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发帖数: 29846 | 1 April 25, 2012 by Warner Todd Huston
On April 20, Michael Mukasey appeared before the Republican Lawyers
Association’s National Policy Conference and C-SPAN cameras were there to
record his discussion of the conference theme: Restoring a Government of
Laws: The Obama Administration v. The Constitution.
Mukasey, the former Bush Administration Attorney General, headlined a half
hour discussion — which included a Q&A session — and offered one of the
more cogent explanations I’ve seen of why Obamacare is so wildly
unconstitutional.
The whole presentation is worth watching but one of his answers during the Q
&A segment was particularly important.
One of the attendees asked if Mukasey regale tell them with his hypothetical
argument in support of Obamacare. Mukasey joked that his supporting
argument would be “an extraordinarily short opinion,” but his more
detailed answer actually presented a concise argument to the opposite; why
Obamacare is simply unconstitutional. (At about 25 minutes into the segment)
It’s not law, it’s not limiting principle, it’s not… I guess it
would look not unlike Solicitor General Verrilli’s, “Gee, people are
really sick, we gotta do something, and these damn states just can’t take
care of these sick people so let’s ignore the Constitution and…” Usually
they’re not that candid.
There are no legal arguments — and if there were I sure wouldn’t be
telling you — there are no legal arguments in support of Obamacare and that
is why it’s not a coincidence that Congress for 230 years has never tried
this before. They’ve had millions of opportunities where they, all kinds of
crises, the height of the New Deal, all… you know, nobody required you to
buy war bonds during WWII and that was because it was literally unthinkable
that in a nation postulated on the principle that the people are sovereign
to the government, that the government can commandeer the people to do
something and they are merely required to salute and say yes sir…
particularly when it’s the federal government which by definition had its
powers limited and enumerated precisely because they couldn’t engage in
this sort of tyrannical police power.
And that really was the odd thing about this whole debate from the
Solicitor General’s perspective, he kept saying, “look, the way the act
did is a much more efficient way of getting money into the insurance
companies coffers than if we had followed this Commerce Clause thing and
conditioned access to healthcare providers and then made you buy insurance.
” And I was like, “Yeah. That’s exactly right.”
I can’t conceive of a system… more badly equipped to force citizen A
to give his property [i.e. his money in insurance costs as discussed earlier
in the program] to citizen B than the system the framers came up with. That
simply reflects the fact that the framers didn’t want to make wealth
transfers between the citizenry easy they wanted to make it impossible.
So, it doesn’t reflect any flaw in our reasoning, it reflects only the
fact that the paradigmatic example of what the framers were trying to
deprive the federal government, the power that they were trying to deny the
federal government, was wealth transfers among the citizenry and that’s
precisely why they didn’t give them the police power.
So, you can use that as my dissenting opinion [to Obamacare].
Very well put, that.
Obamacare cannot possibly be Constitutional. If the government can compel us
to buy health insurance, the simple fact of the matter is that there will
be nothing under the sun that the government cannot make us do from this
point forward. If Obamacare stands it will forever destroy the sovereignty
of the people and place all power in the capricious, often feckless hands of
the president and congress.
The American Republic will become a dead letter, an historical artifact.
Sadly, this is exactly what the radical in chief wants. He wants supreme,
tyrannical, dictatorial power to do anything he feels like doing at any
given moment. As Mukasey notes, the founders wanted to avoid giving the
president or congress these king-like powers over the people.
Obama plans to wipe out their handiwork. |
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