Did you catch President Obama’s opener during his presser at the White House while responding to the horrendous Supreme Court ObamaCare ruling on Thursday? It’s a crash of the Constitution.
“Five years ago, after nearly a century of talk, decades of trying, a year of bipartisan debate,” Obama said. “We finally declared in America health care is not a privilege, but a right for all.”
Cue image of Founding Fathers in graves, rolling.
Health. Care. Is. Not. A. Right.
Except, now it is. And the reverberations due to be heard around the country from this core outcome of the court’s ruling – 6-3, in favor of upholding the subsidies in Obamacare – are going to be massive. How so? Just take a before-after shot.
Once upon a time, some guys with some good orating skills and even better writing talents gathered together for some political shop-talk in Philadelphia to see if they could come up with a proper way to inform the King of England they weren’t going to play his reindeer games any more.
Idea men were appointed: This “Committee of Five,” as it was dubbed, included John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Robert Livingston of New York and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Jefferson spent nearly three weeks penning what was to become one of the greatest political policy positions the world’s ever seen, the Declaration of Independence. And among its many simple premises was this powerful phrase – that governments are instituted to uphold the God-given rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Health care did not make the list.
But now, thanks to the Supreme Court, the floodgates of this limited government principle have been thrust wide. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his fiery dissent: The court was guilty of “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” a phrase defined by Merriam-Webster as “dishonest or suspicious activity.” What would be the proper term, I wonder, to describe a court case that now solidifies what many in the patriotic, traditional-minded and conservative-thinking camps of politics and culture fear is a socialist vein creeping into American society?
Oh yes – that’s called Burwellian, a playful little mix of “Orwellian” and the case name, King v. Burwell. And it’s being picked up by Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist who is steaming fast and furious ahead to unseat presidential heir apparent Hillary Clinton from her throne. Recent polls, too, find in his favor.
“In simultaneous surveys, the U.S. senator from Vermont received nearly a quarter of support from likely Democratic caucus and primary voters in the states that host the first presidential nomination balloting early next year, cutting sharply into Clinton’s still-huge lead,” Bloomberg Politics just reported. “The polls suggest substantive and symbolic support for the socialist, as well as a craving among some Democrats for a Clinton rival to rise.”
Meanwhile, the number of candidates in the Republican presidential field has hit Lucky 13 – a bevy that will no doubt cause enough infighting to frustrate the few voters left in America whose attention spans aren’t limited to the time-frame of typing a tweet. Can you say disenfranchised? Let’s hope the candidate emerging from primary season is enough of a principled politician … well, let’s hope, at least, he or she is not a moderate.
Because moderate in Republican circles of late seems to mean Democratic. And in the Democratic circles, we seem to have an emerging socialist party.
So to recap: We’ve got a Supreme Court that just threw a dagger at limited government. We’ve got a sitting president who just received a judicial hand-clap for his socialist Obamacare. And we’ve got an emerging Democratic presidential candidate with a self-declared love of socialism and a voter base that finds his message compelling – and a Republican Party that seems emasculated, at worst, and confused, at best, in how to rein in this entitlement-minded atmosphere.
The days of America as a republic seem to be reaching their end. So how about a note of inspiration, to turn back the clock and remind who we are? This one from Patrick Henry seems most apt: “I know not what others may choose but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death.”
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