The truest picture is quite to the contrary. He was pious, devoutly religious and temperate. King George was known as faithful to his wife and adoring of his fifteen children. At home in England, he was beloved throughout his celebrated fifty-nine year rein.

While the Declaration of Independence can be purely defined as a list of grievances with the Christian King, in truth, independence came as a final remedy for those grievances. Eighteenth century England was a perfectly lovely nation to be a free citizen of. In the New World, the colonial system was coupled with low taxation, open markets and free trade. This created what Historians believe was the most prosperous place with the highest standard of living in the world. What’s more, England was a nation of law and justice. Not tyranny and despotism.

Yet, ten years before the Declaration, Parliament levied the Stamp Act on the colonies, a direct tax requiring that each printed document carry a revenue stamp. To be sure, the revenues were intended to pay for the debts accrued from the costly, but highly successful Seven Year’s (or French and Indian) War: a war which ultimately benefitted the colonies far more than it did the motherland. Still, it was the principle of this tax that infuriated the colonists and ignited a decade of resistance. The colonies had no Parliamentary representation, yet Parliament had complete taxation authority over the colonies.

If that seems unjust, imagine an electorate with universal suffrage (above age 18) and representation, but which comingles taxpayers with persons who pay almost no taxes and with non-tax payers. If a non-taxpaying welfare recipient is voting for her welfare check, er, uh, voting for Linda Sanchez that is, while a taxpayer is voting in the same district for a welfare reforming tax reducer, have we reached the point of taxation without representation? At the very least, we have a gross dilution of the taxpayer’s voting representation.

Liberals like to argue—here, I loosely interchange “argue” where I in fact mean, “spit, stutter and scream”—so what if the top X% are paying taxes, the average person (the little guy) isn’t affected. By their logic, a tax could justly confiscate 99% of one extremely wealthy person’s fortune. Indeed, I suppose if I had ten children and only boiled one of them alive, the other nine should really have nothing to complain about.

Take the so-called “Death Tax,” officially titled the “Estate Tax.” In 1916, Congress decided that when a person dies, the value of his estate shall be taxed above a certain exempted amount. Talk about taxation without representation. Who is there to represent deceased persons whose estates don’t come in under the exemption? I’m not certain, but I don’t believe Heaven has Congressional representation (though I see that Hell has quite a number of districts now).

Liberals will “argue” that this tax only affects the “rich.” Even if this were true, I fail to see the underlying “argument.” One, accruing wealth is not (yet) a crime in America. Two, even if it were, a criminal penalty cannot be made into the form of a tax. Three, putting one and two aside, what do we suppose forms the genesis of jobs, investment and economic growth? Let’s just hope it’s all generated at the Internal Revenue Service, because it’s hording mass amounts of capital.

In 2001, Congress repealed the Death Tax. Ever since, Congress has slowly phased it out by reducing the rate by 55% per year, while increasing the exemption from $1 million to $3.5 million. In 2000, 52,000 estates paid the tax. Because of the increased exemption, only 17,000 paid it in 2008, generating about $24 billion (or, a paltry 1% of Federal tax revenue. Thus, to suggest that this tax serves the noble purpose of deficit reduction is like suggesting a handful of iodine tablets will revitalize the Gulf Coast.).

Since it was part of a budget reconciliation bill, Congressional rules placed a ten-year expiration on it. This Congress is now refusing to repeal it permanently, guaranteeing that the heirs of anyone who dies with an estate larger than at least $3.5 million will be hit by up to 45% taxation.

Liberals will hail this as a tax on the richest of the rich, and a means of forestalling the onset of oligopoly in America: to keep wealth from being centralized in a small number of hands. Truly, better all the wealth to be placed in one set of hands.

But this isn’t the whole story. For one, the economy doesn’t work like it did in fourteenth century Venice. The modern economy is fueled by innovation, and there is ample opportunity in the global marketplace for individuals to pursue high-paying work, start businesses and market their ideas.

Second, this is a tax on capital, not income. That includes stocks and investments, as well as machinery, equipment and any resource that generates incomes. That means, if you own a small business and a home totaling $3.5 million, your heirs shall be hit with a tax. So, in addition to the estate of Bill Gates, farmers, restaurateurs, donut-chain owners, auto-repair shop owners and anyone who spent fifty years building a small fortune will leave behind a hefty tax burden. Often times, the only way  for the heirs to pay this tax is to liquidate that capital (i.e., sell it off at fair market value). Unless one can conceive of maintaining an auto shop without a lift or a donut shop without a commercial deep fryer, this often means selling the whole business to cover the tax.

This leaves business owners with one rational option: life insurance. Yes, the party who supposedly “has your back” when it comes to fighting off those conniving insurance lobbyists (all the while having their campaign war chests stocked by insurance companies) would rather have you sink thousands into insurance companies, rather than simply relinquish its postmortem claim on your estate.

Third, if Liberals are so hungry for a tax on capital being transferred to heirs, why has the inheritance tax not satiated them? Already, if a person dies leaving a capital asset to his heir, the heir carries over the basis of that capital, and is taxed should he ever sell that asset. Thus, if Grandma buys a diamond ring in 1925 for $200, leaving it to you in her will, and you sell that ring for $10,000 in 2010, you will be taxed on $9,800 of that sale.

But it’s never enough. This tax isn’t about placing a check on the centralization of wealth, nor even is it about redistributing wealth. Maximal taxation, no matter the reason or outcome is the name of this game. This is about control, servitude and dependence.

