Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's, D-Nev., buyoffs to Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., for their votes for Obamacare are up against an important legal fact: They're unconstitutional.
President Obama's team has scared the nation over the past week with pronouncements so crazy they leave you breathless. But worse still are the decisions they've made, decisions that show America is in danger, and that those charged with protecting us are failing to treat this life-and-death struggle as the war that it really is.
Two ongoing trends I chronicled during 2009 highlight an ironic situation: Leftists remain tough on their domestic political opponents, while lax when it comes to our real common enemies. As we recently saw with the Christmas airplane-bombing attempt, leftists seem bent on treating terrorists with kid gloves, insisting they receive rights normally reserved for U.S. citizens (even when this means failing to extract timely information that might save lives).
The editor of the New Yorker was once asked about the hip, cool, insider writing that graced his journal. Didn't its stylish prose go over people's heads? "We don't write it for the little old lady from Dubuque," he replied. Not pitching your case to the little old lady from Dubuque, Iowa, became a hallmark of modern sophisticated liberalism--a liberalism more characterized by point-of-view than by policy point papers. So when the New Yorker's Christmas week number hit newsstands, it was bound to attract attention.
America is careening in overdrive in exactly the wrong direction, and the American people know it. All across this nation, people crave a new vision of leadership to restore traditional American prosperity and the American Dream, which they rightly see slipping away.
This column originally appeared on The American Spectator website on December 30, 2009.
The health policy atrocity that Washington Democrats are now finalizing represents an ugly new turn in American politics. From almost the founding of the Republic, we have seen demagogues seek to sway public opinion in their favor with crass arguments appealing to base motives in the electorate, from racism to class warfare to xenophobia. But that is NOT what we are seeing in Washington today, on issues from health care to “global warming” to federal deficits, spending, taxes, welfare, energy, and beyond.
What we are seeing in Washington today is much worse. […]
President Obama's health-care bill is now moving toward final passage. The policy issues may be coming to an end, but the legal issues are certain to continue because key provisions of this dangerous legislation are unconstitutional. Legally speaking, this legislation creates a target-rich environment. We will focus on three of its more glaring constitutional defects.
"Ever since Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform in 1912, seven presidents -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- have taken up the cause of reform time and time again," President Obama said in a statement hailing the Christmas Eve Senate vote to take over 1/6 of the nation's economy. "Such efforts have been blocked by special-interests lobbyists who have perpetrated the status quo that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people."
Pollsters like to say their surveys are like a snapshot, limited to the time and the picture frame in which they are taken. What we are seeing in polling on the takeover of health care by the federal government is a consistent opposition by the American people. No major poll shows the people supporting the House or Senate bill.
John Maynard Keynes is considered one of the leading lights of liberal economics. Challenged by a critic who said that in the long run, Keynesian economics would lead to national bankruptcy, Keynes memorably responded with a witticism: "In the long run, we're all dead."
