Reflections From a Murky Pond

One thing that Obama has going with him in the war over the constitutionality of his “signature achievement,” Obamacare is his Mini-Me in the ranks of the SCOTUS justices, Elena Kagan.

What Does That Spell? Tyranny! Yay!

Kagan is a shameless supporter of ObamaCare and nobody with an iota of rational thought thinks that Obama’s pet cheerleader and former attack dog – i.e, Solicitor General – will be impartial in the upcoming court case.

America’s domestic enemies, the Liberals and Progressives, will claim that Kagan’s impartiality will be offset by that of Justice Clarence Thomas and, in this particular instance, their ranting are not wholly without merit, though they – the one’s who keeping screeching about “The Patrimony” – are drawing a false equivalency between Kagan’s actual prior support of Obamacare and Justice Thomas’ wife’s employment.

One will notice though, if one bothers to look, that our domestic enemies never deny that Kagan is “in the tank” and a currently living defilement of the office she’s been given.

Tags: America | Commerce Clause | Constitutional Law | Crime | Healthcare | Insurance | Kagan | Law | Liberals | Nanny State | Obama | Politics | Socialism | The Constitution | Tyranny | US Supreme Court

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

It is the nature of governments to make laws in order to criminalize the citizenry’s actions or, possibly coming soon, inactions. This is how the government maintains and expands its power.

New Crime – Failure To Purchase Health Insurance

Very shortly the US Supreme Court will begin deciding whether or not the Obama Regime will be allowed to make not purchasing a product or service, government-approved health insurance in this case, a federal crime punishable by hefty fines and, if those fines are not paid, by wage garnishment, seizure of assets, and/or incarceration under the existing federal tax evasion laws.

ObamaCare also includes a provision for adding 16,000 additional federal agents to enforce this new criminalization of personal choice and individual liberty, so the Obama Regime and the Liberals in Congress are obviously placing a high value upon enforcing this tyranny.

Hopefully, the SCOTUS will strike down this law as unconstitutional. Their doing so will alleviate the existential need for Americans to exercise the Gods-given 2nd Amendment rights to strike down the tyrants and their enforcers who, by providing material aid and comfort to the enemy, willfully violated their oaths of allegiance to America and made themselves valid targets in war.

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Keep your eyes open. Travel light but load heavy, and always put another round in the enemy after they’re down.

Tags: America | Commerce Clause | Constitutional Law | Crime | Healthcare | Insurance | Law | Liberals | Nanny State | Obama | Politics | Socialism | The Constitution | Tyranny | US Supreme Court

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at 6:27 am and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

As has become almost commonplace and as was foreshadowed by his stated reasons for his refusal to dismiss all portions of Florida v. US Dept. of Health and Human Services, Senior United States District Judge, Roger Vinson ruled that the Individual Mandate that ObamaCare is predicated upon to be unconstitutional.

This causes the entire law to be made void since it lacks a severability clause.

Simply put, the Liberals who attempted to rule Congress and our nation did not add a Severability Clause to ObamaCare and, therefor the Individual Mandate cannot legally be stripped from the Act.  An example of such a clause is shown below:

If any provision or provisions of this Agreement shall be held to be invalid, illegal, unenforceable or in conflict with the law of any jurisdiction, the validity, legality and enforceability of the remaining provisions shall not in any way be affected or impaired thereby.

During at least some of the many iterations of the Bill there was a severability clause included in it. It did not, however, survive to the final draft which was eventually signed into law. Nor could it or should it have, if basic common sense were to prevail, been included in the law.

The Individual Mandate was first and primary among a plethora of rules and codicils with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 that were inextricably bound to the whole of the Act and absolutely vital to its function and were “novel,” “unprecedented,” and legally and constitutionally questionable. Without it the entire Act will implode upon itself because its entire funding and actuarial model would be gutted.

So ObamaCare is now void where prohibited, which is currently on in Florida. That will change when the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals hears the case and/or when it goes before the US Supreme Court.

