Obamacare is an affront.
Obamacare reflects the breakdown of the whole American system. It was passed as the author points out in the dark where lobbyists could work. It was passed out of regular order so that the customary quotas of Senators in assent did not have to be obtained. It was passed by tricks to evade the Constitution where tax laws must originate in the House of Representatives. It was so turgid with 2700 pages of law so that it was passed in ignorance because no representative of the people actually read it.
The law was an affront because it essentially said to the secretary of health education and welfare, go and make a law regulating every American's healthcare, a further evasion of the Constitution, an evasion of constitutional responsibility as set down in article 1 for the Congress alone to make laws. The secretary has written tens of thousands of pages of regulations which, again, no legislator has read and very few if any understand.
Not content with the Secretary of Health Education and Welfare usurping the article 1 responsibility of Congress to make laws, the president himself has unconstitutionally usurped that power by arbitrarily enforcing some portions of the law and declining to enforce other portions of law.
Obamacare reflects the breakdown of the process of judicial review and nothing could better illustrate this ongoing subversion of our centuries-old legacy of judicial review than the contrived opinion of the Chief Justice.
Not surprisingly, the resistance to the law, the effort to defund Obamacare, equally reflected the breakdown of our national political process. The ordinary course of funding the government through passage of a budget law as opposed to a continuing resolution followed by specific appropriations has been done away with to be substituted with rule by crisis and fear, inevitably the financial security of the nation has been wounded, perhaps mortally, not by the attempt to defund Obamacare but by the whole sordid history that led up to the necessity to do so.
The article points out the breakdown of civil morality on the part of the president who has flatly lied to a gullible low information electorate and secured his own reelection partly on the basis of that lie. The article further highlights the duplicity of Democrats in Congress to the sordid business which is further reflected in their disgraceful slanders against the party Republicans as "terrorists" and "extortionists."
The breakdown of the system is further reflected in the treatment by the media of those who try to restore integrity into the process with 100% of the television media utterly declining to place "blame" for shutdown on Obama or the Democrats as well as article after article blaming the messenger. Ultimately, a representative democracy cannot endure without some decency in the media.
Obama and his lies are not solely responsible for the breakdown of the system, nor is the duplicity inherent in Obamacare the cause, they are both cause and effect, creating and reflecting a terrible moral cavity in the American soul. Obama and his lies have laid bare a putrid underbelly of the Republican Party which must be made clean again or the party will die and the disease very likely will kill the Republic.
