? No? Then you’re forcing me to buy something I may never use.
The claim is made that doctors are under orders to treat those who show up at an emergency room, and it’s true that this is the law. Get rid of the law. Don’t command the entire population of Americans on behalf of the claim that doctors, nurses, and hospitals must labor without any proof of a patient’s willingness or ability to pay. Don’t like that? Fine. What the government can do is put medical bills outside the reach of bankruptcy protection, much like they do your tax bill, or you child support payments, or your student loans. Give it the second bite at the apple of one’s estate, after federal taxes. The fact that some people do not pay is not a burden to be commanded upon all. We shouldn’t be doing that anyway, and I really don’t want to hear any silly arguments about Western or “civilized” societies. There is nothing remotely civilized about the government putting a gun to my head and forcing me to pay for products and services I may never consume, or may have not intention of consuming.
Life and death and all of the other necessities of life are not the government’s proper role or responsibility, ridiculous laws notwithstanding. When I read remarks from a useless jack-ass like Katyal, I realize that this is one of these idiots who probably wants to mandate legal insurance on us too. (Trust me, there is a whole movement among lawyers who want this.) There can be no authority to regulate how I finance something on the basis that I might decide to buy it, otherwise what you’re compelling me to do is purchase in advance.
The rest of the article is filled with similar drivel, and I encourage you to read it on the basis that you ought to know what we’re fighting. I also saw the beginnings of a smear-campaign against the court in the interview, and I want you to notice how they’re preparing to smear the court with this “unelected” business:
“If the Supreme Court struck this down, I think that it wouldn’t just be about health care. It would be the Supreme Court saying: ‘Look, we’ve got the power to really take decisions, move them off of the table of the American people, even in a democracy. And so it could imperil a number of reforms in the New Deal that are designed to help people against big corporations and against, indeed, big governments. The challengers are saying that this law is unconstitutional, which means even if 95 percent of Americans want this law, they can’t have it. And that’s a really profound thing for an unelected court to say.”
On the one hand it’s true: If 95% of Americans want to suppress free speech, that doesn’t make it constitutional, but let me suggest to this legal moron that if 95% of Americans want to suppress free speech, they can easily amend the constitution to do it, thus making it constitutional. Besides, 60-65% of Americans oppose this law anyway, so the very idea posited is false. Give me a break! Here comes the garbage, however:
“The two main outcomes that one can predict — the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate as unconstitutional because it’s unprecedented or it upholds it and says it is part of Congress power over commerce and over taxation. The latter is far more likely because it is such a grave thing for unelected judges to take a decision of such a magnitude for American people. I expect the Supreme Court’s ruling at the end of its current term, June 30.”
Is this clown kidding? That’s what the Supreme Court exists to do: Make judges of this magnitude for the American people. More, the very idea that the Supreme Court is unelected is now a bad thing flies in the face of lefty arguments that were only too happy to see “unelected judges” impose Roe v. Wade, or Social Security, or any other damned thing they want on the American people. No complaints then, at all.
Leftists are scum. I truly hope there is still sufficient wisdom on the court to overturn this unconstitutional monstrosity. If not, the only course remaining is repeal, but for that to happen, Republicans will need to capture sixty seats or more in the Senate, and replace Barack Obama. That’s a tall order in any year, but if Romney is the nominee, prepare to live as slaves to the will of idiots like Katyal.
I’ve warned conservatives for nearly as long as I’ve been blogging that to nominate Mitt Romney is to commit an act of electoral suicide. I’ve told you that when it comes time to run the general election campaign, Romney will abandon all of this talk about repealing Obamacare because he will be toast on this issue. Barack Obama knows this too, and it’s the reason every Democrat in Washington wants to see a Romney candidacy. For once, we got a little insight into the coming Romney betrayals, when his longtime Campaign adviser and Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom on Wednesday likened Mitt Romney to an etch-a-sketch in terms of their ability to re-shape the campaign once the general election campaign begins. This was an admission of what would really happen to all of his talk about being a conservative should Mitt Romney secure the party’s nomination.
I’ve urged the other candidates to hammer Romney on this point, and to their credit, they have, but without debates lately, they’re not making much headway in the media that largely favors Mitt Romney, so the point isn’t being made. Consider it another gift, because now we get a little help from an unlikely source, who made mention of this issue, although not by name. The source? Barack Obama.
“We designed a program that actually previously had support of Republicans, including the person who may end up being the Republican standard bearer and is now pretending like he came up with something different,” the president said.
The Massachusetts plan served as a model for the Affordable Care Act, signed two years ago Friday. Romney, the state’s former governor, has since said the legislation was the correct course for his state but not meant as a model for a national overhaul. But the plan has proved a focal point of criticism aimed at the GOP frontrunner.
