John Roberts Became Obama Chief Legislator instead of U.S. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

Friend and fellow conservative sent the following “thoughtful” analysis by Max Frazier:

 By now you have heard that the United States SupremeCourt has validated the Constitutionality of Obamacare.  The ruling was a 5-4 vote, with Justice Kennedy, who usually votes with the more liberal side of the Court, voting with the minority, and Chief Justice Roberts, who usually is a strong voice on the conservative side of the Court, voting and writing the majority argument.What the Court did in effect was to rewrite the Law so that the individual mandate that everyone have health insurance or pay a penalty – that penalty now becomes a tax. 

The Court stated that it was the right of the Congress to pass and collect taxes.  Yet, as you remember, as the Bill was going through the Congress, it was repeated over and over again that the penalty was not a tax.  But now it is a tax.What the Court said in its ruling is that the Court did what the Congress refused to do in order to make Obamacare constitutional. 

 I always grew up believing that it was not theprivilege of the Supreme Court to write laws or even to change laws, but to declare whether a law violated the United States Constitution.  The precedent set by the Court today is dangerous. 

From now on, the Court can impose on the American people laws that were not passed by the Congress.  In fact, the Supreme Court can make laws – and they are not accountable to the American people.  This could truly be “taxation without representation” – something that began a war back in 1775. FoxNews.com posted an editorial written by Karen Harned, the executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Legal Center.  Here is what she had to say:

“Today marks a sad day in the history of America.  With this decision, Americans have lost the right to be left alone, which Justice William O Douglas once called ‘the beginning of all  freedom.’  It is painful to recognize that the liberties which our forefathers fought a revolution to secure have been lost.  But it is clear that our original constitutional system has been thrown out, and we are left with only the democratic process to preserve our rights.  That should be a sobering thought for anyone who values liberty.

“Ms. Harned continues: “The significance of this decision cannot be overstated.  Our Founding Fathers were greatly concerned that by giving too much power to the federal government, they would be endangering our liberties.  So they sought to restrain the federal government by vesting it with only limited powers.  As James Madison said, the powers of the federal government were to be ‘few and defined.’  Yet with this decision, it is clear that the powers of the federal government are no longer limited at all. 

Our only remaining protections are with those liberties which were explicitly

spelled out in the Bill of Rights, and even those are under assault.  So today

Madison’s vision of the American Republic has been turned on its head: The

powers of the federal government are now broad and uncabined, and the freedoms

of the people are few and confined.”She concludes: “We must now look

forward, with great trepidation, into this brave new world, a world in which the

Constitution has been undone, and federal power knows no limit.  This is a day

that our Founders would never have wanted to see. All that they had fought to

secure and preserve has been lost.”  You can read the article in its entirety by

going to www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/06/28/supreme-court-upholds-obamacare.

The City of New York is deciding that they should regulate the size of

the soft drinks you can purchase.  Other places are arguing that you must get

counseling if you are obese.  Will we soon be mandated that we can only purchase

American made automobiles, after all, the government is in the car-business?  If

I want to drive a Honda or a Toyota or a Volkswagen I will have to pay a penalty

- oops, I meant to say a tax.  And what if I want to cool my home to 68 degrees,

will the government come in and order me to set my AC to 78 degrees or I will

have to pay that “tax?”Today we have taken a huge step down the slippery

slope toward the implosion that is coming.  I shared with someone today, after

hearing the announcement, that Pandora’s Box has been fully opened, and now we

get to see all the uglies that can crawl out.I believe that June 28,

2012 will be one of those dates that will live on in infamy, much like January

22, 1973, or December 7, 1941.With 68% of Americans stating that they

disliked either all or parts of Obamacare, the question now becomes, “What will

they do about it?” 

 

We have heard from the Court. 

 

We have heard from the President.  Now it is time to hear from the people.

Krauthammer: Roberts Contrived Opinion to Achieve Lefty Reputation of “Fairness”

Krauthammer: Roberts “Concocted This Finesse” To Save Court’s Reputation

at realclearpolitics videos:

“He didn’t want to overturn the law, because as Chief Justice he feels he’s the custodian of the reputation and the stature of the court,” syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the health care law. “And I think he thinks that the court suffered a decision in 2000 in Gore and Bush was seen as a partisan court, it went 5-4 along ideological lines.”

“And he was afraid if that happened on ObamaCare, it would diminished the standard of the court, which he thinks he’s responsible for keeping it up. So he concocted this finesse of which allows him of calling a mandate a tax, which it is not. So he concocts a finesse which allows him to uphold the law and strike it down, the commerce clause as the reason,” Krauthammer said.

The video:    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/06/28/krauthammer_roberts_concocted_this_finesse_to_save_courts_reputation.html

Explaining Roberts’ Dreaminess Making Obamacare Case Worse

The New and Even Worse Obamacare

by Yuval Levin     at    National Review Online

 The political case for repealing Obamacare, which has always been the most significant and relevant case, is stronger than ever after today’s decision. Left alone, the law will spend well over a trillion dollars in the coming decade on yet another health-care entitlement program and on the expansion of existing entitlements, micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, employ even heavier price controls of the sort that have always failed in Medicare, and raise half a trillion dollars in taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. And now we know that its tax bill will be even higher than we thought, and that its reduction of the uninsured even smaller. Today’s decision just means that President Obama must now embrace this monstrosity even tighter, and that the case for replacing him has grown even clearer and more powerful.