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States represented in Florida v. US Dept. of Health and Human Services lawsuit were:

Additionally, Oklahoma and Virginia have also filed independent lawsuits against Obamacare. That brings the number of states that have brought suit against the Obama Regime over all or parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Tags: America | Commerce Clause | Courts | Crime | Federal Courts | Healthcare | Insurance | Law | Obama | Politics | The Constitution | Vinson

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 11:50 am and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

It is truly amazing – horrifying really to any true American – the lengths to which Liberals and Obama cultists will go to justify ObamaCare.

Their arguments are not only false, in the sense that they’re not actual arguments, but they’re unhealthy and dangerous to America because they fly in the face of the Constitutional restraints placed upon the federal government.

Peter Coy’s commentary on US District Court Judge Henry Hudson’s decision in Virginia v. US Dept. of Health and Human Services is par for the course when it comes to these quasi- and non-arguments.

To win the legal battle—as well as the battle for public opinion—the Obama Administration must address directly the qualms about overreaching that Hudson expressed in his opinion. The way to do that is to make a persuasive case that mandatory coverage is not the first step on a slippery slope to totalitarianism.

The best case against the slippery slope argument isn’t even a legal one. It’s in an amicus curiae brief filed in November in a broader Florida case by 41 top economists, including three Nobel laureates, Kenneth Arrow of Stanford, Eric Maskin of Princeton, and George Akerlof of Berkeley. They argue that health care has unique characteristics that justify the congressional mandate—and since other markets such as food and housing don’t have those characteristics, Congress will never have any justification to intervene in them to the same degree.

The economists’ argument bears attention. Arrow, 90 years old, has been probing the peculiarities of the health sector since 1963, when he wrote a much-cited paper, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care,” that’s mentioned in the brief. Arrow and the other economists say—in agreement with the Obama Administration—that a health insurance system that must accept all comers but can’t require everyone to join will quickly enter a death spiral. Healthy people won’t opt in until they need coverage, so many or most of the insured will be sick and costly. As a result, insurers will have to raise rates, pushing the last few healthy customers out, forcing rates on the rest to go even higher, and so on until it leads to collapse. Amitabh Chandra, an economist at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who joined the amicus brief, writes in an e-mail: “We don’t let people buy car insurance after they’ve wrecked their cars, or after we find their house is on fire. For the same reason, the individual mandate is absolutely key.”

— Peter Coy
Commentary: The Health-Care Act on Trial

Firstly, this is a false argument. Judge Hudson did not state his ruling as being a bulwark against some “the first step on a slippery slope to totalitarianism.” His ruling was based on the Individual Mandate being, in and of itself, an unconstitutional expansion of government interference.

Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market. In doing so, enactment of the [individual mandate] exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I [of the Constitution.]

–U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson
Virginia v. US Dept. of Health and Human Services

Secondly, argumentum ad consequentiam has always been a piss-poor response to receiving an unfavorable ruling and, in this case it’s a dangerous argument to be used or entertained. There is never a valid justification for allowing the federal government to exceed its constitutional granted powers over the American people and that attempt at justification is all that these “economists'” amicus curiae is.

“Reviewing court must strike down unconstitutional law even though that law is “designed to promote the highest good. The good sought in unconstitutional legislation is an insidious feature, because it leads citizens and legislators of good purpose to promote it, without thought of the serious breach it will make in the ark of our covenant, or the harm which will come from breaking down recognized standards.”

– US SCOTUS Opinion,
Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co., (259 U.S. 20), May 15, 1922

It doesn’t matter a whit whether or not ObamaCare is worthwhile or not; it matters even less whether or not ObamaCare will fail without the Individual Mandate. What matters is whether or not the Individual Mandate is unconstitutional – and the US Federal Courts have repeatedly, though not unanimously, decreed that it is not constitutional.

While it’s dangerous close to the “slippery slope” argument, I’ll put forth that ignoring our Constitution and the limits it places upon the federal government is a far more dangerous and unhealthy enterprise than anything that currently perceived as wrong with our overly intertwined health insurance and healthcare industries. I say this because legal precedents linger for a very long time and are often used to justify future rulings largely unrelated to the original cases.

Tags: America | Commerce Clause | Courts | Ethics & Morality | Federal Courts | Freedom | Healthcare | Hudson | Insurance | Obama | Peter Coy | Politics | The Constitution | Tyranny

This entry was posted on Friday, January 7th, 2011 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Ethics & Morality, Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.