In Thursday’s interview, Obama said Republican opposition to the plan, including the Supreme Court challenge, is politically motivated.
He said state governors will have a difficult time explaining resistance to the law to their constituents.
“When people see that in fact it works, it makes sense – as it’s, by the way, working in Massachusetts – then I think a whole bunch of folks will say ‘Why aren’t we trying it as well?’” Obama said.
It’s important to understand the meaning of this audio clip in context of the “Etch-a-sketch” comment. Twice, in less than two minutes, Obama goes out of his way to mention a unnamed candidate(Romney) and the state he governed (Massachusetts) as extensions of his healthcare law. Let that soak in, and realize that the one issue on which more than 60% of Americans agree, that Obamacare must be repealed, Mitt Romney will be completely neutralized in a general campaign.
Therefore, I believe that the Etch-a-Sketch is all about dumping his promise to seek the repeal of Obama-care. He can’t. He will be absolutely wrecked by Barack Obama and his campaign if he even tries that approach. Romney is the one candidate among all of the Republicans who is least able to make the case against Obamacare, and it is the one issue that has united the American people against Obama like no other. I cannot see how the Republicans defeat Obama without this issue, and yet if Mitt Romney is the nominee, this is precisely what he will be forced to do.
That “Etch-a-Sketch?” Yes, that got to be shaken as soon as Romney captures the nomination, and when it is, part of the picture that will be erased will be the promise to repeal Obamacare. Mitt Romney is being dishonest in this respect. It will ruin him if he tries, and without it, he cannot win. I think most of the readers of this blog have understood this all along, but there’s a segment of the conservative base that doesn’t follow the inside politics, and may not yet understand this. There is no candidate who will fare more poorly against Barack Obama than Mitt Romney. All of this talk about his electability is based on a very generic sense conveyed by the media, but does not represent what the voters will see in the last six to eight weeks of the campaign. This is just a sample of how Romney will be neutered on the Obama-care issue, and it’s going to mean Romney will simply drop all of the repeal talk once he has your nomination. Let me be blunt:
Nominate the Etch-a-Sketch, and you get four more years of Barack Obama.
Remember when Congress was running the numbers through the Congressional Budget Office to get a scoring of the costs of Obama-care? Not surprisingly, these estimates fell well short of the real numbers under the arm-twisting and politicking of the Democrat leadership of Nancy Pelosi(D-CA,) then Speaker of the House. In short, they engineered a lie, and that lie was that over ten years, the costs of Obama-care would be “just” $900 Billion, but now the CBO has revised its estimates, and that number has sky-rocketed to nearly $1.8 Trillion. You might wonder how badly you’re about to be hammered, but you can expect that by the time Obamacare is fully implemented, most working Americans will see their premiums sky-rocket(and in truth, many already have in just the last two years since the bill’s passage.) Expect to pay more in taxes, and if you’re an employer, you may want to consider what they intend for you with all the new penalties.
Back in 2009-10, when the bill was being debated, they kept going back to browbeat CBO as repeated modifications of the bill continued to exceed one-trillion dollars. They finally came out with a cost estimate of $940 billion, and this was sufficient to get the support of some wavering Democrats who didn’t want to be tagged with a $1 Trillion expenditure. At the time, many Congressional critics said that it would come in far higher since the CBO was using a static scoring that didn’t account for economic conditions at large. Much of the near doubling of the costs are accounted for by a weaker economy than they had estimated at the time. This is typical CBO estimating: Look at the sky today, see it is blue, and estimate the cost for umbrellas over the next ten years will be zero. As you’re drenched for lack of an umbrella, they will explain that their estimates didn’t account for the dynamics of weather.
The entire Obama-care scam is just now kicking into high gear. Over the next eighteen months, as new features and taxes kick in, along with the mandates and penalties, I don’t think most small or even medium businesses quite grasp how badly this is going to affect their bottom lines. This is because much of it has been hidden, and many large corporations have managed to obtain exemptions from the Obama administration. It’s not clear that those exemptions are even legal, and it’s fairly certain they will end early in a second Obama term. Our best hope is that the Supreme Court overturns the whole law, since there is no severability clause in this law, meaning that to throw out one portion, for instance the individual mandate, all portions of the law must go. If that happens, we’ll be extraordinarily fortunate, but we must plan on the fact that this is going to go forward irrespective of the desires of more than 65% of the American people, who oppose it.
When you see Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or Barack Obama, or any other Democrat who supported and voted for this law, you can assume they are liars, one and all, and that they knew full well that this program was going to cost significantly more than advertised. They lied, because it was the only way to get even their own members to vote for it, not because those members believed the lies, but because it gave them plausible political cover. Know this: If your member of Congress or your Senators voted for this bill, despite what they may say now, they knew it was an underestimate based on willful ignorance. You should cast your votes accordingly at the next opportunity.
