Victor Davis Hanson on “”Justice”” Roberts Legislating a new Obama Obamacare Bill

Supreme Court Hypocrisies
By hailing Roberts, the Left reveals its double standards.

by Victor Davis Hanson    at  National Review Online

Until last week, Chief Justice John Roberts was vilified as the leader of a conservative judicial cabal poised to destroy the Obama presidency by overturning the federal takeover of health care. But with his unexpected affirmation, Roberts suddenly was lauded as the new Earl Warren — an “evolving” conservative who at last saw the logic of liberal big government.

Among our elites — journalists, pundits, and academics — liberal Supreme Court justices are always deemed “open-minded,” even as they are expected to vote in absolute lockstep liberal fashion. In contrast, a conservative justice is written off as reactionary or blatantly partisan when he likewise predictably follows his own orthodoxy — pressures that may well have affected Roberts if reports of an eleventh-hour switch in his vote are true.

No surprise, then, that a surreal discussion followed the recent ruling of the high court. Our legal establishment expected that the four liberal judges would not deviate one iota in their affirmation of the health-care law, even as it hoped that a conservative or two would show judicial character by joining the liberals.

Democrats like activist federal courts to overturn — in matters of gay marriage, abortion, affirmative action, and illegal immigration — ballot propositions and majority votes of legislatures fostered by supposedly illiberal and unsophisticated voters. But on health care, liberals — led by the president — made the argument that a wrongly activist Supreme Court should not dare to tamper with what an elected Congress had wrought.

 

President Obama was incoherent in his commentary on the Supreme Court. Before the Roberts ruling, when most were betting that the president’s health-care plan would be overturned — especially given the poor performance of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in arguing the government’s case before the Court — Obama was angry at the thought of such judicial activism. In a manner that did not reflect much knowledge of either the Constitution or the history of the republic, he thundered, “Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” 

Of course, the Supreme Court’s overturning of a law is not extraordinary or unprecedented. And the president’s bill did not pass by a “strong majority,” but squeaked through the House by seven votes. What was “unprecedented” was a presidential shot across the bow of the Supreme Court on the eve of a critical decision — especially given the fact that Obama would soon welcome the Court’s activism in overturning most of a duly-passed Arizona immigration law that sought to enforce federal statutes.

To get the health-care bill passed in the first place, the Obama administration swore that it was a mandate and not a tax raise, which would have contradicted his campaign pledge not to hike taxes on the middle class. Yet Verrilli worried that a mandate would be declared unconstitutional, so he argued in the chambers of the Court that it was a tax — and a majority of justices agreed.

But then the Obama administration flipped again at the thought of raising taxes on the middle class and is now calling the mandate/tax a “penalty” — thanking the Court for its wisdom while rebuking the means by which it came to it. 

Conservatives have come to distrust federal courts that overturn legislative majorities. But this time, conservatives hoped that the Roberts Supreme Court would overturn Obamacare rather than the less likely scenario of a Republican president and a congressional majority in both houses doing it sometime in the future. In short, there is no such thing as consistent judicial activism or restraint — only court rulings that support a favored political agenda and then are scorned as activist or lauded as enlightened by the particular involved parties.

A big reason for all the hypocrisies and paradoxes is that the 2,409-page health-care act is a mess. Even its creators cannot agree whether it involves a mandate, tax, or penalty. The public doesn’t like or want it — at least the parts it must soon pay for. It was passed only on a strictly partisan vote and under shady means (remember the “Cornhusker Kickback”?). Hundreds of friends of influential Democratic politicians have already had their companies exempted from what was sold as a wonderful change. The country is nearly insolvent and $16 trillion in debt, and yet poised to take on the largest social-entitlement program in a half-century.

This mess is only the beginning, since we won’t even feel the full effect (or cost) of the law for another two years. But we should assume that what starts out this badly will end even worse.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author most recently of The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.© 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Two Age-Old Lessons for Life Justice John Roberts Apparently Failed to Learn

1.  “WHAT A STRANGE WEB WE WEAVE, WHEN WE FIRST PRACTICE TO DECEIVE!”

2.  “HONESTY  IS  THE BEST POLICY.”

