ColoradoPatriot
Gay Patriot
3/25/2012
…Like many who read this blog, I’m cautiously hopeful the Supreme Court will agree with me that ObamaCare is patently unconstitutional and should be annulled post haste. But like many (much smarter than I) observers, I’m not convinced this will happen.
Either way, however, our remedy should not be the Supreme Court.
ObamaCare has never enjoyed the consent of the governed. Not while it was being debated, not when it was being passed (remember ‘deeming’?), not since. There is not an issue in the past three years of which the (un-)popularity has been as consistent and reliable as ObamaCare’s. It’s almost embarrassing how blatant this is. Last week’s two-year anniversary passed with nary a word from the man whose name graces the neologism itself. Imagine: the greatest legislative accomplishment of his young presidential career, and he says nothing about it on its anniversary. (By contrast, here’s one of FDR’s famous radio addresses on the third anniversary of Social Security’s passing.)
There is no reason this horrible abrogation of our liberties should be allowed to stand. But if we’re a Nation of individuals who are responsible for ourselves and are deserving of the rights with which we’ve been vested by our Creator, don’t we have some responsibility ourselves in defending them?…
…we have been called to duty and our charge is to expunge from the halls of power those who would rather use government to enslave us all to their indentured service and replace them with like-minded individuals who view their job as caretakers of our God-given liberties for just a few years tenure.
Read the complete article at Gay Patriot.
Related: The Right to be left alone at stake in ObamaCare hearings
…All citizens, repeat: “I exist; therefore I am a tool of the State.”
The Obama administration paints each American as innately incapable of paying his way by individually chosen means and timing. Even if the consumption of medical services were literally inevitable for everyone (which it is not), is nonpayment by every individual inevitable? Are you personally fated to be a burden on the “system” unless the government decides how you will handle your finances or what commerce you will engage in and when?…
…Obamacare denies the autonomy and accountability of the individual and establishes the homogeny and anonymity of a faceless collective. Politicians want to judge and dictate your personal actions, present and future, based on statistical generalizations derived from an economic aggregate.
But don’t call it the socialization of health care…
Read the whole thing.
H/T GTF
Update: Articles from around the web…
Liberty and ObamaCare. The Affordable Care Act claims federal power is unlimited. Now the High Court must decide.
Few legal cases in the modern era are as consequential, or as defining, as the challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that the Supreme Court hears beginning Monday. The powers that the Obama Administration is claiming change the structure of the American government as it has existed for 225 years. Thus has the health-care law provoked an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional showdown that endangers individual liberty.
It is a remarkable moment. The High Court has scheduled the longest oral arguments in nearly a half-century: five and a half hours, spread over three days. Yet Democrats, the liberal legal establishment and the press corps spent most of 2010 and 2011 deriding the government of limited and enumerated powers of Article I as a quaint artifact of the 18th century. Now even President Obama and his staff seem to grasp their constitutional gamble.
Consider a White House strategy memo that leaked this month, revealing that senior Administration officials are coordinating with liberal advocacy groups to pressure the Court. “Frame the Supreme Court oral arguments in terms of real people and real benefits that would be lost if the law were overturned,” the memo notes, rather than “the individual responsibility piece of the law and the legal precedence [sic].” Those nonpolitical details are merely what “lawyers will be talking about.”…
Obamacare in the Supreme Court 101: Deliberations, Rulings and Impacts
…The Supreme Court will consider four main questions when the Obamacare cases come before the bench. And the answers to those questions will determine whether all, some, or none of Obamacare will remain in force after the Court’s decision.
Issues the Court Will Decide:
- The justices will decide if the Anti-Injunction Act will prohibit states and other parties from challenging the individual mandate.
- The Court will determine if the individual mandate that requires all Americans to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.
- The Court will decide if the mandate, if ruled unconstitutional, can be severed from the Affordable Care Act.
- The Court will rule if Congress exceeded its enumerated powers under the Spending Clause and violated basic federalism principles by placing heavy regulations on states that receive Medicaid funding…
Even If Overturned, ObamaCare’s Legacy Will Live On
On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments in the states’ lawsuit against ObamaCare. If the court, as it should, strikes down the entire law, friends of the Constitution will have reason to celebrate. They may, however, want to keep some of their champagne in reserve, for while all the provisions of the law would then be null and void at the federal level, the effects of those that have already been implemented may not easily be undone, according to the Washington Post.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the ongoing saga of ObamaCare. In February 2011 Dr. Lloyd M. Krieger argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “the law has already yielded profound, destructive changes that will not be undone by repeal or defunding alone.”…
…Unfortunately, as Georgetown University professor Sabrina Corlette told the Post, these mandates “are really very popular.” Many people believe they are getting something for nothing via these rules and therefore will be loath to support repeal. They do not realize that such coverage mandates “have driven up the cost of many insurance plans,” as the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies, Michael Cannon, told the paper. Thus, they also do not grasp that, in Cannon’s words, “there will be more affordable coverage options” if these mandates are repealed. State legislators and Governors who might support repeal would do so at their own electoral peril…
…Obamacare was carefully constructed to manipulate the standard 10-year cost projections of the CBO. Because benefits would not fully kick in for four years, President Obama could trumpet 10-year gross costs of less than $1 trillion — $938 billion to be exact.
But now that the near-costless years 2010 and 2011 have elapsed, the true 10-year price tag comes into focus. From 2013 through 2022, the CBO reports, the costs of Obamacare come to $1.76 trillion — almost twice the phony original number.
It gets worse. Annual gross costs after 2021 are more than a quarter of $1 trillion every year — until the end of time. That, for a new entitlement in a country already drowning in $16 trillion of debt…
…If Obamacare is upheld, it fundamentally changes the nature of the American social contract. It means the effective end of a government of enumerated powers — i.e., finite, delineated powers beyond which the government may not go, beyond which lies the free realm of the people and their voluntary institutions. The new post-Obamacare dispensation is a central government of unlimited power from which citizen and civil society struggle to carve out and maintain spheres of autonomy…
Gillespie Serves it Dry in a Fonzie Jacket
…I submit that what is significant about ObamaCare is that it’s the last remaining piece in FDR’s diabolical re-write of the Bill of Rights…
“Fox News Sunday” Panel on the Upcoming U.S. Supreme Court “ObamaCare Hearings”; Chris Wallace – “It’s a Lose-Lose for Obama” – Video 3/25/12