The great legal scholars at NRO and elsewhere will surely be offering their sharp analyses of the Court’s decision in the coming hours and days, and I very much look forward to learning from them. Until then, a few thoughts about the Court’s arguments from this amateur observer, and a few (perhaps slightly more informed) thoughts about the health-care implications.

Reading the opinion of the Chief Justice, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was working very hard to find arguments that might enable him to walk a precarious tightrope, and that at the end of the day he just had to pretend those arguments existed. In the months leading up to this decision, many of us thought the Court faced a choice between throwing out a major act of legislation and throwing out any limits on the Commerce Clause. My sense from this opinion is that Roberts desperately sought a way to do neither: He wanted to avoid striking down the law (and four of his colleagues evidently concluded that the whole law would have to go if the mandate did), but he wanted to avoid extending even further the meaning of the Commerce Clause.

 This is a thoroughly understandable desire. He pursued it in the end by treating the individual mandate as a tax. The Court’s opinion thus accepts more or less in their entirety the arguments of the conservative legal scholars who said that the Commerce Clause could not be read to permit Congress to regulate inactivity or to compel commercial activity, and rejects more or less in their entirety the frantic, shallow tantrums of countless liberal legal types who insisted that such an objection was tantamount to lunacy. In its effects on our understanding of the Commerce Clause alone, this decision does much of what conservatives hoped it might. But it then treats the mandate as a tax and so concludes that the law can stand with just that alteration in our understanding of its meaning. 

The Chief’s argument for this interpretation seems to me exceedingly weak, and the critique of this argument offered up by the dissenting justices is devastating. But Roberts seemed to be after what might be considered a minimalist (or restrained) ruling in terms of both its constitutional implications and its practical ones — he wanted to leave the law alone but reject its champions’ limitless interpretation of the Commerce Clause. He did that at the expense of a coherent case for the Court’s ruling. His desire is not hard to understand, though his actual legal reasoning is.

And the nature of the action he has taken, as a matter of the Court’s disposition toward laws brought before it in disputes, is strikingly micro-managerial. Roberts has rewritten the law in several crucial respects rather than rule it unconstitutional. It’s not clear how his own theory of the Court’s role (even as articulated in this opinion) justifies doing this, but it seems his concern for the Court’s standing justified it in his eyes. This rewriting of the law — the fact that Obamacare was not simply upheld today — has several significant practical implications.

First, the Court ruled that the individual mandate would have been constitutional if, rather than being crafted as a legal requirement with a penalty for non-compliance, it had been crafted as a tax from which those who were insured were exempted and that, rather than be overturned, the mandate should be treated as though that was indeed how it was crafted. The Chief Justice’s opinion argues that the mandate should now be understood as essentially an optional tax — people have the choice of buying insurance approved by the federal government or paying that tax. Decades of academic studies of the question of driving insurance coverage with penalties and incentives have found that a mandate crafted this way would have a significantly smaller effect than a mandate that was structured as a legal requirement with a penalty. (The Congressional Budget Office discussed some of that literature in this paperfrom 2010.) The basic reason appears to be that a lot of compliance with legal requirements is driven by people’s inclination to do what they are required to do by law, quite apart from the cost of breaking the law. When the imperative to buy insurance is instead presented as a choice between two options, more people will be likely to choose the cheaper option (which, for almost everyone, will be paying the tax rather than buying the coverage). If Obamacare is not repealed by 2014, the behavioral economics of insurance decisions suggests, today’s Court opinion sets up the Obamacare system for an insurance death spiral — less expressly than an outright striking of the mandate while leaving the rest of the law intact, of course, but pretty expressly.

 

Second, the Medicaid portion of the decision is very important, and (to me) rather surprising. The Court essentially ruled that the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare is optional for the states. Obamacare as originally written would have required states to participate in the huge expansion of the (unreformed, and very badly designed) program, and states that did not participate would have lost all of their federal Medicaid dollars. That expansion accounted for about half of the overall reduction in the uninsured scored by CBO. The Court now says that states choosing not to participate in the expansion must be able to remain in essentially today’s Medicaid program— they would not get the new federal money that Obamacare allocates for the expansion, but they would not lose the funding arrangements they have with Congress now. Here again, the Court simply rewrites a portion of the law to answer a constitutional objection rather than ruling that portion unconstitutional. 

Expanding Medicaid coverage could cost the states a great deal of money over time. If Obamacare is not repealed, I think, many states will choose not to expand their Medicaid programs, and as a result far fewer uninsured people will be covered under Obamcare than would have been otherwise. Moreover, in states that do this, a gap will open up between the lowest income level eligible to receive subsidies in the Obamacare exchanges and the highest income level eligible for Medicaid, and it is far from clear what the federal government or the states will do about that.

