03 July 2012
George Will is among those conservatives driven to find victory in a stunning defeat.

By persuading the court to reject a Commerce Clause rationale for a president’s signature act, the conservative legal insurgency against Obamacare has won a huge victory for the long haul. This victory will help revive a venerable tradition of America’s political culture, that of viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint, searching for congruence with the Constitution’s architecture of enumerated powers. By rejecting the Commerce Clause rationale, Thursday’s decision reaffirmed the Constitution’s foundational premise: Enumerated powers are necessarily limited because, as Chief Justice John Marshall said, “the enumeration presupposes something not enumerated.”
This desperation to find a victory rides rough-shod over the fact that, as the Chief Justice explained, we are still free to buy (government approved) healthcare or not buy healthcare insurance; we just aren't free to not buy healthcare insurance and not pay a penalty for not owning healthcare insurance. And the IRS is still invested with power it did not previous have; and it previously had a lot.

The IRS now gets to know about a small business's entire payroll, the level of their insurance coverage -- and it gets to know the income of not just the primary breadwinner in your house, but your entire family’s income, in order to assess/collect the mandated tax. Plus, it gets to share your personal info with all sorts of government agencies, insurance companies and employers. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. "We expect even more lien and levy powers," an IRS official says.

2 comments:

Mary Ann said...

Hello James, it's been a while since I've been here. Several family sadnesses and computer crashes and have taken up a lot of time the last couple years.

The most chilling thing I've heard...maybe ever...was Thomas Sowell in an interview (I think with Bill Bennett) where he said he was glad he was the age he was. Because...he would not live to see how this all turned out. Still haunts me.

James Frank Solís said...

Mary Ann! I've missed you ma'am. And I've noted a bit of a slow-down in your blogging. (Yeah, mine too.) I'm sorry to hear about the sadnesses in your family. Please email me and let me know how I can pray for you and your family: philologous.lector@gmail.com.

I heard Sowell say that too. My boss told me he almost (but only almost) regrets bringing his children into the world.

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James Frank Solís
Former soldier (USA). Graduate-level educated. Married 26 years. Texas ex-patriate. Ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America.
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