The Heritage Foundation today: "Is Obamacare Consistent with Our First Principles?" And this is a piece from the Heritage Foundation about how all of this health care is really just unconstitutional. "During one of Sen. Arlen Specter's (D-PA) early health care townhalls in Lebanon, Pennsylvania; mother of two Katy Abram told the audience: 'I don't believe this is just about health care. It's not about TARP. It's not about left and right. This is about the systematic dismantling of this country. I'm only 35 years-old. I've never been interested in politics. You have awakened the sleeping giant.' Abrams is dead on. Our federal government has, unfortunately, long been drifting away from the limited government principles first envisioned by our founders. But over the past eleven months, that drift has turned into an all out sprint towards an undemocratic, technocratic, leviathan state … a type of government that our Constitution was specifically designed to prevent.
"As Abram points out, both political parties have been complicit in the rapid deterioration of our founding principles. It was after all President Bush who pushed for and signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 which created the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). When the Bush administration submitted their legislation to Congress we warned: 'From a constitutional standpoint, the current versions of the legislation are different in scope, and especially in kind, from almost any federal legislation that has come before.' Specifically we identified: (1) Congress's enumerated power -- or lack thereof -- to intervene with private markets in the manner contemplated, (2) the lack of meaningful standards to guide the extremely broad grant of discretion to the Treasury secretary (the 'legislative delegation' problem), (3) limitations on judicial review over the exercise of that almost limitless discretion, and (4) related separation of powers concerns." And they were exactly right. Congress doesn't have the right constitutionally to intervene in the private sector the way they are doing and did.
Now, the Heritage Foundation piece here says: "The only thing that truly surprised us after the legislation's passage was just how quickly our worst fears were realized. The TARP plan, as sold to Congress, was never even implemented and, instead, it quickly devolved into a political slush fund," and there were people that warned that that's what it was all about in the first place. "Even worse is what is not yet in the bill, but is desperately wanted by the Obama administration. A super-empowered Medicare Payment Advisory Commission that is specifically designed to 'save money in an apolitical, technocratic way.' The entire purpose of this part of Obamacare would be to take medical decisions away from patients and vest it in a panel of experts specifically designed to be completely unaccountable to the American people. Is this what the Framers of the Constitution had in mind?"
Let me translate this for you. Right now Congress decides on Medicare payments, how much, where they go, as a matter of legislation. Rahm Emanuel has said the most important thing in any health care legislation is transferring that control to the White House. Obama wants to set up a panel of people, czars that are not accountable to anybody, that will make these decisions, and that's where the end-of-life stuff has come into question and the death panels and all of that. And that is clearly unconstitutional. The powers delegated by the Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Most of the Constitution tells the government what it cannot do. Obama doesn't like that. So this entire health care legislation is not even constitutional. We're watching it being shredded before our eyes.
This is basically the question of whether or not health care is a 'right' according to the Constitution. Obama and many liberals would say (in fact, Obama did say this in one of the debates last fall) that it is. Conservatives would say that it is not. Another good analysis that addresses this idea can be found at RedState. Excerpts:
[A 'right' is] something the government cannot forbid.
A basic right which is implied but not mentioned in the Constitution is the right to travel. The government should not interfere in our movement from place to place. But there is no right to transportation, either to a specific form of transport or to have any provided, Cash For Clunkers notwithstanding. If there were, one couldn't pass by a hitchhiker (and they would choke every intersection demanding that their rights be satisfied).
Similarly, the government should not be able to bar anyone from receiving health care. That is very different thing from supplying it to everyone, or forcing health care workers to serve anyone who appears before them.
But in their usual manner, the left have found a way to redefine the word "right" in this context, from that which the government cannot prevent to that which it must provide.
That's the key, I think, and something that many Americans seem to have forgotten. Get that firmly in your head as the foundation of this argument: a 'right', defined as something the government cannot prevent, does not equate to something that the government must provide.
I remember reading another description some time ago (can't remember where, or I'd cite it) that said a true constitutional right is something that is granted to all without taking something away from any. To call health care a 'right' fails that definition, too, since the masses will be forced to fund via their taxpayer dollars the 'right' to 'free' health care for others.
RedState also hits on this idea in a larger context:
Like other socialists, Barack Obama believes rights to include things the government must provide, and it is from that unfortunate perspective that he was able to give the clear response that he did. Indeed, positive rights are the essence of socialism, and cause an insidious mission creep for an ever-expanding government. Positive rights also lead inevitably to forcing one citizen, whether driver or physician, to serve another.
From a reading of the Constitution and an understanding of how the Founders intended it, the idea that health care is a 'right' is wholly inaccurate. The fact that so many Americans even accept that premise shows us the results of decades of liberal indoctrination in our education system, and the danger in allowing words to be redefined.
Ultimately, the shredding of the Constitution will only be stopped when Americans get back to it, understand it, and rely upon it rather than the redefinition du jour.
There's my two cents.
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