The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom
and individual liberty
"There
is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it
steadily." --George
Washington
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If Only Obamacare Had Been Passed With Careful
Deliberation By Michael Barone
Many Democrats are genuinely puzzled about Republicans' continuing opposition to Obamacare. It is the law of the land, these Democrats say. Critics should accept it, as critics accepted Medicare. They should work constructively and across the aisle with Democrats to repair any flaws and make the law work to help people. Historical analogies are often useful, but can be misleading. Certainly so in this case: Republicans, like it or not, are behaving differently from the way they behaved after the passage of Medicare in 1965.
To understand why there is continued resistance to Obamacare and why majorities of voters continue to oppose it in polls, a different historical analogy is helpful. It is an example of a law that was bitterly opposed but that was accepted by opponents to a much greater extent than even many of its advocates expected: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The most controversial provision of the law was Title II, prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations — hotels, motels, restaurants and theaters. This overturned Southern state laws requiring racial segregation in such facilities. There was good reason to believe that this law would be hard to enforce in practice, as recent experience of the Freedom Riders showed.
Starting in May 1961, civil rights groups organized biracial groups to ride on interstate bus lines in the South. Segregated interstate transportation had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1946, but Southern states ignored the ruling. Freedom Riders were physically attacked with baseball bats and bicycle chains in South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. Birmingham police chief Bull Connor (then a Democratic National Committeeman) organized mob attacks. A bus was firebombed near Anniston, Ala.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy called for a "cooling off period." The Kennedy administration eventually got Southern governors to provide police escorts for Freedom Ride buses and not to interfere if the Riders were arrested.
I have often wondered what the politicians and journalists who favored equal rights but urged civil rights protesters to go slowly were thinking. They must have believed that protests would provoke violence, and that most of the people hurt would be black. Surely many of those who supported desegregating public accommodations must have feared widespread noncompliance and continuing violence. But in fact these things did not happen to any great extent.
Many Democrats are genuinely puzzled about Republicans' continuing opposition to Obamacare. It is the law of the land, these Democrats say. Critics should accept it, as critics accepted Medicare. They should work constructively and across the aisle with Democrats to repair any flaws and make the law work to help people. Historical analogies are often useful, but can be misleading. Certainly so in this case: Republicans, like it or not, are behaving differently from the way they behaved after the passage of Medicare in 1965.
To understand why there is continued resistance to Obamacare and why majorities of voters continue to oppose it in polls, a different historical analogy is helpful. It is an example of a law that was bitterly opposed but that was accepted by opponents to a much greater extent than even many of its advocates expected: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The most controversial provision of the law was Title II, prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations — hotels, motels, restaurants and theaters. This overturned Southern state laws requiring racial segregation in such facilities. There was good reason to believe that this law would be hard to enforce in practice, as recent experience of the Freedom Riders showed.
Starting in May 1961, civil rights groups organized biracial groups to ride on interstate bus lines in the South. Segregated interstate transportation had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1946, but Southern states ignored the ruling. Freedom Riders were physically attacked with baseball bats and bicycle chains in South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. Birmingham police chief Bull Connor (then a Democratic National Committeeman) organized mob attacks. A bus was firebombed near Anniston, Ala.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy called for a "cooling off period." The Kennedy administration eventually got Southern governors to provide police escorts for Freedom Ride buses and not to interfere if the Riders were arrested.
I have often wondered what the politicians and journalists who favored equal rights but urged civil rights protesters to go slowly were thinking. They must have believed that protests would provoke violence, and that most of the people hurt would be black. Surely many of those who supported desegregating public accommodations must have feared widespread noncompliance and continuing violence. But in fact these things did not happen to any great extent.
Why not? The way the law was passed.
In May 1963, Bull Connor turned police dogs and fire hoses on protesters in Birmingham. Technological developments enabled evening newscasts to bring the Birmingham story into Americans' living rooms.
A feeling that this was intolerable and that something must be done swept most of the nation. In June, President Kennedy went on evening television and endorsed a civil rights bill including public accommodations. Congress had passed, after much deliberation, civil rights laws of narrower scope and lesser effect in 1957 and 1960. It proceeded with careful deliberation to pass a stronger bill this time.