It has been my contention throughout this primary season that Mitt Romney will not be able to defeat Barack Obama because he will be unable to differentiate between himself and Barack Obama on the matter of Obamacare. It is nearly impossible to believe Mitt Romney on this issue, because when he claims that on the basis of federalism and the Tenth Amendment, he would never prescribe for the nation the same sort of mandate he imposed on the people of his own state of Massachusetts, the evidence contradicts his own words on the matter. I have shown you videos that demonstrate the point, but here is one more from none other than leftist Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, who was offering a ‘warning’ to Romney. Before the election is over, if Mitt Romney is the nominee of the Republican party, the left and their lap-dog media intend to make we conservatives rue the day, and it will be with Mitt Romney’s assistance.
I think it’s going to be worse than O’Donnell admits. I doubt whether the Obama campaign or Barack Obama himself will wait for Romney to make this into an issue. It’s my bet that he’ll do his best to avoid the issue altogether, because the left-wing media will not permit him to get away with the lies in the general that they have forgiven in the primary season. When Romney lies to other Republicans, the mainstream media won’t object, but you can bet that if Romney tries to pass off this same lie in the general campaign against Obama, he will never be permitted to get away with it.
Romney is vulnerable to defeat for this reason, and because his pronouncements on the campaign trail have to date promised repealing Obamacare, it’s going to be raised whether he likes it or not. The way it will be raised is by labeling Romney both as a liar and a hypocrite, two charges he surely seems to deserve in the matter. It will be done in the weeks leading up to the election, probably after the middle of October, and it will be used to massacre the Republicans.
More, I suspect that if he secures the nomination, Romney will try to walk back all of this “repeal Obamacare” talk almost immediately. He’ll talk about fixing it instead, and as I reported some time ago, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has let that cat out of the bag. What this means for Republicans is that once the party nominates Mitt Romney, they’re going to find themselves stuck with a clunker who probably will go down to defeat in November, not merely because of Romneycare, but because of Mitt Romney’s ongoing attempt to conceal it.
On Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC, David Gregory jumped directly into his interview with former Speaker Newt Gingrich and began by asking him about the controversy involving radio talkshow host Rush Limbaugh and his use of the terms “prostitute” and “slut” to describe Sandra Fluke, the 30yo law-school student at Georgetown University who is also an activist for radical feminist views, and who supports the Obama administration’s mandate that religious institutions be compelled to cover contraception, contrary to their religious views. He couched his question in terms of whether the episode had done damage, but he left open where the damage may have occurred. Gingrich did not fall for the trap Gregory laid, and it should serve as an example on how to handle the press.
It is typical of the mainstream media to demand that one conservative answer for another conservative’s statements and troubles, but they also like to create a narrative that suits their own ideological ends. Gregory attempted this same tactic with Gingrich, but as is made plain in this video, Gingrich doesn’t fall into the trap. He presses through Gregory’s attempt, and states his own case, and in answering the question by restating the premise, he demolishes Gregory. Here’s the video:
As you can see from this video, Newt Gingrich knows full well how to contend with the false narratives advanced by the media. I think that as is often the case, Gingrich succeeded in making Gregory look foolish for pressing the line of questioning. If the Republicans are going to win in 2012, this is the way they will need to do it, and frankly, I see none more capable on the Republican side at the moment than Newt Gingrich. In this exchange, it’s clear that Gregory was sent packing with his lame attempt to drag Gingrich into the controversy, or at least to use the opportunity to advance the leftist talking point.
I was also interested to hear the substance of the way Gingrich answered it, because he stuck to his own agenda in pointing out that Barack Obama is carrying on a war against the Catholic Church, and indeed all religious institutions. In fact, many of the things he said are in close accord with the positions I’ve taken over the last several days on the contraception controversy, particularly with respect to the war on the Church. He also mentioned Cardinal George, and that means Gingrich is doing his homework. He’s studying the available information, and that he’s arriving at conclusions that are fundamentally in accord with conservative values is important, because it suggests that his growth as a candidate has been genuinely positive. Can Gingrich come back? If this interview is any indication, it seems likely.
When you invite the world into your bedroom, don’t expect the world to withhold comments. When you invite government to fund healthcare, there will be no holding back the ultimate encroachment into personal privacy. There’s no ambiguity here. When Sandra Fluke testified before Congress, she invited this, but more importantly, when leftists shoved government healthcare down our throats, beginning in the 1960s, and culminating finally in “Obamacare,” the whole question of privacy was suppressed with a finality that most people simply won’t like: The government is involved in your healthcare. By definition, it is no longer private information. You cannot bring government into the matter of contraception without inviting it ultimately into your doctor’s office, your bathroom, and your bedroom.