President Obama  politically  pays no attention at all to limits upon his deceptions.  He deceives nearly every time he opens his mouth.    Indeed, he  is admired for his duplicitousness, deceptiveness, deviousness,  dishonesty,and  even his abilitiy to divide various groups into hating fields.   It aids him to think and act  better as a Marxist.

Besides, being a Marxist,  it all depends upon how one defines, honesty.

Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, devoted to being likeable, to  being successful in his  family and business duties, and wanting to please the public,  seems to understand the age-old adages, but doesn’t apparently know how to oblige their  meaning politically when confronting Obamacare.

So we learned, today, listening to  Dennis Prager  during his radio show.    Much of the time was spent on the following Wall Street Journal editorial challengin candidate Mitt Romney’s political acumen:

Romney’s Tax Confusion

The candidate’s response on the ObamaCare mandate

reveals larger campaign problems

 from the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal:

If Mitt Romney loses his run for the White House, a turning point will have been his decision Monday to absolve President Obama of raising taxes on the middle class. He is managing to turn the only possible silver lining in Chief Justice John Roberts’s ObamaCare salvage operation—that the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty is really a tax—into a second political defeat.

Appearing on MSNBC, close Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom was asked by host Chuck Todd if Mr. Romney “agrees with the president” and “believes that you shouldn’t call the tax penalty a tax, you should call it a penalty or a fee or a fine?”

“That’s correct,” Mr. Fehrnstrom replied, before attempting some hapless spin suggesting that Mr. Obama must be “held accountable” for his own “contradictory” statements on whether it is a penalty or tax. Predictably, the Obama campaign and the media blew past Mr. Fehrnstrom’s point, jumped on the tax-policy concession, and declared the health-care tax debate closed.

Assistant editorial page editor James Freeman on the GOP’s muddled message over whether the individual mandate constitutes a tax. Photo: Associated Press

For conservative optimists who think Mr. Fehrnstrom misspoke or is merely dense, his tax absolution gift to Mr. Obama was confirmed by campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul, who tried the same lame jujitsu spin. In any event, Mr. Fehrnstrom is part of the Boston coterie who are closest to Mr. Romney, and he wouldn’t say such a thing without the candidate’s approval.

In a stroke, the Romney campaign contradicted Republicans throughout the country who had used the Chief Justice’s opinion to declare accurately that Mr. Obama had raised taxes on the middle class. Three-quarters of those who will pay the mandate tax will make less than $120,000 a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Romney high command has muddied the tax issue in a way that will help Mr. Obama’s claims that he is merely taxing rich folks like Mr. Romney. And it has made it that much harder for Republicans to again turn ObamaCare into the winning issue it was in 2010.

Why make such an unforced error? Because it fits with Mr. Romney’s fear of being labeled a flip-flopper, as if that is worse than confusing voters about the tax and health-care issues. Mr. Romney favored the individual mandate as part of his reform in Massachusetts, and as we’ve said from the beginning of his candidacy his failure to admit that mistake makes him less able to carry the anti-ObamaCare case to voters.

Mr. Romney should use the Supreme Court opinion as an opening to say that now that the mandate is defined as a tax for the purposes of the law, he will work to repeal it. This would let Mr. Romney show voters that Mr. Obama’s spending ambitions are so vast that they can’t be financed solely by the wealthy but will inevitably hit the middle class.

Democrats would point to the Massachusetts record, but Mr. Romney could reply that was before the Supreme Court had spoken, that he had promised Bay Staters not to raise taxes, and so now the right policy is to repeal the tax along with the rest of ObamaCare. The tragedy is that for the sake of not abandoning his faulty health-care legacy in Massachusetts, Mr. Romney is jeopardizing his chance at becoming President.

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Associated Press

Perhaps Mr. Romney is slowly figuring this out, because in a July 4 interview he stated himself that the penalty now is a “tax” after all. But he offered no elaboration, and so the campaign looks confused in addition to being politically dumb.

This latest mistake is of a piece with the campaign’s insular staff and strategy that are slowly squandering an historic opportunity. Mr. Obama is being hurt by an economic recovery that is weakening for the third time in three years. But Mr. Romney hasn’t been able to take advantage, and if anything he is losing ground.

The Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it’s Mr. Obama’s fault. We’re on its email list and the main daily message from the campaign is that “Obama isn’t working.” Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that. What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the President’s policies aren’t working and how Mr. Romney’s policies will do better.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is assailing Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch rich man, and the rich man obliged by vacationing this week at his lake-side home with a jet-ski cameo. Team Obama is pounding him for Bain Capital, and until a recent ad in Ohio the Romney campaign has been slow to respond.

Team Obama is now opening up a new assault on Mr. Romney as a job outsourcer with foreign bank accounts, and if the Boston boys let that one go unanswered, they ought to be fired for malpractice.

***

All of these attacks were predictable, in particular because they go to the heart of Mr. Romney’s main campaign theme—that he can create jobs as President because he is a successful businessman and manager. But candidates who live by biography typically lose by it. See President John Kerry.

The biography that voters care about is their own, and they want to know how a candidate is going to improve their future. That means offering a larger economic narrative and vision than Mr. Romney has so far provided. It means pointing out the differences with specificity on higher taxes, government-run health care, punitive regulation, and the waste of politically-driven government spending.

Mr. Romney promised Republicans he was the best man to make the case against President Obama, whom they desperately want to defeat. So far Mr. Romney is letting them down.

A version of this article appeared July 5, 2012, on page A10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Romney’s Tax Confusion.

U.S. Government Corrupting University Education worse than its Fannie-Freddie Housing Mess

Why the Education Bubble Will Be Worse Than the Housing Bubble

from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

The problem with student loans is not the interest rate but that the federal government subsidizes student loans at all, say Antony Davies of the Mercatus Center and James R. Harrigan of the Institute for Humane Studies.

The potential harm of government intervention in the student loan market is not unlike the damage caused by similar intervention in the home mortgage market.

• The government, in a fit of social engineering spanning decades, established Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make real the dream of home ownership for working class Americans.
• Beginning in 1996, the Department of Housing and Urban Development told Fannie and Freddie that more than 40 percent of their loans had to go to low-income borrowers.
• Further, starting in the early 1990s, the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates to historically low levels, making mortgages cheaper.
• The net result of this was very predictable: people took out more mortgages and an increasing number of mortgages went to low-income people.
• Between 2001 and 2006, the fraction of new mortgages that were subprime (and consequently unlikely to be paid back) tripled, and the rest, as they say, is history.

This is the exact result we can expect from continued government intervention in student loan markets.

• The Affordable Care Act of 2010 allowed the government to loan money directly to students.
• The following year the Taxpayer Relief Act extended tax breaks to student loan borrowers.
• Predictably, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates at historically low levels, making college loans cheaper.
• And the price of a college education soared — just as one would expect from a market flooded with cheap money.
• By law, lenders cannot even deny Stafford and Perkins loans (types of federal student loans) based on the borrower’s credit or employment status.

The result: from 1976 to 2010, the prices of all commodities rose 280 percent, the price of homes rose 400 percent, and the price of private education rose 1,000 percent.

Source: Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan, “Why the Education Bubble Will Be Worse Than the Housing Bubble,” U.S. News & World Report, June 12, 2012.

For text:

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/06/12/the-government-shouldnt-subsidize-higher-education

For more on Education Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=27

Obamacare’s Transforming Doctors into Factory Workers

Henninger: ObamaCare’s Lost Tribe: Doctors

The practice of medicine is the Obama health-care law’s biggest loser.

from the Wall Street Journal:

“Back at the at the dawn of ObamaCare in June 2009, speaking to the American Medical Association’s annual meeting, President Obama said: “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period.”But will your doctor be able to keep you? Or will your doctor even want to keep you, rather than quit medicine?For the longest time now, since the day one of the Affordable Care Act, we have been having arguments over the mandate to purchase health-care insurance, requirements that insurance companies accept policyholders regardless of health, and price discrimination in insurance policies.

 

And of course this past week, the Supreme Court—or something resembling the Supreme Court—outputted a decision on the tax status of the insurance-purchase mandate, the states’ obligation to pay for Medicaid and as a bonus, the Commerce Clause.Have you noticed what got lost in this historic rumble? Doctors. Remember them?ObamaCare has been a war over the processing of insurance claims. It has been fought by institutional interests representing insurance, hospital and pharmaceutical firms.