The House Judiciary Committee reported a bill in November, just before Kennedy's assassination. The chairman of the Rules Committee, Howard Smith of Virginia, said he would not allow it to be considered. Supporters sought the signatures of a majority of House members needed to bring the bill to the floor. They got them after members heard from their constituents over the winter break. The bill went to the floor in February and passed with bipartisan support, 290-130.
In the Senate, Southerners launched a filibuster that lasted 57 working days. It then required 67 votes to cut off debate. But in June, 71 senators voted for cloture and the bill passed 73-27. Full compliance with the public accommodations section was not immediate. In Georgia, Lester Maddox closed his restaurant rather than serve blacks, and then was elected governor, narrowly, in 1966. But after Congress acted in such deliberate fashion, and the Supreme Court upheld the law, white Southerners largely acquiesced. Traditional Southern courtesy replaced mob violence. Minds and hearts had been changed.
Obamacare has been a different story. Universal health care was promised, not to address a high-profile headline crisis, but because President Obama's twenty-something speechwriter wanted an applause line for a campaign speech. The poorly drafted bill was passed almost entirely on party lines by exceedingly narrow margins — and in the face of majority negative public opinion. So it's not surprising that opponents won't accept its legitimacy or permanence. History tells us what that takes.
~~~~~~
It’s
OK to keep resisting Obamacare
For many supporters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, continued resistance to the law isn’t just mistaken. It’s downright pathological.
They view it this way: Republicans were within their rights to oppose the law while Congress was debating it, but fighting it three years after it was enacted, and more than a year after the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional, is extreme and dangerous. Republicans are “sabotaging” and trying to “nullify” a democratically passed law.
It’s true that because the elections turned out the way they did – with President Barack Obama re-elected and a Democratic majority in the Senate – Obamacare will almost certainly stay on the books for the next few years. It’s also true that, as one might expect in such a heated debate, opponents of the law have sometimes used unwise tactics, hyperbolic language and false claims in attacking it. If you want to say that trying to stop Obamacare by shutting down the government or hitting the debt ceiling is a terrible idea, you’ll get no argument from me. But there’s nothing wrong with continuing to resist Obamacare even though it has been on the books for three years. What would be strange is if Republicans ended their opposition to it. The law was, after all, passed over almost-unanimous Republican objections. Other large government programs haven’t seen as sustained a campaign against them, but they had more bipartisan support at the outset. Obamacare was unpopular with the public when it passed, and it has only become more so. Republicans generally think it will have bad effects on the economy and on health care. And it isn’t yet entrenched. Why wouldn’t they keep opposing it?
Most of what the law’s supporters call “sabotage” is perfectly legitimate political action. Obamacare’s architects envisioned a lot more cooperation from state governments than they’ve gotten so far. But the law allowed states to refrain from setting up insurance exchanges and from expanding Medicaid. States that exercise those options aren’t disobeying the law or even sabotaging it; they’re just making choices that the law’s supporters wish they would not. State governments can even (as some have) make it illegal for their officials to participate in Obamacare. That’s not “nullification;” it doesn’t require state officials to break any federal law.
Obamacare’s critics are actually doing a better job of obeying the legislation than the administration itself, which has repeatedly found creative ways around the law’s requirements or just acted as though it says things it does not say. Obamacare doesn’t authorize the federal government to offer tax credits and impose certain penalties in states that have opted not to create exchanges. The administration is nonetheless barreling ahead as though it does.
Obamacare’s supporters often suggest that Republicans should try to improve the law rather than junk it. (They say this more and more as the law’s flaws become clearer.) The prospect of improvement, though, is mostly an illusion.
It’s not as though some set of major modifications to the law would command bipartisan support. Nor can the law really be pushed in a more conservative direction while retaining its basic character.
A few conservatives have suggested deregulating Obamacare’s exchanges to make it easier to provide policies with high deductibles. But that would mean offering people what the law’s advocates call “skimpy” coverage, which Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has said isn’t real insurance. Deregulation would also fit poorly with the law’s requirement – one its supporters consider very important – that insurers treat sick people and healthy people exactly the same. Enforcing that rule requires a lot of regulation: What if an insurer offers policies that appeal more to healthy people? If you have a different view of how health insurance should work, you’d need to rewrite the law so much that you’d effectively replace it with something new.