People who are defending Fluke are ignoring the simple fact that when you make your sexuality and things related to it a matter of public record and government interest, you’re holding the door open for public judgments. Your reproductive health, but also the health of your kidneys is subject to governmental review. Do not offer that you haven’t understood where this would lead. Fluke wants others to be compelled to cover her contraception. What did she expect would happen? If you come to me and say “hey, pal, I need you to pay for…my kids to eat,” you can expect that I will soon ask you why you have so many children. As long as people are going to try to redistribute their private burdens onto the public account, there should be no claim whatsoever that the demand-makers can avoid public judgment. They’re inviting them.
What do you think is the meaning of the implementation of the various state EBT cards, so that at the grocery check-out, those living off of the rest of us can avoid any alleged stigma previously associated with food-stamps? They want the dignity associated with the appearance of paying their own way without the necessity of actually doing so. Such people are frauds, but their first victim is always themselves. Before they can fool the rest of us, they must first pretend to themselves that this procedure is fine, and that there is no shame in any of it. I won’t permit it. I’m not going to let charlatans parade around as though they are anything other than what the facts reveal.
If you’re a college student, or anybody else for that matter, and you wish to avoid pregnancy, but cannot afford your own contraceptives, there’s a simple answer, and as Foster Freiss might offer, it may involve an aspirin. As a member of the paying public, my first response when you demand free contraception is:
“Nothing is free. Why do you think I should pay for it?”
What can you answer? What is your moral premise? What is the basis for your claim against my wallet? There are two important principles here, and the first is that to Ms. Fluke and any like her who demand contraception funded by others, the only rational answer must be “No.” It’s an important word, and just as it applies in this context, where I do not give my consent, Ms. Fluke and all those like her should consider adding the word to their own vocabularies, in which case contraception might no longer be such a pressing necessity.
I don’t know anything about Fluke’s sexual habits, and I don’t really care. I simply don’t wish to pay for them, and I don’t want government compelling coverages on faith-based institutions, including the university at which she is a student. Her sexual life became a matter of public concern when she made it one. She is not a victim of Rush Limbaugh, or anybody else. She’s a victim of her own desire to put a gun to the heads of people of faith who will be coerced under the auspices of Obamacare to cover her contraceptive needs.
This is the truth of this issue, and when you consider what Obamacare will actually impose, from death-panels to medical records databases, and access to your financial records, it’s clear that there will be no effective protection of privacy. I don’t know how any rational person can believe that they can get somebody else to pay for something on their behalf, and still maintain privacy. You have a heart condition? The government will know. Diabetes? The government will know. Herpes? The government will know. They will know everything about you including the weight you register when you step on the scale in your doctor’s office.
What do you think has been the meaning of the “war on obesity,” the “war on bad eating habits,” the “war on smoking” or the “war on salt?” Wait until this system begets a “war on sexuality” or some such thing. It’s only a matter of time, because in the hands of politicians, it will be unavoidable. There will be no privacy. You will face inevitable judgments if you rely upon government directly or indirectly to meet or mandate the fulfillment of your needs. Sandra Fluke complains that she’s going broke paying for contraception, and that may be the case, but life is full of choices, and it’s time for her to grow up and make them, or sustain the judgments heaped upon her for demanding others carry the burdens those choices impose.
I have long held the position that statists wish to supplant the church and its influence in the lives of people with its own authority, and to do so, the institutional left seeks to displace religion from the lives of Americans because this will enable them to pour government into the vacuum. The latest controversy over the Obamacare mandates on religious institutions to provide contraception coverage in their health care insurance policies was thought to be just another ill-considered political decision from which the Obama administration would ultimately retreat. That retreat has been only rhetorical as Obama’s dictatorial policy remains in place. This isn’t political ineptitude, but statists’ calculations: The Obama administration knows that this attack on the Catholic church and Christianity generally will result in the wholesale elimination of religiously-oriented institutions. That’s what they’re after, and that’s what they’ll get, as the seek to push people even further from religion in order to make more room for the growth of an aggressive and overpowering state.
Hot Air posted an article on this, and I think it should give us pause, because it speaks to the motivations of those who are forcing these policies upon religious institutions, and what their real goal might be. They aren’t worried that the Catholic charities, hospitals, and schools(including universities) will perhaps cease to operate, due to matters of conscience because they fully expect them to do so. Francis Cardinal George of the archdiocese of Chicago sent a message to parishioners and its contents demonstrate the point:
“Two Lents from now,” Cardinal George warned, “unless something changes, the page [listing Catholic organizations] will be blank.”
