HCare - Up to the Voters Now

It's Now Up To Voters To Throw Out The ObamaCare Mess

Posted 06/28/2012 07:02 PM ET

Health Care: Ignoring the Constitution it swore to defend, the Supreme Court has affirmed ObamaCare, making the already important fall elections even more critical. A new president and Congress are needed to rid the country of this meddlesome law.
By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled that the individual mandate is not allowed under the Constitution's Commerce Clause. But it stunningly decided, right out of the ether, that Congress has the power to impose the mandate as a tax — even though Congress never defined it as a tax.
In essence, the Supreme Court's majority rewrote the law for the president and the Democrats who passed the bill. This wasn't lost on the dissenting justices. In their opinion, the court decided "to save a statute Congress did not write" and one the public does not expect.
The president even denied the mandate is a tax.
ObamaCare authors and supporters claimed that the Commerce Clause was the constitutional foundation for the mandate. The argument that it falls under Congress' power to tax was used only when the administration was forced to defend the law in court.
The argument is a thin one. The purpose of a tax is to raise revenues, not compel certain government-approved behavior. While ObamaCare is riddled with trillions in revenue-raising taxes, the cost of ignoring the individual mandate is not among them. Failure to comply with the mandate is met with punishment, a fine intended as a coercive act. That's not a tax.
Chief Justice John Roberts, the George W. Bush appointee who wrote the majority opinion, acknowledged that calling the mandate a tax isn't "the most natural interpretation of the mandate."
But, as if he were trying to help the White House's defense of the legal challenge, which had taken a desperate turn in the courts, he said that the interpretation needed to be only "fairly possible."

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Judicial activism? Yes, it was right there on shameless display in the biggest court decision since the Franklin Roosevelt era. As the dissenters said, a ruling that keeps ObamaCare in place is "strained," "invented" and "amounts ... to a vast judicial overreaching."
There is speculation that Roberts sided with the justices on the left because he didn't want his to be the court that struck down a president's signature legislation and upset what he sees as a collegial relationship between the branches of the government. If so, he is not a man equipped with the proper temperament to be a Supreme Court justice, much less chief justice.
The dissenting judges colorfully called the mandate-as-a-tax a "a creature never hitherto seen in the United States" because it is "a penalty for constitutional purposes that is also a tax for constitutional purposes." They further noted that the Supreme Court has "never held — never — that a penalty imposed for violation of the law was so trivial as to be in effect a tax."
The dissenters — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy — pointed out as well that the fine imposed for failure to comply was never intended to be a tax by its authors, as "the statute repeatedly calls it a penalty."
Calling it a tax not only tortures reasoned thought, but also means that candidate Barack Obama broke his promise that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone earning less that $250,000 a year.
But that's OK. He'll never be called on it by the media. He will be too busy soaking up the press' fawning adulation in the glow of his victory.
The distinction between the Commerce Clause and the power to tax might make a lawyer happy. But what the court has done is give Congress the power to do whatever it wants, to impose any mandate and abridge any freedom as long as it says the legislation falls under its power to tax. Let the implications of that sink in.
While it's easy to condemn the court for its abuse of constitutional standards, we have to remember that four justices said the "central provisions of the act — the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion — are invalid."
They noted, "It follows, as some of the parties urge, that all other provisions of the act must fall as well."
Those justices also had a problem with ObamaCare's "dramatic expansion of the Medicaid program," which they said "exceeds Congress' power to attach conditions to federal grants to the states."
Finding both the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion unconstitutional, they wrote that the entire law should be invalidated.
Had a single justice, say one appointed by President George W. Bush to defend constitutional liberty, grasped ObamaCare's obvious conflicts with the American system and had not chosen this case to try to make a novel legal argument, the outcome would have been flipped. But one man's poor judgment has helped an unnecessary burden on the country become more deeply entrenched.
With a majority of the Supreme Court refusing to protect American freedom from a predatory Congress, it is now up to the voters to restore lost liberty. They have to fire the president and turn Congress over to lawmakers who respect limited government and will pass policies that will in fact bring down medical costs and expand coverage. Health care must be left to the private sector, not commanded and controlled, and consequently choked, by a central planning committee.
Patients deserve full authority over their medical care. They don't need, nor do they deserve, congressional mandates, decrees from bureaucratic planners and costs driven higher by poor government policy. Affordability and wider coverage are possible, but they have to be promoted by policies that make sense, not a muddle.
If the court won't throw out this mess, then the voters will have to throw out its architects. We hope average Americans will be smarter in November than five highly educated justices were in June.