NOT among the checks and balances that the Constitution incorporates into our system is intimidation by the president of the Supreme Court. But intimidation appears to be the course President Obama has selected, following his solicitor general\u2019s stumbling defense of Obamacare before the justices last week.<\/p>\n
Conservative commentators have been gloating ever since that it was only natural that Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., whose job it is to argue cases on behalf of the government, stammered through his presentations. \u00a0It was, in Justice Anthony Kennedy\u2019s words during the three-day review, \u201ca heavy burden\u201d to advocate the constitutionality of this particular law. In the weeks before ramming Obamacare through the House of Representatives without a single vote from the opposition party, then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated on her official website that she believed the Constitution put few if any limits on Congress\u2019s scope of action. \u00a0As Michael Barone recalls in his current column at National Review Online<\/em> (http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/6vh77eo<\/a>), one (now gone) House Democrat told his constituents when questioned on the matter at the time, \u201cI don\u2019t worry about the Constitution.\u201d \u00a0Still, according to the president speaking to reporters yesterday, questioning the constitutionality of this law adopted with so little attention to the Constitution would be an act of unwarranted and rarely employed judicial activism.<\/p>\n Many issues divide the two major political parties today, but none so strikingly as their concept of the Constitution and, by extension, the rule of law. \u00a0It is not too much to say that for Democrats power and law are dangerously close to becoming synonymous. \u00a0What other conclusion can you reach when the secretary of Health and Human Services announces that Obamacare gives her power to compel the Catholic Church to act in opposition to tenets of its faith? Did any nationally prominent Democrat shout, \u201cStop. This is exactly the kind of government action the First Amendment was intended to protect against\u201d?<\/p>\n But now we have something more. \u00a0The same president who, following the Citizens United<\/em> decision, dressed down the members of the court in their presence during a State of the Union address yesterday offered a preemptive dressing down. Like other senior Democrats, during the Obamacare debates he dismissed the idea of constitutional limits on what the government could compel citizens to do. \u00a0And when such objections threatened to derail the bill, his administration may have used false prosecution of Alaska senator Ted Stevens to secure the final vote needed for Senate passage. \u00a0Then, when a special election in Massachusetts deprived them of that Senate margin, they conjured, in effect, a parliamentary trick to achieve final adoption. But now the president suggests to the court that exercise of its constitutionally mandated role of judicial fidelity to our founding law would, in this case, be illegitimate.<\/p>\n Forget the counterproductive stimulus programs, the Jack\u2019s-beanstalk-speed growth of federal spending and debt. \u00a0Forget the inept foreign policy towards almost every country from Russia to Mexico. \u00a0The truly unsettling fact about this administration is its will to power. \u00a0The non-recess recess appointments are a case in point. \u00a0The broad use of regulation to circumvent Congress is another, as, for example, EPAs announcement last week that it would restrict greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants, despite Congress having voted down such measures numerous times.<\/p>\n So more than most, the coming election will be about the nature of federal power. \u00a0It will be about the vigor of checks and balances, of enumerated powers and limited government, and about whether such concepts live today in a republic of liberty \u2013 or whether the idea of liberty is an 18th century anachronism in this, oh, so much more sophisticated age.<\/p>\n Correction:<\/strong> \u201cPipes adds that, as part of forcing 20 million new recipients into Medicaid, the program takes the government\u2019s biggest debt problem (unfunded liabilities) and makes it worse. \u00a0To help pay for the Medicaid expansion, the new law moves $500 billion over the next decade from Medicare to Medicaid. \u00a0What sense does it make to raid Medicare? \u00a0Last year Medicare\u2019s trustees put their program\u2019s unfunded liability at $25 trillion, and even that figure Medicare\u2019s chief actuary immediately disavowed as not representing \u201ca reasonable expectation of actual program expenses,\u201d which he said would come in vastly higher. \u00a0The projections, he noted, assumed reduced reimbursements to healthcare providers that were entirely unreasonable and Congress would feel compelled to reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NOT among the checks and balances that the Constitution incorporates into our system is intimidation by the president of the Supreme Court. But intimidation appears to be the course President Obama has selected, following his solicitor general\u2019s stumbling defense of Obamacare before the justices last week. Conservative commentators have been gloating ever since that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-1148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1155,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions\/1155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIn last week\u2019s column, I mistakenly characterized how Obamacare undermines Medicare. \u00a0Following is the corrected version of the paragraph in question. \u00a0\u201cPipes\u201d is Sally Pipes, president of Pacific Research Institute and author of the recently published The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare <\/em>(http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/7ewml28<\/a>), from which, in my haste, I garbled one key fact and omitted another. The entire revised article (\u201cThe Supreme Court and a Plan for Replacing Obamacare, Whatever the Court Decides\u201d) can be found at my archival site www.clarkjudge.org<\/a>\u00a0under the category \u201cEconomic Policy: Healthcare.\u201d \u00a0I apologize for the error and thank the reader who alerted me to it:<\/p>\n