The Cardinal didn’t stop there. He went on to describe the choices with which the church will be confronted:
Secularize itself, breaking its connection to the church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life.
Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable.
Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government.
Close down.
This is telling, and you can already see the hand-writing on the wall. The Catholic church will not be able to take steps 1 or 2, so they will instead be compelled to follow steps 3 or 4. What will that accomplish? Simply put, it will demolish their employees, their institutions, and will further serve to separate Catholics from their church. This is not accidental, but instead a long-sought goal of the institutional left that has been seeking to drive all religion out of our society. This move will force a retreat of the church into the physical buildings that bear the same description.
The truth is that the church, any church, is not a matter of buildings. It is as large and widespread as its adherents, and this is the secret to what the Obama administration and his thugs of the left are really after: They will confine the church to church grounds, but force the church out of the public sphere altogether. Whether you’re a Catholic, or a member of any other faith, you’ve just been served notice that your church is no longer welcome in the public square except on conditions to be established, enforced, and dictated by government.
Of course, Cardinal George is well aware of this fact, and it’s with sadness I report to you his conclusion from his letter to his parishioners, and if you are a person of faith, you had better pay attention, because whether you are a Catholic or not, he’s speaking to you. All of you:
“The provision of health care should not demand “giving up” religious liberty. Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship. Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship-no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long cold war to defeat that vision of society.”
“The strangest accusation in this manipulated public discussion has the bishops not respecting the separation between church and state. The bishops would love to have the separation between church and state we thought we enjoyed just a few months ago, when we were free to run Catholic institutions in conformity with the demands of the Catholic faith, when the government couldn’t tell us which of our ministries are Catholic and which not, when the law protected rather than crushed conscience. The state is making itself into a church. The bishops didn’t begin this dismaying conflict nor choose its timing. We would love to have it ended as quickly as possible. It’s up to the government to stop the attack.”(emphasis added)
When you consider what the Cardinal is saying, its importance must not be ignored. He’s issuing you a warning, but he’s also telling you the resolution. The government is doing this. Who runs the government? You do. You have it in your power to stop this. You can stop this in November. You can stop this by refusing. You can. You can stop this with a vote. If you’re not Catholic, you’re not exempt from any of this, or the effect it will have on your church, mosque, synagogue or temple. There are no exemptions, because if the Obama administration can successfully drive the Catholic church out, by the far the single largest religious institution in the country, with as many as one in six hospital beds in the country under its umbrella, what will your relatively less influential institution of faith do in response? How will you hold back the government?
Here in the Bible belt of Texas, there are relatively fewer Catholics, but there is a vast diversity of small churches with tiny congregations that are all under threat by this move against religion. As people of faith, you had better understand that this isn’t a war on the Catholic church isn’t due to an anti-Catholic bias, but instead a war on all religion as an obstacle to the supremacy of the state. The institutional left isn’t out to slap the Catholic church in a political move for the sake of some radical, loud-mouthed supporters as has been supposed. They are taking steps to chase churches out of the public square, the private sphere, and eventually out of existence. This is the purpose, and if you blind yourself with the faulty notion that this is about Catholics, or about contraception, you’re setting yourself up for slavery, because whereas churches must solicit donations from you to support their various social causes, the government will instead only demand payment at gunpoint. There will be no choice, and there will be no conscience but that which they dictate it to be.
We’ve heard a good bit about what the 2,700 pages of Obamacare holds in store for the American people, but I’m not sure you will have known all of these details. This video is astonishingly detailed, and if you haven’t seen it before, taking the ten minutes necessary to view it will certainly be an eye-opening affair for those of you who’ve not seen this. Suffice it to say that if this isn’t repealed, we’re going to lose all of our liberties, and with it, the entire country. Take the time to watch this. If you weren’t worried about healthcare before, you will be afterwards:
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi said a mouth-full in an interview with Greta Van Susteren On the Record. She effectively admitted that Mitt Romney will only seek to repeal such parts of Obamacare as are in conflict with his own ideas, so that we’ll see a push for Romneycare nationwide. She makes several dishonest arguments, but one thing that is certain is that she already believes she has a job lined up in a Romney Administration. After all, she helped deliver the critical Florida primary. After all, where would Romney be now if he had lost in Florida? Voters in Michigan and Arizona beware! Romney is who so many have suspected all along: A big-government liberal from Massachusetts. Watch the video here:
It’s bad enough to be ruled by Barack Obama and his friends in the Democrat party and throughout the far-left establishment, but to find that Republicans have the same notions is simply despicable, and here, Bondi confirms it. While she pretends this is a states’ rights issue, it’s nothing of the sort. This isn’t about federalism, but about the nature of one’s right to one’s life and liberty. To attempt to push this line explains why Romney wouldn’t back away from Romneycare, and used the same poorly-formed argument to excuse it: He intends this for all of us.