 

The doctor-patient relationship, or what used to be called “the practice of medicine,” has sunk beneath these waves.Barack Obama, a savvy pol, understood from the start that rationalizing payments claims through the maw of these private and public bureaucracies was not what the average person thinks of as “health care.” To any normal person, health care means that when you or yours get really sick, the doctors and nurses who attend to you will push all else aside to give you medical help.

 

Thus, the constant Obama chorus that you can “keep your own doctor.” No one knows better than Barack Obama that his law sends the nation’s doctors on a voyage into an uncharted health-care world in which they are just along for the ride with their patients.A Wall Street Journal story the day after the Supreme Court ruling examined in detail its impact across the “health sector.” The words “doctor,” “physician” and “nurse” appeared nowhere in this report. The piece, however, did cite the view of one CEO who runs a chain of hospitals, explaining how they’d deal with the law’s expected $155 billion in compensation cuts. “We will make it up in volume,” he said.Volume? Would that be another word for human beings? It is now. At Obama Memorial, docs won’t be treating patients. They’ll be processing “volume.” And then, with what time and energy remains in the day, they’ll be inputting medical data to comply with the law’s new Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), lodged in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.Here’s the Centers’ own description of what PQRS does: “The program provides an incentive payment to practices with eligible professionals (identified on claims by their individual National Provider Identifier [NPI] and Tax Identification Number [TIN]) who satisfactorily report data on quality measures for covered Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) services furnished to Medicare Part B Fee-for-Service (FFS).”We’re all pressed for thinking time these days, but the one group we should make sure has time to focus on what’s in front of them is doctors treating patients. Instead, they’ll also be doing mandated data dumps for far-off panels of experts.Doubts, even among believers, have begun to emerge about what ObamaCare could do to the practice of medicine. A remarkable and important piece by Drs. Christine K. Cassel and Sachin H. Jain in the June 17 Journal of the American Medical Association directly asks: “Does Measurement Suppress Motivation?”The question raised by the article is whether imposing pay-for-performance measurements on individual physicians does more harm than good: “[C]lose attention must be given to whether and how these initiatives motivate physicians and not turn physicians into pawns working only toward specific measurable outcomes, losing the complex problem-solving and diagnostic capabilities essential to their role in quality of patient care, and diminish their sense of professional responsibility by making it a market commodity.

 

“This is an important piece, because Dr. Cassel is part of the intellectual foundation for the measured-directives movement. The saying that comes to mind reading these misgivings is that it’s better late than never to notice that the core relationship between doctor and patient is being eroded. Except that in the wake of Chief Justice Roberts’s upholding of the Affordable Care Act, it’s too late and we’re beyond never.Mitt Romney needs a way to talk about health care in America. This isn’t just a fight over insurance companies. It’s about the people at the center of health care—doctors. The Affordable Care Act will damage that most crucial of all life relationships, that between an ill person and his physician. Barack Obama’s assertion that we all can keep our doctors is false.

 

You could line up practicing physicians from here to Boston to explain to Mr. Romney why that is so.

 

Write to henninger@wsj.com

More Information from Minnesota for Marriage…

Minnesota For Marriage Releases Minnesota Marriage Minute Video: “What kind of issues would small business owners face if marriage is redefined?”

Small business owners who conscientiously object to same-sex marriage will face a range of potential consequences including lawsuits, administrative actions and loss of governmental benefits and contracts.

CLICK HERE to view the video. Please take the time to share it with all your friends, neighbors, family and colleagues.

The Minnesota Marriage Minute is an ongoing dialogue with Minnesota voters hosted by veteran news anchor Kalley Yanta. The educational videos are designed to explore issues related to the marriage amendment. The videos are in a question and answer format and are released on a weekly basis.
 
The Marriage Minute series is a great resource for understanding the proposed Marriage Protection Amendment and equipping you to speak about the amendment. Please share this important educational resource with family members, friends and neighbors. It’s critically important that all our supporters be as informed as possible about the amendment, and this series of videos is a quick and easy way for you and your friends to learn about what is at stake in this election.

CLICK HERE to view this week’s episode of Minnesota Marriage Minute and then share it with everyone you can!