Combined, these two rather arbitrary acts of revision mean that if the CBO reassesses the law’s effect on the number of Americans without insurance (which it certainly will do) using the same methods it used originally, it is likely to find a much smaller reduction in the uninsured.The scope of its projected reduction of the uninsured and the (already false at the time) assertion that it did not raise taxes on the middle class were of course essential to the bare and narrow passage of Obamacare. The law as the Supreme Court has rewritten it today would not have passed. It contains all of the many grave flaws that have made Obamacare so unpopular, and fewer of the elements that finally persuaded some wavering Democrats to hold their noses and vote for it.

 

The case for repealing the law is thus stronger than ever. And it would be made stronger still if it could be reinforced with a clear set of alternatives offered up by the Republican nominee for president. The shape of such reforms is perfectly clear — Mitt Romney has laid it out in general, and others have done it in far greater detail. It consists of a series of reforms (of our entitlement programs, of the tax treatment of insurance, of the individual-coverage market, and of insurance regulations) that would enable a real market in insurance, and enable all Americans to participate in it. Such a transformation of American health careneed not be pursued in one fell swoop, and should not be pursued in one massive piece of legislation. But in this election season, conservative office-seekers and officeholders should make clear to the public that they have in mind a clear, achievable path to a health-care system that works for everyone. 

The disaster of Obamacare has created an opportunity for such conservative reformers. It is after all perfectly easy to show that we can do better. And today’s decision only makes it easier to show voters why this law needs to go, and how that could be done. 

There is only one way. “Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in today’s opinion. “We possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them.” They can be, and they should be. Now let us see to it that they will be.

—Yuval Levin is the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the editor of National Affairs. 

Protect My Vote.com Asking for your Support!

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On July 3^rd, we’ll be at Music in Plymouth recruiting supporters and giving away some nice swag.

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Constitutional amendments don’t get passed by themselves. Spreading the message takes a lot of effort from people who care.

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Best regards,

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ProtectMyVote.com

Prepared and paid for by ProtectMyVote.com, 1730 New Brighton Blvd, Minneapolis, MN  55413

Obama’s Barack Hussein War against Christianity

Welcome to the Cult of Government

By George Neumayr     at realclearreligion:

Either say “long live the federal government” or die, Mexican government officials hectored Catholics in the early twentieth century, as depicted in the movie, For Greater Glory, an account of the Christian resistance to this persecution known as the “Cristeros war.”

Is Mexico’s past America’s future? After four years of in-your-face secularism from Barack Obama, it is not an idle question.

“Darn tooting,” Barack Obama said to militant feminists when they asked him, after the passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” if he was going to force Christians to pay for the contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients of their employees.

Under his secularist mandates, of which his HHS contraceptive/abortifacient mandate is the most obvious example, Americans are in effect forced to say “long live the federal government” or face financial death. Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the essence of the “Affordable Care Act,” noncomplying religious organizations can expect to face fines of $2,000 per employee as soon as August 2013. These fines will cripple most Christian hospitals and schools and cause the closures of many religious charities.

Judeo-Christianity is so dangerous to the common good, according to Obama, that he feels free to persecute it through fiats and a cramped definition of “religion” which renders, as the United States Bishops have pointed out, even Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity nonreligious. As HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius decreed at the time of the HHS mandate’s announcement, only private sects that “primarily” employ and serve fellow members of their sects qualify as “religious” under the Obama administration’s definition of a religious organization.

How convenient. By this Orwellian definition of “religion,” Obama seeks to maintain the fiction that he is respecting “religious freedom” while driving the religious out of the public square.

Purging the traditionally religious from public life has long been the objective of the ACLU left, from which Barack Obama comes. He is, as his supporters put it in 2008, the one “we have been waiting for” — meaning that he is the final consummation of socialism and secularism.

According to Barack Obama, no higher power should exist in public life than godless government. Government, not God, is the sole measure of morality and law for him. Government, not God, is the determiner of the “good.” Never mind that the word good derives from the word God. Hence, Obama feels justified in shunting the religious into the shadows of society. While he has not pursued this aim violently, as Mexican President Plutarco Calles did in the 1920s, he has pursued it bureaucratically and legislatively.

Were Plutarco Calles alive today, he would no doubt approve of Obama’s attempts to define religion out of public life through statute, not to mention Obama’s use of public schools as instruments of secularist propaganda. Raised by an atheistic uncle who taught him to hate the Church and influenced by the growing secularism in Western Europe (where he traveled), Calles was a socialist and secularist who sought to monopolize all of public life by plucking children from parents and priests and indoctrinating them in statism. “We must enter and take possession of the mind of childhood, the mind of youth,” Calles liked to say.

In For Greater Glory, the child who is pressured to say “long live the federal government” instead says bravely, “Viva Cristo Rey!” Let us hope that the parents of America will teach their children to emulate this heroic example.

George Neumayr, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is co-author (with Phyllis Schlafly) of the forthcoming book, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.