Rather than talking for two weeks about contraception, perhaps we should have been spending a little more time vetting Romneycare and Mitt’s intentions, but then again, maybe mis-direction has been the point.
In a move that is clearly aimed at lessening the political damage to his administration, but will factually do almost nothing to address the issue, ABCNews is reporting that Barack Obama or some spokesman will reportedly make a statement Friday on an alleged concession to or accommodation of religious organizations on the contraception coverage mandate. The proposed “solution” would mere shift the responsibility under the edict to insurers. All of this is an attempt to satisfy his leftist base, while making it appear that he’s substantially changing his position where the rest of us are concerned. Shifting the object of the edict from religious institutions to their insurance providers is not really making a factual change in the results, but it changes the way it will operate, giving the President political cover.
Ladies and gentlemen, don’t be fooled: Obama still intends to shove this down the throats of people of faith, and the fact that they’re going to put the onus on insurers does nothing to alleviate the concerns. It simply means that religious organizations will have no choice except to insure people on policies that will have federally-mandated coverage requirements, because what the administration will now do is bully insurers instead of religious entities. That’s not a concession, and it’s not an accommodation, and while it may offer a technical out for Obama to claim he hadn’t been oppressing the religious freedoms of Americans, it merely means that he will oppress their religious free exercise indirectly.
The insurance mandate will remain. All that will change is who will be compelled to enforce it. At that point, what you must admit is that Obama is accommodating anything, but merely shifting the means by which his goal will be obtained. This is the typical leftist approach: When caught with your hand in the cookie jar, quickly withdraw it, while merely reaching with the other hand into the same jar, hoping you will not notice. Expect the media to portray this as “Obama caves,” but that’s a lie. He isn’t caving. He isn’t changing his objective. He still intends to force Catholics, and other Christians to comply with the goal of seeing to it that all contraceptive measures are available to all women through health-care insurance.
Don’t fall for it. It’s a political show, but the net effect is meaningless. He isn’t surrendering the idea of coercing people of faith, but merely trying to convince them that his coercion is aimed at insurers. You can watch Jake Tapper’s report on ABCNews here:
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1012280&w=425&h=350&fv=]
This isn’t even accommodation. Let’s be honest with ourselves and admit that Obama is still going to shove this down the throats of faith-based organizations, and there is no way around it. This may fool some people into believing that Obama has made an accommodation, but at the end of the day, this still results in a government edict on how money from people of faith will be spent. So he shifted responsibility to the insurers, but this changes nothing about the results. Nothing. Don’t let up. This isn’t Obama surrendering on the issue, but instead merely trying to re-frame the issue to his advantage. It’s still a dictatorial action, no matter how we slice it.
Watching some of the coverage of Barack Obama’s edict issued to Catholic organizations, it’s become painfully clear to me that many so-called “journalists” don’t have the first clue why this is upsetting. They simply don’t understand it. In their thinking, this isn’t a religious issue at all. In their view, matters of conscience begin and end at the steps of the church, demonstrating that they not only believe in a separation of church and state, but church and life. What they admitted in their shocked confusion over the back-lash is what I have always known, and you have likely suspected too: To these people, religion is a belief system that is practiced behind the closed doors of a church, and the very notion that your beliefs extend to the rest of your life is foreign to them. While many in the media claim to be members of various churches, one clearly gets the sense that many are not all too serious about it, and this issue has revealed them as insincere.
After all, if you’re a committed and observant Catholic, you hold with the teachings of the Church that contraception (never mind abortion) contradicts God’s will. These people in media understand this about Catholics, but they are astonished when Catholics and others react badly against a governmental edict that requires them to support contraception through compulsory add-ons to insurance plans, or through tax dollars. For them, the issue is your private faith, to which they will agree you are entitled, versus your adherence to it in all facets of your life. In effect, what they suppose is that while you may rightly hold your own beliefs, that when you exit the church you must set aside your beliefs in all the rest of your daily life. In essence, they believe in a separation of your religious beliefs from practical life.
This is a telling revelation, and it correlates well with this class of bloody hypocrites, who may profess this religious belief or that, but seldom adhere to it in their own lives. To them, religion is about private professions of a belief in a crowd of like-minded people, assembled at best within the walls of a church, hidden from society and closed in from all the world. They cannot conceive of the notion that you might adhere to a given church, accept all its teachings, and extend their practice into your daily lives. You oppose abortion on the basis of religion? Fine, they will say, but if you’re a doctor, that doesn’t relieve you of the duty to perform one if a patient demands it. They demand doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmacists, and everyone else to abandon their faith once they exit their homes or churches.
