Posted on 03/23/2012 6:40:30 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Obamacare dominated the 2010 midterms, driving its Democratic authors to a historic electoral shellacking. But since then, the issue has slipped quietly underground.
Now it’s back, summoned to the national stage by the confluence of three disparate events: the release of new Congressional Budget Office cost estimates, the approach of Supreme Court hearings on the law’s constitutionality, and the issuance of a compulsory contraception mandate.
COST Obamacare was carefully constructed to manipulate the standard ten-year cost projections of the CBO. Because benefits would not fully kick in for four years, President Obama could trumpet ten-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 ten-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 a trillion dollars every year — until the end of time. That, for a new entitlement in a country already drowning in $16 trillion of debt.
CONSTITUTIONALITY Beginning March 26, the Supreme Court will hear challenges to the law. The American people, by an astonishing two-thirds majority, want the law and/or the individual mandate tossed out by the Court. In practice, however, questions this momentous are generally decided 5 to 4, i.e., they depend on whatever side of the bed Justice Anthony Kennedy gets out of that morning.
Ultimately, the question will hinge on whether the Commerce Clause has any limits. If the federal government can compel a private citizen, under threat of a federally imposed penalty, to engage in a private contract with a private entity (to buy health insurance), is there anything the federal government cannot compel the citizen to do?
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.
Figure becomes ground; ground becomes figure. The stakes could not be higher.
COERCIVENESS Serendipitously, the recently issued regulation on contraceptive coverage has allowed us to see exactly how this new power works. All institutions — excepting only churches, but not church-run charities, hospitals, etc. — will be required to offer health care that must include free contraception, sterilization, and drugs that cause abortion.
Consider the cascade of arbitrary bureaucratic decisions that resulted in this edict:
1) Contraception, sterilization, and abortion pills are classified as medical prevention. On whose authority? The secretary of health and human services, invoking the Institute of Medicine. But surely categorizing pregnancy as a disease equivalent is a value decision, disguised as scientific. If contraception is prevention, what are fertility clinics? Disease inducers? And if contraception is prevention because it lessens morbidity and saves money, by that logic, mass sterilization would be the greatest boon to public health since the pasteurization of milk.
2) This type of prevention is free — no co-pay. Why? Is contraception morally superior to or more socially vital than — and thus more of a “right” than — penicillin for a child with pneumonia?
3) “Religious” exemptions to this edict extend only to churches, places where the faithful worship God, and not to church-run hospitals and charities, places where the faithful do God’s work. Who promulgated this definition, so subversive of the whole notion of godliness, so stunningly ignorant of the very idea of religious vocation? The almighty HHS secretary.
Today, it’s the Catholic Church whose free-exercise powers are under assault from this cascade of diktats sanctioned by — indeed required by — Obamacare. Tomorrow it will be the turn of other institutions of civil society that dare stand between unfettered state and atomized citizen.
Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality, and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. Little wonder the president barely mentioned it in his latest State of the Union address. He wants to be reelected. He’d rather talk about other things.
But there’s no escaping it now. Oral arguments begin Monday at 10 a.m.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist.
Here’s my guess as to what will happen -— The final decision will boil down to ONE MAN — Anthony Kennedy.
His decision will depend on which side of the bed he wakes up on in the morning.
$10 says 0bummer&Co ignore the SCOTUS. They’ll implement it somehow, somewhere, someplace in a *workaround*.
Here are a few suggestions to all Freepers who will carry posters and signs in front of The House of THE NINE SUPREMES:
Obama”care” was robo-signed by Congress, and is therefore illegal.
Obama”care” was 2700 pages long, but is still being written, but not by Congress: witness the forced contraception coverage recently.
Obama”care” has caused “The Catholic Spring.”
Obama”care” reduces competition, and therefore is illegal by the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Law.
Obama”care” is designed to be a US Federal Government monopoly, with no competition.
Obama”care” also is illegal according to the US Constitution, because it violates our freedom of choice.
Will THE NINE SUPREMES notice any of these three violations? I seriously doubt it.
Impeached Bill Clinton proved that the US President is above US Federal Law, so anything that the President wants he gets, regardless of the Federal Laws that he has violated.
I would add:
Obama care = TERM LIMITS for supreme court justices.
We must send a message who is in charge of this country. SCOTUS is supreme only to other courts, NOT the American people. Get it right or YOUR FIRED.
lol
My take is that the cowards who comprise the SCOTUS have already reached a decision. I predict a 4-4 ruling, with Kagan abstaining, which essentially lets the law stand., without a decision.
In the grand scheme of things, I could care less what the SCOTUS says or does. I REFUSE TO KNEEL BEFORE THE ALMIGHTY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.
We have long passed the era when we were a nation of laws and we followed the rule of law. How can we follow the rule of laws when we allow the murder of innocents? How can we follow the rule of laws when every perversion is called normal? How can we follow the rule of law when our Constitution, yes, even our very freedom, is being attacked?
