Posted on 09/01/2012 4:33:06 AM PDT by listenhillary
When a member of Congress introduces legislation, the Constitution requires that legislative proposal to secure the approval of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the president (unless Congress overrides a presidential veto) before it can become law. In all cases, either chamber of Congress may block it.
In 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) created the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB. When the unelected government officials on this board submit a legislative proposal to Congress, it automatically becomes law: PPACA requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to implement it. Blocking an IPAB "proposal" requires at a minimum that the House and the Senate and the president agree on a substitute. The Board's edicts therefore can become law without congressional action, congressional approval, meaningful congressional oversight, or being subject to a presidential veto. Citizens will have no power to challenge IPAB's edicts in court.
Worse, PPACA forbids Congress from repealing IPAB outside of a seven-month window in the year 2017, and even then requires a three-fifths majority in both chambers. A heretofore unreported feature of PPACA dictates that if Congress misses that repeal window, PPACA prohibits Congress from ever altering an IPAB "proposal." By restricting lawmaking powers of future Congresses, PPACA thus attempts to amend the Constitution by statute.
More by Michael F. Cannon
IPAB's unelected members will have effectively unfettered power to impose taxes and ration care for all Americans, whether the government pays their medical bills or not. In some circumstances, just one political party or even one individual would have full command of IPAB's lawmaking powers. IPAB truly is independent, but in the worst sense of the word. It wields power independent of Congress, independent of the president, independent of the judiciary, and independent of the will of the people.
The creation of IPAB is an admission that the federal government's efforts to plan America's health care sector have failed. It is proof of the axiom that government control of the economy threatens democracy.
IPAB may be the most anti-constitutional measure ever to pass Congress, and it is therefore tempting to dismiss IPAB as an absurdity that the body politic will soon reject. Until that occurs, IPAB will potentially empower just one unelected government official to impose any tax or regulation, to appropriate funds, and to wield other lawmaking powers.
You are right about this being a concentration of power in the hands of the Executive branch. Soviet Russia isn't the only place this happened. In Nazi Germany, one of Hitler's famous early acts was the passing of an "Enabling Law" which made anything he decreed legal and the Law of the land.
Moreover, one doesn't have to go abroad to find a situation where conclusions based on flimsy facts are used by the political authorities as an excuse for policies with broad and long-lasting effects. Here in the US, a single study on mortgage lending in Boston (later questioned) was used as the justification for forcing banks to make loans to unqualified minority buyers as a condition for renewal of their charters. The banks knew the loans were subpar, and eagerly bundled them up into mortgage backed securities for resale. This was part of the "lend to anyone to increase homeownership" snowball. It was inititiated by the the Community Reinvestment Act (passed during the Carter years and reinvigorated under Clinton), and supported by GWB's "ownership society" promotion of home ownership.
The regulation of the snowball was woefully clueless and inadequate. We are still cleaning up, and will be for another decade.
In fact, we may never clean up, because Obama's gang is urging the FHA to lend with 3.5% down, and starting a whole new cycle of under-capitalized home ownership.
Evil, as intended!
Neither had I.
Looks like it also takes another angle: coerced medical coverage with a plan that divulges all medical records to the government as a violation of medical privacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coons_v._Geithner
You nailed it.
And one of these complicit or incompetent Boehner-ites is on Romney’s ticket. Ryan, of all people, should know that just stating “repeal & replace” is insufficient.
Detailing out the political case that Obamacare is a series of abuses of power that personally affects us, and it’s not just an unaffordable cost, is not easy. They need a huge team of lawyers to unwind this monster, before the election (and after).
Most Americans still think it gets them free health insurance. So they can’t win on the budget-busting agrument.
Why>
Congress and the president can undo any law or act with a simple majority. The only bills passed that cannot be undone in such a way are Constitutional requirements. Or so that is how I understand it to be.
All the rest is bluster by the idiots who passed the initial law.
In place of “bills,” I meant “actions.”. Overriding a veto, for instance, still requires 2/3 of both Houses, etc.
We need another body of government that does nothing but repeal laws with a simple majority.
Maybe this body is made up of citizens who vote electronically from their computers at home. You have to pay federal taxes to be eligible.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Are we there yet?
Why is it that Sarah Palin is ridiculed
by Democrats,
by the media,
even by Republicans
for calling them “Death Panels.”
Why>
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Because, as I have said before, those who talk the way almost everyone used to talk and say things that used to be considered self evident and incontrovertible truth are now referred to by the left and even by many who call themselves conservative as kooks. On the other hand people like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Al Sharpton and Barack Obama who spout the kind of nonsense for which people used to be declared mentally incompetent are rewarded with high government office or lucrative television contracts. In other words our culture is downside up and bass ackwards from anything that makes sense to me. On top of all else judges, even supreme court judges, now render rulings that are often obviously absurd to anyone with the equivalent of a nineteen fifties public high school education. They would like for all of us who are old enough to remember when most of what went on seemed to make some kind of sense lose our confidence and think the problem is that we are just not smart enough to understand the subtleties of modern politics and jurisprudence. I for one don’t buy that load of horse apples.
“America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.” - Claire Wolfe
Some days I think we can fix what is wrong. Other days, I’m not so sure.
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