In their view, religion is something dispensable, like deciding whether it is too warm for a sweater, or too cool for shorts on the way to a picnic. They project their own loosely-defined, carelessly adopted choices of conscience onto every other man and woman in the culture, and expect that all others would so easily drop their beliefs at the command of a President, or any other dictatorial thug, just on his say-so. It is much like the attitude of Romney over Romneycare in the debate with Rick Santorum: “It’s not worth getting angry about.” This disconnect in their professed religious views from their daily lives is born of the fact that in the first instance, most of them are liars, and starting with the commandment to “not bear false witness,” they begin very early in their careers to do precisely that.
If you slant a story about a person to make his actions seem worse, or better, you’re bearing false witness. What has modern journalism become if not a perpetual parade of people trotted out before some camera, or interviewed and quoted in print who bears false witness against somebody else? When this becomes the touchstone of your profession, and the way to score the lead story, and the above-the-fold headline, you can bet the long-term affect will be to destroy one’s sense of what is a lie and what isn’t. Mad? Yes, of course we become angry! This should offend you nearly as badly as the story in this case, because it reveals something else too: It is reported that President Obama and some in his inner circle dismissed warnings from some others in the administration that there could be a back-lash, and that they are somewhat surprised now that the back-lash is well under way. In short, the media is surprised, but so is the President’s inner circle, and for exactly the same reason: Obama, despite his professions of a Christian faith and twenty years in Jeremiah Wright’s church, doesn’t take his faith all that seriously either. Like many liberals, it was all about appearances.
This also explains something else, if you’re observant: The same people who are shocked about this reveal why they hold such naive views about radical Islamists. Think of it: They don’t understand that Muslims motivated to terror by radical Imams might well actually believe every word they’ve been taught as they throw themselves into crowded streets with bombs strapped to their chests. In short, they are willing to act on the strength of their beliefs, whether you and I agree with those beliefs being a separate matter. In the worldview of the left, this is a confounding issue of politics gone haywire, and it is why they do not understand how the Arab Spring is rapidly undergoing a climate change of a different sort. In the main, this is either because they don’t hold religious convictions, or at least not firmly, or because they believe that political expedience trumps all other causes. Either way, what they fail to understand is that a Catholic doctor of Obstetrics and Gynecology may have matters of conscience or faith that prohibit the performing of abortions.
To them, matters of faith are strictly personal, and should have no bearing on one’s dealings or relations with others. These people have no understanding of committed, observantly faithful practitioners of any religion. They think “free exercise” is a matter of speech at most, and even then should remain in church at its most public. Their perspective is that of a shallow faith, not made of actions tied to beliefs, but of words tied mainly to doubts or dis-beliefs. They cannot understand why one’s religious beliefs should matter at all in one’s performance in the workplace, or why they might affect the diligence with which one adheres to the vows of one’s marriage. In their view, these things are all superficial and transient, meaning that when they seem shocked and confused over how this could possibly be seen by Catholics, or Christians in general, as a matter of the interference by the state in the free exercise of religion, most are not faking it. They really don’t “get it,” and it’s because they have no idea that faith and religious instruction actually informs the views of many millions of Americans. They expect you to make professions of faith, but never to act upon it.
In short, they really are clueless. And besides, “it’s not worth getting angry about.”
Here we go. I published an article earlier this morning, and here’s a piece of video that perfectly demonstrates my point. This sort of nonsense must be stopped, and we must be the generation who stops it, or our country is finished. It starts with defining the concept of “rights,” and this ACLU basket-case is a perfect case study in how the left discards actual liberties in the name of concocted ones. Listen to what this twit says, and recognize, given what I posted earlier, what she is really doing here. It’s vile and disgusting, and the ACLU is moving from merely Anti-American to criminally complicit in the overthrow of our constitution.
To watch television and listen to the arguments of leftists is to punish your mind. I have heard and watched the most absurd switching of contexts I have seen in quite some time, and I must tell you that if the left is permitted to win on this one, you’re done. The country is done. Liberty is dead. These dictatorial thugs have perfected the ludicrous formula of switching contexts to an extent I have never seen, but you must know of it in full. This propaganda form would be artful if were not so evil, but in this case, it’s clumsily obvious. It is nevertheless effective against the sort of people who are easily swayed by half-baked arguments. They say: “Barack Obama isn’t oppressing people and institutions of faith, but instead, and incredibly, freeing their victims from oppression.”
