Posted on 03/24/2010 11:53:16 AM PDT by mojito
....Were I to wager on the question (which may turn out to be an exercise in reading the mind of Anthony Kennedy), I would expect the Court to uphold the individual mandate. But the day that it does will be a tragic one for the Republic.
The reason will not be the survival of ObamaCare. It is, I think, a poorly conceived proposal that will do more harm than good. As written, it seems likely to fail and, if not abandoned, may well lead to a single payer system. But we have survived worse.
It will be tragic because the notion of a Congress limited by the scope of its enumerated powers will have finally suffered the coup de grace. The Bill of Rights (once famously - and now ironically - thought to be unnecessary given the structural limits on the power of the national government) will become the only limitation on the power of Congress. If Congress can require you to buy health insurance because of the ways in which your uncovered existence effects interstate commerce or because it can tax you in an effort to force you to do anything old thing it wants you to, it is hard to see what - save some other constitutional restriction - it cannot require you to do - or prohibit you from doing.
[...]
The extent to which you are comfortable with this may turn on the extent to which you are comfortable with the centralization of authority and, in a world in which Congressional enactments are increasingly delegations of authority to bureaucrats, your confidence in the capacity of experts to "get it right."
I am not very comfortable. I am not very confident.
(Excerpt) Read more at pointoflaw.com ...
No more talk,,It is time for action.
It is time to follow our the lead of the Founders
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness”….Thomas Jefferson
Have we? England didn't despise the Colonies as much as this admin does America.
Others have come to the same conlcusion...
When the government merely asserted jurisdiction over commerce in material things, it still hadn’t asserted itself over your very existence – but because the care of your body is the care of your very self, and because everyone at some time needs healthcare services, the government has now made that leap to absolute rule.
The Constitution only proscribes a headcount (and that is all I gave them in 2000). Since the original wording was that slaves were to be counted as only 3/5's of a free person, and since we are no longer free persons, I think I should respond with a headcount of '3' for my 5-person family.
The sky’s the limit.
The seeds of rebellion and revolution have also been planted. This is not the end, merely the beginning of the war for the restoration of our Rights!
He has made some major mistakes, not only in passing a wildly unpopular bill, but one with other futile flaws. We can exploit theses flaws and kill not only this bill but far more tyranny. We need not win in the court to do this, as the real power is not in the Federal Government, but in we the people and in our States.
we must learn to effectively harness that power and the power of competition to distort the big government by using its inherit weakness(efficiency, and happiness of the people) against it. We have an opportunity like never before to do this!
Obama in moving too fast and against the will of the American people and to their horror has provided us with that opportunity, we must simply press our advantage!
Obama’s inexperienced and greed for power will be his undoing, and the undoing of the progressive agenda!
Let us take this opportunity!
His malevolence is tempered by his incompetence..
When the newly elected congressmen are seated in 2011, they should follow the European example of voting "confidence/no confidence" in the President.
Listen to the whole interview.
Whose right is health care? Do you think it's yours?Congressman Anthony Weiner has said that health care is not a commodity. If it isn't a commodity then do doctors and nurses have rights? Assigning health care the status of a right makes health care workers slaves to that right who must serve it. On what ground could a health care worker refuse to provide their products and services since that would violate the patient's "basic human right to health care."
That is a direct loss of individual rights for health care providers. The collective right of the people to receive health care would supersede the provider's individual right to set fees and hours or to change their occupational status or even decide how to apply their skills and knowledge if taken to its logical extreme. A collective right, by practical definition, is a state right because it is a right that is created and given by the government to those it chooses to give it to. It is not a natural right possessed by each person protected by the Constitution from the government. It is also a collective/state right by virtue of the fact that it would supersede individual rights when the two come into conflict. How else would the government view a right that it created and administers vs. one it has no control over?
Of course it isn't stated in any bill that a patient's right to care supersedes a provider's right to set fees and hours etc, but it doesn't need to. Rights, as always, are adjudicated in the courts. The Health Care Reform bills simply establish the foundation for the courts to rule in favor of the collective right.
Weiner’s view is collectivist, fascist and totalitarian. Collectivist because it has to be described as being a right of the many instead of the one and superior due to that fact. Fascist because ultimately the sole authority for its creation and oversight is from one entity the Federal government. Totalitarian because the Federal government is the enforcer of this collective right as well. State and local jurisdictions will have little say about it.
Congressman Weiner's view is the underlying philosophy of all of the Health Care Reform legislation in the House and Senate. Consider this section in the Senate version of the bill; the setting up of community watch dogs that will monitor citizens for various health parameters. Read pages 382 - 393.
TITLE I—QUALITY, AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL AMERICANS pps 382 - 393
So, even citizens themselves will be subject to Federal regulations on their behavior in order to fulfill the "human right" of universal health care. It isn't the individual's liberty that is being protected by that it is the government's control over its own health care system that is being guarded. How much clearer can it be that these bills abrogate the concept of individual rights? Someone will be checking your lifestyle, according to gov regulations, to be certain you serve the best interests of the "basic human right to health care" ie. "the Public Option."
HCR is not just about rationing care and wealth redistribution. It's about the end of individual rights as the corrosive effects of the new collectivist "basic human right to health care" spreads throughout the legal and political systems like a virus.
I think that the main purpose of Health Care Reform (HCR) is as a direct assault on individual liberties.
Health Care is a Liberty Issue
Conservative Underground - 18 August 2009 - Tim DunkinAnother Stupid Argument: Heath Care is a Right
Obama's Authoritarian, Unconstitutional Health Care Proposal
To Americans Who Believe Healthcare is a Right
OBAMA: HEALTH CARE DESTROYING FREE SPEECH
Mandated health insurance threatens freedom, privacy
Second Bill of Rights aka FDR's economic bill of rights
(An early attempt to embed collective rights into American politics and society.)
On a different board I challenge all the liberals to explain why Obama wasted money on the cash for clunkers deal when all he had to do was have congress pass a law requiring everyone to buy a new car...the sound of crickets was deafening.
Make no mistake, if this doesn't get overturned by the SCOTUS congress has turned Americans into slaves who have no property rights.
“Make no mistake, if this doesn’t get overturned by the SCOTUS congress has turned Americans into slaves who have no property rights.”
If the SCOTUS doesn’t overturn the mandate, then the fed.gov will have to imprison hundreds of thousands to millions of additional people - and, generally speaking, the very people who are the most productive (i.e. the best income producers and tax paying) among us. Where’s THAT going to leave us?
That, BTW, is only in the financial sense - what about the effect on the attitude of the public. Here’s how I think that most thinking people will react (initially, anyway):
http://www.hyscience.com/archives/2005/09/wounded_marine.php
After that, the anger will only grow, because with such a ruling would come asset seizures and people being dragged off to prison by armor-clad paramilitary commandos in the employ of the IRS. Yeah, that’s going to improve the mood of the country...NOT! I’d not be surprised to see a few of our federal legislators suddenly falling victim to a new and emerging disease, instantaneously fatal airborne lead poisoning.
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