The real problem raised by Obamacare is not the unprecedented individual mandate, but rather the expansive scope that the Supreme Court has already given to the federal government’s spending power — which is both the root of the Medicaid issue and perhaps the gravest threat to the federal structure of the Constitution. In U.S. v. Butler (1936), the Supreme Court warned that conditional federal grants could become an “instrument for the total subversion of the governmental powers reserved to the individual states.” So it has proved. But in U.S. v. Printz (1997), the Supreme Court ruled that what offends the “dual sovereignty” of the states is an offense to the federal structure of the Constitution, and must be struck down.
By elision, the Eleventh Circuit deftly avoided Judge Vinson’s invitation to extend the logic of Printz to the domain of conditional federal grants. Perhaps it had little choice, given that Dole is both unworkable and (for the moment) a controlling precedent. Unfortunately, we do not have the same “circuit split” on the Medicaid issue that now guarantees the individual mandate’s rapid ascent to the Supreme Court. But, with any luck, the Supremes will grant certiorari on the Medicaid issue, and at long last squarely face how poisonous federal conditional grants are to the whole philosophy of government that shaped our Constitution.
I think that it’s equally impossible to conceive that Obama didn’t know about Gunwalker. Of course, that’s partly because I agree with some of the commenters — this was never an operation that “went south” (well, it did literally, but not figuratively). It did exactly what it was intended to do all along. What’s amazing is that they thought they could get away with it. But actually, given how supine the gun-hating Obama-loving media has been on the story, they may well have gotten away with it had the Republicans not taken back the House.
I agree that we have to do more than just repeal SOX and Dodd-Frank — we need real banking and finance reform. I’m not sure just what it would look like, but it wouldn’t look like either of those bills.
Starting October 1st, any public official who passes or enforces gun regulations below the state level faces a $5,000 personal fine and could even be removed from office by the governor for enacting or enforcing local gun laws.
While Florida has had a law on its books since 1987 that makes it illegal to pass gun regulations beyond state statutes, there was no enforcement mechanism in place. As a result, towns and cities have created ordinances at will. In the process, many of them have criminalized otherwise completely law-abiding citizens who unintentionally ran afoul of arbitrary, localized gun rules.
But thanks to the law recently signed by Governor Rick Scott, that’s all about to change in the Sunshine State.
We didn’t put a man on the moon because some company thought they might be able to make a profit doing it. It takes vision to involve the common good of the American people without regard for profit. If you’re charting a course for this country and your big idea is “NO WE CAN’T”, then I don’t want you leading this country.
No, Rachel, we put a man on the moon because we wanted to show that a democratic socialist space program was superior to a totalitarian socialist space program. If we’d done it for profit, it would have taken a lot longer, but we’d still be doing it.
Science fiction writers used to focus on the horrors of nuclear war and frightened the willies out of readers for many decades. Public worry much more intense than anything the greens can gin up never got the nuclear disarmament movement over the hump — not because nuclear war isn’t bad, or because people weren’t scared, but because the nuclear disarmament movement’s policy ideas emanated from the same cloud-cuckoo-land that the green fantasies do.
Panic doesn’t turn an unworkable policy agenda into something that people can actually do. It can waste a lot of energy and time and cause otherwise capable people to sink months or years of their lives into leprechaun chases, and it can cause pandering politicians to gesture in the direction of your agenda without ever actually doing anything significant — but that is all. And it is not much.
It is, after all, fiction. Sort of like Al Gore’s book, but more entertaining.
I wish that we had a court that was willing to overturn that disastrous decision. The health-care mandate would present an excellent opportunity to do so. As Glenn notes, it wouldn’t have been the first time that the court has followed a bad path for decades.
I haven’t formed much of an opinion of Perry yet, other than that he can’t possibly be worse than Barack Obama. Am I put off by his religiosity? Sure, but that’s something that I’ve gotten used to, and I accept that I’m not going to get a serious presidential candidate in my lifetime who doesn’t at least pretend to be religious (though Barack Obama really pushed the envelope, and only survived the Reverend Wright affair because the press did everything it could to cover for him). Fellow agnostic Roger Simon agrees with me.
Perry is an exceedingly successful Texas politician. He comes from a place that is self-regarding in the extreme (I speak as a native of Oklahoma) and inward-looking. He has never operated outside its borders, and he may be unaware of its parochial character. If he is, he needs to wake up right away – and Mitt Romney is perfectly situated to give him that wake-up call.
Here is what Perry needs to do. He needs to anticipate the assault.
For example, if Obama’s people play anti-Texas prejudice against him, he should mock their advertisements. Indeed, he might do well to hit them hard the day they play this card – by preparing humorous advertisements ahead of time comparing Texas . . . with Chicago. They could touch on corruption, gangsters, population explosion and population implosion, political practices. And it could all be done with a light touch.
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent ‘poverty’ and ‘exclusion’.
Unfortunately, we have the same problem in this country. Fortunately, we’re not quite as far gone, at least in many states.