Yes, that’s right: According to the talking points of every leftwing hack from Jehmu Greene(another Soros shill on FoxNews,) to James Carney(aptly named as he conducts his three-ring circus in the briefing room of the White House,) the word has gone out from on high: President Obama’s severe policy is not a breach of religious freedoms, but instead the elevation of freedoms for women. This clown-show should not be acknowledged in the usual fashion. This is tyranny writ large, and if you’re still not quite seeing the threat explicit in all this, let me do my best to explain it. We have here two contradictory premises, and one of them is a logical farce, while the other is a natural law. I’m going to solicit your attention while we differentiate among the two.
The right of conscience(freedom of religion, thought, speech, publishing and the like,) arise from the natural fact that no person can control your mind, or what you believe. All they can do is to silence you by coercion and naked aggression, but nothing on Earth can forcibly change your mind if you are determined against it. This gives rise to the old lament that “you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.” I can chide you, I can threaten you, and I can even do you harm, but I cannot compel you to change your mind, and that is the root of that freedom: Your mind and its contents are yours, and solely. No government, no dictator, no King, and no society can command you to change your mind.
Place this against the notion of a “freedom to access contraception.” That sounds great for those who want it, but that’s not where the left ends their hunt. They now make of it a “right to equal access to contraception.” Once you make of a thing a “right,” then nobody can interfere with you legally. However, all of this flies in the face of nature, and therefore the very concept of “rights.” What if there is no contraception available? Is nature violating your rights? Is the market violating your rights? Is the government violating your rights? This abominable argument is based on a nonsensical premise that you can have a right, any right, of any sort or in any context to that which must be provided in some way by others.
There is no such right. There can be no such right. This is not a right, but a wish, or a demand, and call it what you will, but to call it a “right” is to demean and debase what a “right” is. A right is a natural entitlement of liberty that confers no positive obligation upon another, nor requires the consent of another for its free exercise, but arises solely from the natural fact of one’s existence. How can one then claim a condom, or a birth control pill, or a spermicidal gel, or any of the other myriad forms of contraception are a matter of rights? To have such a right would compel others to provide it, and that’s a “positive obligation,” and to exercise it, you would need the consent of no other, but what if none wish to manufacture it, sell it, or prescribe it? It cannot be a right by any measure. There can be no rights to a thing which others must provide.
What is worst among all the criminal edicts implicit in this case is that Obama is instructing institutions of faith that they must provide, as a matter of “rights,” access to contraception via health insurance plans. Now he will command people to provide insurance for coverage they do not wish to provide on grounds of conscience, and as bad as this seems, and it is truly monstrous, I tell you now that this is the result of permitting tin-pot thugs with suits and ties from either party to tell you anything about what you may or must sell or purchase, and under what conditions you may or must do so.
What is being done in this case is not merely an affront to people of faith, but to all people everywhere of every persuasion and of any inclination, except statism. In a nutshell, an actual right, the natural right of conscience, endorsed by our First Amendment, and allegedly guaranteed us by our government, has been trampled in the name of a non-existent, impossible, and unenforceable right to the minds, bodies, souls, and properties of others. This is the radical boot of Barack Obama on the throats of Americans everywhere, and those too foolish to understand the meaning of this assault on their precious liberties are either too young to understand them, or too submissively dependent to care.
I am laying down a challenge to my readers, to be spread as far and wide among institutions of faith, be they churches, mosques, synagogues or temples, or the charity and healthcare facilities and organizations under their umbrellas: Do not yield to this. There is talk of some sort of negotiation. Any who negotiate this point are sell-outs. Any who yield are collaborators. This is not a matter of insurance policies, but a matter of urgent necessity in the name of liberty. I urge resistance. I urge non-compliance. I do not and would not ordinarily undertake such strong language, but I believe it is my duty as an American, knowing full well that this exceeds all boundaries on governmental authority prescribed by our framers, and knowing that this will lead only to more tyrannical edicts issuing forth from the despot’s mouth.
That’s right, I said it. Barack Obama is a despot. Report me to AttackWatch if you don’t like it. Is there any greater treason to be undertaken by any man entrusted with power but to reach out to the consciences of others and demand at gunpoint: “Your thoughts and your beliefs, or your life?” If my readers fail to remember every other word I have written, remember these few: Government is force, and nothing more, and to yield your mind to its threats of force is a surrender to an unnatural dictator at the most fundamental level.
No person should permit this. No person should surrender to this. No person. You have seen now the ultimate bastardization of the concept of “rights,” and it is being done to you as you sit in quiet contemplation of the spectacle, as your appointed leaders contemplate their own surrender in the name of the kingdoms they have built for themselves by the graces of your charity and by your acts in the name of your faith. If they will not lead, and stand up to this tyrant, you must do so by unseating your cardinals, bishops, ministers, priests, reverends, pastors, rabbis, and any other leader to whom you look for guidance on such matters. If they will not lead now, when the cause is greatest, and when you need them most, you need them…not at all.
