Posted on 06/30/2012 10:23:54 AM PDT by EternalVigilance
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act, I have noticed a curious phenomenon in which some conservative commentators seem to be so desperate to find a silver lining to the ruling that they have abandoned all logic. Consider George Will, who wrote a column in the aftermath of the ruling that actually puts forward the argument that we conservatives should take the fact that Roberts didn’t rely upon the commerce clause as evidence that there might be some constitutional limitation on the federal government after all. That would be a wonderful aspect of this ruling, if they had overturned the law! Instead, what we have is a monstrous precedent set in which the court re-writes a law in order to make it constitutional by imputing into the act a tax that had not existed in fact. This is an unmitigated disaster. I have heard a few who have noted hopefully that this ruling will energize the conservative base, and while that’s probably the case, I’m not certain I am so concerned about the political fall-out as I am about the long-run constitutional implications. You see, the political situation may permit us to repair the law, but it doesn’t permit us to immediately repair the damage done to the body of case law upon which future courts will rely as precedents in their own rulings.
The other thing I have read is the bizarre notion put forward by the National Review that what Roberts did was more conservative because he exercised judicial restraint in not striking down the law. Balderdash! Once you realize the legal contortions through which Roberts arrived at this ruling, it makes no sense whatever to claim he hadn’t acted as an activist. The convoluted logic by which he found a tax in a law that plainly states it does not contain one is an onerous breech of any notion of strict construction. I cannot conceive of any intellectually rigorous examination of this ruling by which this can be seen as a positive by anybody who is in favor of strict construction. When it came to the Anti-Injunction section of the ruling, it was held not to have been a tax, but just a few pages later, as Roberts performed mental gymnastics, he declared it was a tax after all.
On Thursday evening, Mark Levin summarized the matter better than anybody I’ve heard speak to this matter, in part because he understands the legalities in question, his Landmark Legal Foundation having been a participant in this case, but also because he knew Justice Roberts years ago when they both worked in the Reagan administration. Levin’s critique of the decision mirrors most of my own, and indeed, there was one aspect I hadn’t considered until Levin led me to it. That premise led me to yet another that I don’t believe Levin has yet realized in full. What one must understand is that this ruling is an unmitigated disaster, and no search for some alleged silver lining can repair it.
What Justice Roberts actually did was to expand the definition of what constitutes a permissible tax . Congress is permitted to levy only certain forms of tax, and this one doesn’t fit the definition of any of them. In dispensing with that issue, Roberts held that it didn’t matter, and that words don’t matter, and that plain-written legislative language doesn’t matter. He also ignored the context of the law, and the intent of Congress. One version of this bill had an actual tax, but Congress could not pass it in that form, so Congress altered it to contain no tax. What John Roberts did was to ignore the actual text of the legislation, and to say that the labels didn’t matter: If it looks like a tax, it is one. The problem with this is that it does nothing to restrain Congress from levying new taxes, and ignores the definitions of what sort of taxes Congress may enact. This is a wholesale extension of Congressional taxing authority because what Roberts ruled with respect to the particular form of the tax, insofar as the question of whether Congress had met the constitutional limits on whether it could impose it was effectively: “Close enough.”
That is offered to us as evidence of John Roberts’ alleged strict construction? Close enough? What this means, effectively, is that if Congress enacts some tax that it has questionable constitutional authority to levy, smiling John will be there to tell us it’s “close enough,” with every leftist monster on the court standing behind him to uphold it.
Ladies and gentlemen, there exists no silver lining to this ruling. All of the crackpot, delusional happy-talk from some conservatives in media is designed to make you feel better. You’ve just lost both arms and legs in a brutal assault, but they tell you, you should consider this a happy opportunity to enjoy the comforts of a new wheelchair and mouth-controlled joystick. You’ve just lost your family to a violent home-invasion, but, they tell you, you should view this as a chance to start over. The intention here is to keep you calm. The intention now is to serve a political end, while your country is dying around you. Your most sacred law, the US Constitution, has been crumpled and tossed into the ash-bin of history, and you are told you should do a happy-dance to the calming sounds of “Oh Happy Days.”
I’d like you to inventory the whole of the conservatives to whom you listen, or whose columns and opinions you read, and I want you to take care to note which of them are imploring you to consider some silver lining. They are lying. They have good intentions, many of them, and they have contorted themselves into a formless spaghetti of reasoning in order to find some good in this awful plate of refuse you’ve been handed. Don’t surrender your minds by sprinkling Parmesan on it and wolfing it down. Are there some limited political opportunities as a result of this decision? Yes, but they require the fulfillment of a whole laundry-list of “if-then” statements.
IF Mitt Romney is elected, and IF he doesn’t sell us out, and IF we hold the House, and IF we recapture the Senate(and at least 60 votes) and IF the moderates in either house don’t screw us, and IF Boehner and McConnell have the guts to do in repealing what the villains Reid and Pelosi did in passing the ACA, and IF they can deliver a bill to President Romney’s desk, and IF John Roberts and the other liberals on the court can be replaced, and IF Mitt Romney can replace them with actual strict constructionists, THEN you might have a chance to undo this damage. IF any of these don’t happen, your constitution is effectively dead as a restraint on government.
