There is no silver lining. And we still don’t know what’s in the bill.

View 731 Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Roberta has an appointment for an eye exam that includes dilation so I’ll have to drive her. This will be short.

The storm over Mr. Chief Justice Roberts decision continues. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding, and much talk of “silver linings” and others denouncing those who see “silver linings.” I am not privy to Mr. Roberts’ thinking, but I think those looking for silver linings are mistaken: this was not Mr. Roberts being the conservative Chief Justice standing in the way of the political departments as they rush the nation toward the end of the Constitutional Republic as we know it; this is Mr. Roberts in a cry of despair proclaiming that conservatives can no longer rely on the Supreme Court to save the people from the consequences of their political decisions.

What Mr. Roberts has seen is that a law so badly framed that it has internal contradictions and which mandates colossal new taxes while handing over nearly 20% of the national economy to federal bureaucrats has passed the House and Senate and has been signed by a President who purports to be an expert on Constitutional Law by dint of having been a lecturer on the subject at the University of Chicago as well as the President of the Harvard Law Review; and despite the obvious defects of this law, four Justices were eager to approve it. The whole course of the United States turns on the survival of five men. If one of them goes, so does the Constitution.

The old model of Congress messing with the Constitution and the Court trying to save it no longer works. We have gone too far down the road to serfdom, and if we continue there will be no turning back. The Courts cannot perpetually resist the political departments. If the Constitutionalists among us cannot regain control of the political branches, what we know as the Constitution of 1789 will be gone, irretrievably gone; it takes only one more liberal Justice.

Whereupon Mr. Roberts has thrown this question to the people. Is this the way you want to go? If so, confirm those who posed it. If not, turn them out. You have one more election to accomplish this. If Mr. Obama has four more years, the chances are good that he will be able to add one more to the Court, and there will be no turning back.

One can argue that this is a political strategic decision and it is not his to make. He would argue that it is his task to save the Constitution and this is the only way he knows that will accomplish that. Turn out the makers of this act which would march the United States down the path to federal control of everything, and do it while there is yet time to do so; or face the fact that the Court can no longer protect you from political consequences of your actions. If you want an entitlement state, here is your chance; if you want to reverse this course and move away from entitlements, here is your chance. And, incidentally, what we have is 2700 pages of bad law, passed by ideologues who had not read it and could not have known how bad it is, and approved by four Justices who haven’t read it either. If they’ll approve this they’ll approve anything. If you give Mr. Obama the chance he will add yet another to their number.

Mr. Roberts has proclaimed a reality. He might have gone with the conservative block and thrown the law out, thus making this election one of populism vs. the courts – something the liberals were preparing for. Now the issue is clear. This is a referendum on the entitlement state march down the Road to Serfdom. He may well have been wrong to do this, but it is what he has done.

If Mr. Obama wins this election he will have won and Obamacare will be implemented.

Ms. Pelosi told us that we had to pass the Bill so that we could find out what’s in it. We have done so. Now we know. And now that we know, we have a chance to reject it.

I have mail from readers who say that since Romney is unsatisfactory, they will vote Libertarian. TRhat is certainly an option.

I note that on the 1912 election President William Howard Taft, who took office as the designated successor to Theodore Roosevelt, failed of reelection because Roosevelt found him unsatisfactory and ran against him as the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) candidate. The result was predictable, the election of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson won a second term on the platform of “he kept us out of the War”, meaning The Great War, which after American entry under Wilson was called the World War.

I can well understand the frustrations of those who find Romney unsatisfactory. He was not my candidate. On the other hand, most of the people I know including myself find it a lot easier to gain influence and even power within the Republican Party rather than the Democrat party.  We do not live in a perfect world. In this real world, either Romney or Obama will become President and will appoint at least one Justice of the Supreme Court. Neither of those potential winners would be my first or even tenth choice to be President; but there is a lot more than a dime’s worth of difference between them.

You wrote:

"Ms. Pelosi told us that we had to pass the Bill so that w could find out what’s in it."

Perhaps you should read her complete remarks, so that you understand the context of the statement. It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t vested in taking her comments out of context that she was referring to the fact that given all the manufactured controversy, the only way The American People will find out what’s in the bill is when it’s implemented.

Of course, those with their own agendas won’t bother to actually review her remarks in their totality, because when it’s out of context and intentionally misconstrued, it makes a hell of a soundbite.

Which, of course, shows the validity of her point regarding the manufactured controversy and the reality.

M

But in fact we did have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. And one of the things we find is that it fails to authorize funding of some of its own key elements: it was rushed into law defects and all. And I suspect that neither you nor anyone else believes that Ms. Pelosi actually read the bill that she conducted through the House. Indeed I would wager that not one of those who voted for that bill had actually read it. Twenty seven hundred pages is a lot of reading, and this was done by a lame duck Congress and even then has to use arcane parliamentary maneuvers to get it passed before that Congress was no more.  Yes: we had to pass the bill in order to find out what is in it. And what we are finding is not at all pleasant.

The simplest procedure is to repeal it, every bit of it, and then start over – assuming that there is any sentiment for a new national health bill at all.  The Clintons lost their Congressional majority on this issue, but Mr. Clinton was clever enough to disassociate himself from it in the election of 1996; and the Republicans were kind enough to run Bob Dole, probably the only man Clinton could beat. Romney is not Dole. Romney is more Mormon than Establishment.

But it is hardly unfair to say that the bill had to be passed in order to find out what was in it. No one knew what was in it when it was passed, and many are just finding out some of it now.