It is time - no, it is way past time, to take back our nation. Or to go silent into the night. Patrick Henry said: “I know not what course others may take; but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death.” Are we 1% as brave?
Maybe the House should propose some mandates that liberals won’t like.
One could argue that, since psychiatric care is also mandated by Obamacare, that reading the Bible would have great value to policy holders in times of great mental stress, so the purchase of Bibles should be covered.
Safety is a concern also related to “health” so perhaps a list of approved guns could be included among the things our people need “access” to.
Liberals completely wagged out over the Virginia mandate to perform an ultrasound for an abortion, let’s give them some more mandates they won’t like.
When will the decision come out? Fall?
The major problem with THE NINE SUPREMES is that they are chosen for political reasons by the POTUS, and then they vote as an un-accountable democracy, for a Nation that is NOT a Democracy, but a REPUBLIC.
As a result, THE NINE SUPREMES commonly vote 5 to 4 on most issues. Constitutionality is seldom a consideration, and their up-coming ruling on Obama”care” will prove my point.
Now is the time to stand and deliver to address our grievances to the dictates of the Left.
Oppose the dictates of Dictator Baby-Doc Barack!
Our ONLY chance to ABOLISH Obama”care” rests with THE NINE SUPREMES, because Romney will be defeated by Obama.
IMHO, if Romney is anointed as the RNC Nominee, THE main issue in the National Election, Obama”care,” will be taken off the campaign table. Hence, Romney will not only lose, but suffer another crushing, and sadly typical, RINO defeat.
To those who want poster ideas, here are a few ideas for demonstration posters:
Obama”care” was robo-signed by Congress, and is therefore illegal.
Obama”care” was 2700 pages long, but is still being written, but not by Congress: witness the forced contraception coverage recently.
Obama”care” has caused “The Catholic Spring.”
Obama”care” reduces competition, and therefore is illegal by the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Law.
Obama”care” is designed to be a US Federal Government monopoly, with no competition.
Obama”care” also is illegal according to the US Constitution, because it violates our freedom of choice.
Will THE NINE SUPREMES notice any of these three violations? I seriously doubt it.
Impeached Bill Clinton proved that the US President is above US Federal Law, so anything that the President wants he gets, regardless of the Federal Laws that he has violated.
http://standupforreligiousfreedom.com/locations/
The Nationwide Rally for Religious Freedom is being held Friday, March 23 at noon, local time, outside federal buildings, Congressional offices and historic sites across the country. The theme for the Rally is “Stand Up for Religious Freedom—Stop the HHS Mandate!”
Madison submitted it to the first Congress as: “ The exceptions here or elsewhere in the constitution, made in favor of particular rights, shall not be so construed as to diminish the just importance of other rights retained by the people, or as to enlarge the powers delegated by the constitution; but either as actual limitations of such powers, or as inserted merely for greater caution.”
It emerged as the concise and beautiful Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
But of course, at least four of the nine philosopher-kings have for practical purposes, excised the notion of God given rights from the Constitution.
Over the past 60 years, has the Court EVER ruled that there is a limit to the power of the Imperial Federal Government when it invokes the interstate commerce clause?
I think with the Obamacare advocate Kagan sitting there (fat, dumb, and ugly)along with that plump, warm Hispanic female with her years of life experience, the SCOTUS will allow Barry and his fellow communists to really begin dismantling the US’s medical prowess,destroy our military, kiss the behinds of every jihadist around, and decrease our freedom and liberty all for the sake of “fairness”.
I am absolutely disgusted with the GOP: look at the candidates! They spend more time attacking each other than attacking Obama. Dumb assess!
When will the GOP ever challenge the commies? Will it take a 3rd revolution to free America?
SCOTUS is in lockstep with him. Thomas already admitted they are "evading" the eligibility issue and Ginsberg stated publically the Constitution is old and outdated. And those weren't even the ones appointed by The Won. They might find fault in a couple minor points but overall will crown him DICtator of All the Lands.
“If contraception is prevention, what are fertility clinics? Disease inducers? And if contraception is prevention because it lessens morbidity and saves money, by that logic, mass sterilization would be the greatest boon to public health since the pasteurization of milk. “
(Um, may be prescient speech, Charles. It’s not an accident that the powers-that-be can easily shift public sterilization into the category of health care prevention.)
Needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
Once it is determined that the so called "ObamaCare" is constitutional it will give the Prez a great talking point during the Debates. The argument that it is unconstitutional will no longer be valid. Opponents will then need to attack it from a financial standpoint which the public, for the most part, will turn a deaf ear to.
Well Charles, if you’re that damned concerned about the Supremes and ObamaCare then why have you spent the last year pimping the one Republican candidate who has no moral ground to stand on and lobby for the legislative repeal of the beast?
Screw you Charles.
I have stated that I am NOT participating in OweBamaSCare. The line has been drawn. It is time to stand up to those who plan to RULE us!
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