The danger of self-imposed delusions is that you come to believe them, like a pathological liar. It is by this form of self-delusion that we’ve permitted our country to lose its roots in reverence for the Constitution. We cannot defeat the statists by pretending this isn’t the disaster that it is, if we can defeat them at all. I believe some talking heads know this, but do not want to yield to what will come in the wake of such a monstrosity. They’re hanging on, stubbornly telling us that the stench of smoke reaching our nostrils is merely an air freshener of a novel scent. Rather than screaming “Fire,” and warning conservative Americans that the house is ablaze, the barn is wiped out, the surviving farm animals running loose in a frantic bid to stay ahead of the flames licking at their heels, many are now telling you that it’s all okay. It will be fine.
We've been doing it your way for over half a century, and it's done nothing but encourage and sanction the Republican party's leftward evolution....
Where do you ever see [the Democrats] compromising their principles to vote for center-right Democrat candidates? You don't. They'd rather lose by a landslide than back up a single inch on their ideological beliefs, and they demand candidates who are unbending in their allegiance to their shared ideals.
But on our side, we're told that we have to compromise to 'win'. If you continue to promote or agree with that computation, eventually you wind up voting for the other side's agenda. Whether you realize it or not - and that is exactly what is happening in this race.
BUMP TO THE TOP.
Somehow I doubt you’ll even be here a month from now.
Is that a threat?
You apparently believe Romney is a conservative, ok.
Most people who have been keeping up know he is not, many are still voting for him because they suffer from BHOhysteria.
What is find extremely amusing is that your support of Romney means nothing because you live in California.
If Obama is re elected, there is a zero percent chance of repealing obamacare. If romney gets elected, there is a greater than zero chance of Obamacare getting repealed. Good enough for me.
How could it be? This isn’t my website.
But when you see Romney folks blatantly insulting their host, and those who agree with him, it’s not hard to imagine them riding the lightning, is it?
But that’s not enough to override a veto, as I’m sure someone else has said farther along in the thread.
Thanks, Finny. It all sort of rushed out at once over coffee this morning.
After the assault that Chief Justice Roberts laid on us this last week, I've been forced to look at the immensity of what he's taken from all Americans. Confronting the horror of Roberts' decision has made me far less forgiving of anything resembling a quisling viewpoint.
Thank you, Pubster.
The website is paid for by donations.
Sheesh, can you ever write! It can’t be easy for those of us living in a world that isn’t, to have to hear from those of us who are not.
The contribution the Republican Party has made to the now socialist state we find ourselves living in has been clarion for decades, but the final blow to the Republic is putting up Mitt Romney, the chief cornerstone and pattern designer for Obama’s socialist America.
What an exclamation mark to the blunt message the party has sent us!
Romney is no contrast to Obama, but for rhetorical phrases, so what of consequence does he have to offer anyone beyond that?
He is empty on the issues, you can’t beat an agenda out of him on anything, he has every intention of triangulating and outsourcing to congress every controversy, so he can duck risk and triangulating himself into a second term.
With the socialist GOPE proving their impotence on religious liberty, immigration, border security, the environment, on foreign military adventures and defending Israel, there is nothing left in the hope and change box from either the party nor their nominee.
Enabling all this with our vote rather than extracting a price from this mob ascends to the pinnacle of stupidity, or worse.
On the contrary, FRiend, time to ponder the warning gzzimlich posted way back in April:
I live in a country (the UK) where the “conservative” choice supports gay marriage, socialised healthcare and the “right” of unions to make domestic labour almost prohibitively costly to employers.
I emphasize that this is the “conservative” candidate (David Cameron.)
Romney might seem like a decent option when compared with Obama, but my country - a surveillance state in which the use of “reasonable force” in defending your life and property was only made official policy a couple of years ago - is a prime example of what happens when you compromise your principles and start rationalising voting for the lesser of two evils.
I'm voting for a plurality. I'm voting third party and pray that everybody who's disgusted with both Obama and Romney do the same so whichever evil gets the White House, is facing four years of it being ON RECORD that the large majority of American voters wanted him to get lost. It's the only advantage my presidential vote can give to conservative Repblicans in Congress. Obama is loathed though the MSM spins otherwise; if he wins on a plurality where nearly two in three voted against him, he would be humiliated and a mockery. Republicans chastened by how Romney was rejected, would move right. Obama would be a scarecrow trying to advance his agenda.
Time to stop hyperventilating "ABO!" and START THINKING.
Amen Brother FReeper. And worse, ABO is risking a landslide mandate for this lemon.
I'm voting for a plurality: I'm voting official on-the-ballot third party, and I urge folks to join me.
If you kick in a few bucks do you think that gives you a right to call the owner, and principled conservatives who agree with him about Romney, slanderous, lying names?
If you kick in a few bucks do you think that gives you a right to call the owner, and principled conservatives who agree with him about Romney, slanderous, lying names?
I’ve seen it go both ways.
Over the last couple of months this site has become characterized by those who are actively seeking Obama’s re-election and now, the ratification of Obamacare.
***Dude, that’s some really good weed you’ve been smoking.
OK, you win. You are the worst.
***Congratulations. It appears to be a badge of honor that you’ve won.
My question is why are the accusatory posts against conservatives allowed to stand? If those of us so accused hit “abuse” are WE in danger of a time out?
***hmmm... crickets ... I find that disturbing. If Jimrob doesn’t like the flamewars that erupt from his posts regarding Romney The Amazing Libtard, he should just put both sides on notice that certain accusations (like the one you’ve pointed out) will earn you a time out.
I’m confused about the benefits of continuing Obama’s tyranny. Do you know something I don’t know?
Good question. I don’t think you’ll receive a logical answer.
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