Republicans have too often failed to outline a replacement that would make health insurance affordable for people outside the current system. Even if they do, putting such a plan in place will require years of effort that will often seem futile. It took decades for liberals to get the Affordable Care Act. But no sensible person during that time told them to give up because the matter was settled. Nobody said they should quit out of respect for all the elections that had failed to yield enough politicians committed to their health care plan.
There’s no reason for conservatives to accept rules of the game in which it’s always appropriate to agitate for an expansion of government, but illegitimate to roll it back. Republicans may have all sorts of things for which to apologize, but wanting to scrap Obamacare isn’t one of them.
~~~~~~
ObamaCare Regulations So Far: 10,535 Pages by
Gary North
When
the government passes a law, it must be enforced. The executive branch of the
government then makes up the actual enforcement rules. It interprets the law
and translates it into actual regulations. The ObamaCare law was 2,000
pages long. That is just the beginning. Now the executive branch is building on
its foundations. The specific interpretations are published in the Federal
Register, which is published daily by the federal government. It
publishes about 80,000 pages of regulations a year. Each page is three
columns of rules that can be understood only by very specialized and very
expensive lawyers in a particular field.
Democrat
Congressman Henry Waxman was asked if he had read all 10,535 pages. Waxman refused
to answer. He said it was a propaganda question. He refused to answer. You
owe it to yourself to see one page in the Federal Register. Few
Americans ever have. Go here.
You will see a highlighted link: Today’s
Issue of the Federal Register. Click it. You will see articles. Click the
PDF of any article. Then read just one column. You will not have to read
all three to get the picture. Multiply this one column by 240,000. That is
one year’s output. This is the
law of the land — not the laws that Congress passed and a President signed into law. What
Congress passed and a President signed was only the beginning.
~~~~~~
Obama was the only president in his 37 years in Congress
who refused to engage with Congress to resolve a budget impasse.
"This is a dark moment in our nation's history and our citizens have every right to be disappointed in their government." Hatch said he believed there is room for consensus, but if the Democrats won't even consider talking to Republicans, that agreement can never be reached. President Barack Obama and the Democrats' refusal to negotiate with Republicans on the budget not only caused the government shutdown, but demonstrates they wanted it so they could blame Republicans for it, Sen. Orrin Hatch says. Veteran Utah Republican said Obama was the only president in his 37 years in Congress who refused to engage with Congress to resolve a budget impasse.
"Presidents should work with Congress to stop fiscal impasses like this. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all negotiated over raising the debt ceiling, and ultimately included budget reforms. President Clinton and then Speaker Gingrich negotiated over the last government shutdown back in 1996," he said. "This president is unwilling to do it, the Democrats are unwilling to do it. They said take their position or leave and they've basically wanted this shutdown so they can blame Republicans for it."
"[Republicans] think there's lots of room for consensus, but you've got to get [Democrats] to talk to you ...We haven't had the president engaged, he's the only president in my 37 years in the Congress who just hasn't engaged, and he wants his way above all things," said the Senate's most senior Republican and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee.
"I don't see how you can help but blame the Democrats for not opening the door and talking to us," he said. Hatch said Republicans have offered a number of concessions to try to reach a budget deal, none of which were debated or even considered by the Democrats. Among them, he said, is the proposal to delay Obamacare for a year. He said the proposal was based on the view of the American people that the healthcare law is not "ready for prime time," and a concern that the program would be highly vulnerable to fraud. Hatch went on to say that while he doesn't know how long the shutdown may last, the threat of the United States defaulting on its debt is a more significant matter.
He concluded by saying, "This is a time for real leadership from the president and the Senate Democrats, and once again, they're missing in action. The American people deserve better and I hope that they realize that it isn't Republicans that are causing this problem."
"When you start talking about the debt ceiling, that means you're going to default on the obligations," he said. "Why wouldn't they be willing to sit down and discuss this with the Republicans and with the Democrats, too? There are some Democrats who are unnerved by all of this but they are rigidly forced to vote with the Democrat leadership which is not willing to negotiate, not willing to sit down, not willing to do anything. "Frankly, it's very frustrating," Hatch said.
~~~~~~
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"[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an
anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life
or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these
will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues
and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science,
to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one
or a very few."–John
Adams, An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, 1763
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