Today's Supreme Court ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obama Care, is a huge disappointment for anyone who cares for the Constitution and the rule of law. This law was shoved through Congress against the will of a strong majority of the people in this country. It gives unprecedented power to the central government to control the lives of individual citizens. This has been done over the objections of several States. It also gives the central government control over approximately one-seventh of the economy...in effect socializing a whole segment of the private industry.
One of the most troublesome aspects of this law, the so-called "individual mandate," which forces individual citizens to purchase health insurance, whether they want to or not, under the penalty of being fined, was held to be constitutional under Congress' taxing power. Chief Justice Roberts found, in writing the majority opinion, that "In this case, however, it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congress's power to tax." This flies directly in the face the wording of the act and of what was continually claimed by Obama and his minions. He claimed that the individual mandate was "absolutely not" a tax.
Rather than interpreting the law, as is the mandate of the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts and the other assenting members have legislated from the bench. The mandate language in the law did not call for a tax, but rather a penalty. Roberts and the others changed the law by judicial fiat. In writing for the dissenting members, Justice Kennedy explains that, "In a few cases, this Court has held that a 'tax' imposed upon private conduct was so onerous as to be in effect a penalty. But we have never held—never—that a penalty imposed for violation of the law was so trivial as to be in effect a tax. We have never held that any exaction imposed for violation of the law is an exercise of Congress’ taxing power—even when the statute calls it a tax, much less when (as here) the statute repeatedly calls it a penalty. When an act adopt[s] the criteria of 'wrongdoing' and then imposes a monetary penalty as the “principal consequence on those who transgress its standard,” it creates a regulatory penalty, not a tax." But that's what the majority clearly did in this case...they interpreted a penalty as a tax.
Justice Kennedy, also explained:
"As for the constitutional power to tax and spend for the general welfare: The Court has long since expanded that beyond (what Madison thought it meant) taxing and spending for those aspects of the general welfare that were within the Federal Government’s enumerated powers, see United States v. Butler, 297 U. S. 1, 65–66 (1936). Thus, we now have sizable federal Departments devoted to subjects not mentioned among Congress’ enumerated powers, and only marginally related to commerce: the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The principal practical obstacle that prevents Congress from using the tax-and-spend power to assume all the general-welfare responsibilities traditionally exercised by the States is the sheer impossibility of managing a Federal Government large enough to administer such a system."
"The Act before us here exceeds federal power both in mandating the purchase of health insurance and in denying nonconsenting States all Medicaid funding. These parts of the Act are central to its design and operation, and all the Act’s other provisions would not have beenenacted without them. In our view it must follow that the entire statute is inoperative."The truly frightening part of this decision is that it sets precedent that will likely allow the central government to control any activity or sector of the economy they wish through their seemingly unlimited power to tax. Rep. Jeff Landry, R-La. had it right when he spoke on the steps of the Supreme Court after the ruling, “They basically have said Congress has no limit to its taxing power. This is the largest tax increase on the poor and the middle class in the history of this country . . . it was sold to the American people as a mandate and not a tax.”
The short-term solution is to vote Obama and all of his central planning, socialist cronies out of office and push the new president and Congress for a total repeal of this bad law. But this is not enough. The problem is systemic...the government given to us by the founders has rotted to the core. The central government can not be trusted to act on the principles of the founding and the original intent of our bedrock legal document, the Constitution. Neither can Supreme Court be counted on to take up the cause. As I wrote in a previous post:
Where are the checks and balances that safe guard our liberty? The Supreme Court? This is only a small group of politically appointed lawyers, with tenure for life, who have a history of rubber stamping government expansion. No, the only real hope is to return to America's founding principles, and it is The People who must demand the changes necessary.Notice that throughout this post, I have referred to the "central government" rather than the Federal government. I do this with a purpose. The founding fathers provided us with a federal republic form of government. It was a republic in that ultimate power originated from "the People." It was federal in that there was a small body that was to represent the interests of the federation of the sovereign United States of America. This central government was to be very limited in scope and power and, derived it's power from the States and the People. The chief check on the power of the Federal government was to be the sovereign States. With this ruling, and many before it, we no longer have a federal form of government in practice, we have a national one with the States now being subservient to the central body. This is why I will no longer refer to this body as federal. There are no sovereign States, and soon, if we don't make a change, there will be no republic.
Because the central government has become so corrupted, we cannot hope to restore it from within. We must return to the principles of federalism. The States must retake their rightful role as the check against usurpation and aggression by the central government. To do this, we must repeal the Seventeenth Amendment (see these post for more information on this topic: Repeal the 17th Amendment ; Like the 10th Amendment? Repeal the 17th!). The states must then nullify unconstitutional laws and rollback the central government to it's rightful scope. Without these steps, the republic is truly dead.
See the following posts for background on Federalism:
