Last week’s historic 3 day Supreme Court debate on Obamacare made one thing abundantly clear. The Obama administration is unable to answer basic constitutional questions and does not want nor consider the fact that there are limits on what the Government is allowed to do. Whether a liberal or conservative justice asked the basic question: If Congress can do this, what can't it do? Obama’s lawyers had no reasonable answer. Fundamentally, Obama and his administration, do not grasp liberty and freedom and the basis for the American experiment in self-rule.
Obama’s sole case was that because everybody might unexpectedly need healthcare the government has the right to force everybody to purchase insurance. When asked to compare that with a certainty, Justice Samuel Alito asked, "Everybody is going to be buried or cremated at some point. What's the difference?" The Obama lawyer stammered and tried to equivocate but offered no coherent retort.
Obama and the liberal left want the government to control the people, but our pesky constitution keep making it difficult. Little questions like since health care is regulated by the states, since you cannot purchase health insurance across state lines, and since patients and doctors services are exchanged within a state, how forcing all people to purchase health insurance is regulating interstate commerce? Is a question bounced around but not answered by Obama’s lawyers.
SOLICITOR GENERAL VERRILLI: “I agree, except, Mr. Chief Justice, that what the Court has said as I read the Court’s cases is that the way in which you ensure that the Federal Government stays in its sphere and the sphere reserved for the States is protected is by policing the boundary: Is the national government regulating economic activity with a substantial effect on interstate commerce?”
JUSTICE KENNEDY: “But the reason, the reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act. In the law of torts our tradition, our law, has been that you don’t have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger. The blind man is walking in front of a car and you do not have a duty to stop him absent some relation between you. And there is some severe moral criticisms of that rule, but that’s generally the rule.
And here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.”
Obama said he wanted to fundamentally change America. That is exactly what he is trying to do, to grant government the authority and right to force the people to purchase services and take actions that the government deems prudent, regardless of the individual’s liberty.
Justice Kennedy said it very well, the fact is there is no government enforced “obligation to one another.” The fact is that there is not a legally “shared responsibility” for our fellow citizens. In a free society everybody is responsible for themselves. We do have a moral obligation to voluntarily take care of each other, this is charity. Charity is voluntary, with our own time and money give of our own volition. Liberals as repeated studies have demonstrated, give embarrassingly little to charity, but are quite fond of forcing others to provide charity.
Constitutionally there are limits to the federal government. That doesn’t sit well with liberal utopian fantasy. They have no answer when asked, “If the government can do that, what can it do?” They accept no limits to the government. The fundamental problem is far deeper. The culture of America is no longer based on any form of democratic control. The ruling elite simply choose to ignore the plain will of the people.
The traditions and intellectual rigor that created our constitution, a period of time know as the “Enlightenment,” resulted in such clear and succinct ideas as expressed in the Magna Carta, The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and our Bill of Rights. The idea that the people, not some ruling elite, can and should govern themselves lived for about a century. That idea is dead, there is not a liberal out there would be willing to let somebody make a life decision that government doesn’t approve and benefit or suffer the effects of that decision. Make a decision that earns wealth, and the government has a right to that wealth; make a decision that makes you poor, and the government will supply you with your needs. Self governing, self ownership, and individual responsibility are ideas that created the greatest nation the world ever saw, with the highest standard of living for more people than ever before. These concepts are foreign to Obama and his administration.
The writings of Locke, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and even Newton, all added to the conditions that resulted a society like the world had never known. The result was rather than the historic norm for all of history, which a few ruling elite live in relative luxury and control the masses living in abject poverty but the establishment of what is now know as the middle class. Over the past 100 years, this tradition of self rule has been diluted to a point that most people don’t even understand it. For a while new Americans from Europe, Russia, and even Asia, appeared to assimilate into the self-governing culture of the USA. The addition of millions of people who come from cultures that don’t even have a word in their languages to describe such basic principles as earning completely diluted the very principles upon which the USA was built.
Although it has taken a century, the melting pot has proven to be a myth not a fact. Rather than take the responsibilities and risks that accompany freedom and liberty, the multi-cultural experiment has resulted in old feudal ( or possibly tribal) thinking supplanting the foundational basis for self-rule. The very idea that because some people won’t (or can’t) make good life choices, that some ruling elite must take care of everybody cradle to grave is the antithesis of the foundational principles of the USA. Masses of immigrants have ignored the founding principles of our former Republic, and imposed the traditions, mores and attitudes of their cultures on the USA.
When the concept that people earn, not win, are not granted, but earn property, based upon free trade of their labor and capital, is not accepted as a viable concept, it is plain that the USA is going the way of the Roman Empire and is destined to be frayed. The historically brief period of time where liberty and freedom was allowed to prosper is over. Libertarianism, or classic liberalism, has been killed by multiculturalism; it was inevitable as the “live and let live” attitude associated with libertarianism, the very freedom and liberty our society was based, lead to tolerance of other cultures regardless of their compatibility with self-rule.
The reason Obama’s lawyers couldn’t answer basic constitutional questions, is culturally the very idea of self-ownership, self-rule, and the associated responsibility that accompany liberty are such foreign concepts that the Obama administration doesn’t even understand the question.
Obama and his administration believe that the ruling elite have the authority to dictate to individuals what they must purchase, and do not accept that people are free to pursue life as they see fit. This is the fundamental change Obama promised and is attempting to enact. The very idea that government is limited, especially from doing “good,” is culturally beyond his and his administration’s understanding. Obama’s “Bitter, Clinging” comments and his often repeated frustration with the constitution, speak clearly that he does not understand a culture of self-rule, self-ownership, and liberty, and does not believe that people should be free.
The very fact that the individual mandate in Obamacare is being considered constitutional by any of our Supreme Courte Justices, is ample evidence that the ideas, culture, and thinking that created our nation are gone; no longer are all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and no longer do we consider the fact that our government was created to secure these rights, instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, instead the government is some ruling elite with the power and authority to mandate what actions individuals must take, as it assumes the responsibility for every person in exchange for their liberty.
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