Everyone else is blathering on about today's Supreme Court ruling on ObamaCare, so I might as well blather some too. . .
The Court majority has done B.O. no favors with this ruling.
First, the individual mandate was upheld as constitutionally valid under Congress' power to impose taxes. Romeny and the GOP can now enter the 2012 campaign season with a potent weapon: B.O. has set yet another precedent--the largest tax hike on the middle-class in U.S. history.
Second, the majority opinion explicitly rejects the administration's claim that the mandate is valid under the Commerce Clause. This means that the Court has said that the Commerce Clause is not infinitely malleable. . .something the Left has long believed and hoped to have validated in this decision. They didn't get their wish.
Third, the Court severely limits the ability of the Feds to punish states financially for refusing to participate in the B.O. Medicaid shell-game. IOW, states that do not want to help finance ObamaCare by taking on more of the costs of Medicaid don't have to. This means that the cost of ObamaCare just skyrocketed.
Fourth, by leaving most of the law intact and labeling its funding mechanism a tax, the Court has returned the ultimate fate of ObamaCare back to the political arena. Romney's and the GOP's new campaign slogan: Repeal ObamaCare & Obama 2012.
Now, the 2012 presidential election is a referendum on both B.O.'s handling of the economy AND his signature piece of legislation.
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I hope you're correct, Fr. Powell, about this being no victory for the Obamanation of Desolation.
ReplyDeleteFather, in re your points:
ReplyDeleteFirst: The GOP has made an art form out of snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. I frankly lack confidence they will make good use of this potent weapon. Plus, I don't believe Romney will really move heaven and earth to get rid of Obamacare: he is on record as supporting an individual mandate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6DrH6P9OC0
Second: The Commerce Clause may not be infinitely malleable under this decision (a result, by the way, that could have been better achieved by striking down Obamacare in toto), but now the taxation power IS. The enumerated taxes in the Constitution are now a dead letter.
Third: This result also could have been better achieved by striking down the law in toto.
Fourth: Even if we succeed in repealing Obamacare, we are still left with this lousy, rotten, putrescent Supreme Court precedent that we can never get rid of. This precedent will open doors to even further usurpations of our liberty.
Sorry, Pater, but as Churchill said when Neville Chamberlain came home from Munich: we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.
I'm not a lawyer, so I won't argue that law with you. In purely political terms, this is a defeat for B.O. He now has to go out on the campaign trail and defend a overwhelmingly unpopular law that includes 22 new taxes!
DeleteAll this politicizing, sectarianism, and namecalling is demoralizing.
ReplyDeleteScott, I agree. Unfortunately, that's what politics is all about right now. I'm all in favor of civility, so long as everyone plays by the same rules. "Civility" has become a way for the Left to keep the Right quiet.
DeleteThe Catholic Church's recently concocted so-called "social doctrine" supports the creation of a welfare state with open borders and a mindless obsession with "the poor", regardless of real world consequences. To me it has not one jot more legitimacy than the Church's former alliances with monarchy or with the global colonizing projects of Europe. Mother Church just makes this stuff up as she goes along, to curry favor with whomever she thinks is her current dance partner. The US Catholic Church has been a major accomplice in the destruction of this country through its support of massive illegal Latino immigration and the expansion of government power through "social programs for the poor."
ReplyDeleteI can see now why the US Nativists were so fearful of Catholics. In the end, Rome supports collectivism.
Since the Acts of the Apostles the Church has been a communitarian enterprise. Western-style liberal democratic individualism is a relatively new social invention, basically, a product of the debauched post-Cartesian "Enlightenment." The Church is obligated to uphold a certain level of basic human cooperation in light of the imago Dei. We can't be full-blown libertarians. I agree that gov't is more often the problem rather than the solution and our contemporary addiction to gov't programs is killing us. If the Church is to be faulted for anything, it's for not being more pro-active in doing what Christ told us to do in Matthew 25. Yes, we do a lot of that now, but there is always more and more and more to do.
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