Crossposted from The Liberty Papers, where I am a contributor:
Reading these point/counterpoint posts on the question of how the supreme court would decide on Obamacares constitutionality, was quite disturbing to me in several ways.
On the one hand I was heartened, because clearly both Brad and Doug are sane and rational folks with a reasonably solid background in both law and politics, and a foundational understanding of the constitution…
Of course, that only highlights how many people in this country are not.
Any reading of the constitution… of the very intent of the founding of this nation… makes it clear that our federal government is meant to be one of of limited and enumerated powers. If the government can mandate this, they can mandate anything. This is the fundamental argument about the necessity for a limiting principle to any government act.
And anyone who doesn’t want unlimited, unconstrained government can see that. Sadly, it seems that the idea of unlimited, unconstrained government is quite popular in some quarters… even with some supreme court justices.
The basic liberal/progressive/leftist argument for socialized medicine is “we should do this even if it IS illegal and unconstitutional, because it’s the right thing to do so the supreme court should uphold it”.
I.E. “It’s good because we want it, and therefore it should be legal because it is good; and we need to get rid of this whole “limited government” thing, because it gets in the way of us doing what is right and good.”
What I also find heartening is that both Brad and Doug both seem to have a good sense of all of this…
But that is also disturbing…
Because both of them seem to share the same actual opinion:
Both believe that Obamacare is ACTUALLY unconstitutional, and should be struck down…
…It’s just that Brad is cynical enough about the supreme court and the political aspects of the decision that he thinks enough justices will be able to argue themselves into ignoring the constitution and doing what they want to do, rather than what is right.
… and Doug believes that there’s a good possibility of that as well; he just has a bit more hope that they won’t.
… and if you look around the commentariat, that’s pretty much the split of positions that every other knowledgable observer has as well.
And if that isn’t disturbing to you, then you really have no idea what is going on, do you?