By forcing persons with estates exceeding the exempted amount to (a) invest in life insurance (b) invest in estate planning attorneys (c) avoid growth of its business to avoid the inevitable tax burden, this tax is an irrational obstacle placed in the way of job creation. The Heritage Foundation has cited studies indicating that no fewer than 130,000 and as many as 1.5 million jobs would be created by repealing this tax.

Although Heritage is an undeniably Conservative institution, can there be any doubt that lifting this burden would lead to job creation? At its core, this tax suggests that it is better to waste economic resources immediately, rather than reinvest in one’s business enterprises, and thereby invest in the growth of our nation. That it is better for an heir to sell his parents’ business or sell off assets to pay a tax, rather than to hire a new employee and expand the business. Instead, let the federal government extend his unemployment benefits and all are taken care of!

Revolutions have been waged over far less than the unjust and unfounded Death Tax. If he were here, King George himself might survey the current political landscape and find strange bedfellows throughout this very nation, now in its 234th year of belligerence. As matter of fact, George III would practically be Ron Paul in 2010.

Partisanship can be volatile. Mix in factors like universal suffrage at the age of eighteen (it may as well be aged seven in the case of most American eighteen year olds) and a government that buys voter loyalty with statist ‘goodies’ like “free” health care and “free” education for millions, and the situation becomes explosive.

(“When the people find that they can vote themselves money,” Benjamin Franklin warned, “that will herald the end of the republic.”)

Still, maintaining the proposition that both mainstream political parties are ‘equally bad,’ is on the order of holding that a sore throat and a violent case of rectal cancer are ‘equally bad.’

It’s true, both parties share the blame for the federal Nanny State, the permanent-war mentality, the devaluing of the currency and the bastardization of the greatest economy in the history of the world. But this is sort of like saying a battered wife was as much responsible for the dissolution of her marriage as her aggressive husband because she let herself go. I mean, sure, that probably ticked him off.

From the French Revolution to Vietnam, some form of Democrat always had war fever (that’s if one sees a continuing line between Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama; I however see a discrete and discernible branching point somewhere around Otto Von Bismark). Granted, several of those wars were justifiable. But the attitude was indiscriminating and hubristic, and characteristically Democrat.

Enter George W. Bush.

Enough has been argued about the moral and legal justifications for the Iraq and Afghan Wars to fill a million blogs. What’s certain is that from Lincoln to Reagan, Republicans were hawks, but temperate and resolved. Lincoln had no options. Robert Taft was weary of Cold War adventures into Asia. Reagan never fought the Soviets on the battlefield, nor did Nixon. Nixon began our exit from Vietnam. Goldwater was a hawk, but Johnson was the cowboy, pissing in the wind. Democrats from Wilson to Truman, Kennedy to Johnson, and Clinton to Obama have been militarily ambitious, globalist, at times even imperialist. George W. Bush cited Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman among his heroes.

Setting aside the moral justifications for Iraq and Afghanistan – indeed, even for Korea and Vietnam – let us be fair and assume Bush broke with his party’s form.

Among other breaks from tradition, Bush supported the expansion of Medicare, amnesty, the expansion of federal education spending, all the while fashioning himself a “Compassionate Conservative” (as a Conservative, I deduce that the qualifier in that phrase is intended to insinuate that (1) persons like myself are not compassionate and that (2) Bush and his ilk were at least somewhat-big government bleeding hearts).

The 2008 standard-bearer of the party, John-reach-around-the-aisle-McCain authored the First Amendment killing McCain-Feingold bill, restricting federal campaign expenditures in an unprecedented manner. He too supports amnesty, permanent war with whoever looks at us funny, and repealing the Bush tax cuts.

But can it even be argued that these examples create a moral equivalence? Conservatives, many Independents and Conservative-Republicans plugged their noses to vote for John McCain, and now he might loose his own Senate primary in Arizona.

Obama’s amnesty scheme comes with the support of the mainstream of his radical party. Bush fought multitudes of dissenters in his party, and the attempt failed.

Bush, as the story goes, supported an “unprecedented” expansion of Executive power and was a war-mongorer (then again, he never suspended habeas corpus, like Lincoln; imprisoned a vast concentration of persons on the basis of race, like Franklin D. Roosevelt; executed enemy combatants, like Franklin D. Roosevelt. He did however, like Clinton, lob missiles into Iraq on the basis of a Weapons of Mass Destruction proliferation program and Saddam Hussein’s violation of U.N. sanctions). Fair enough, and Obama is doing what again in Afghanistan and Iraq? I mean, I know he stopped using the words “Enemy Combatant” and “War and Terror.”

Bush’s Afghan War was mild compared to Barack Obama’s Afghan War, where double the amount of casualties have occurred in one-seventh of the amount of time. This is because Obama promised a resurgent Afghan policy and a quick-as-can-be 2011 exit (Gotta get back to handling the more important domestic agenda. You know, ruining the economy, killing jobs, maybe a little golf.)

Moreover, unlike Obama, it was at least believable that Bush supported racial equality (save that racially-charged Hurricane he caused). In what is surely a casebook example of voter intimidation, in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (passed by 94% of Senate Republicans and 73% of Senate Democrats), the New Black Panthers stood in front of a Philadelphia polling place on the night of the 2008 election brandishing batons. (I don’t know, surely Black Panthers with batons outside a polling place is only theoretically intimidation on the basis of race. It’s not like the voters were Harvard Black Studies professors or anything).

The Bush Justice Department initiated a lawsuit which Obama’s DOJ pursued, at least, up until recently.

Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli overruled a unanimous recommendation from six DOJ attorneys to pursue this case. This prompted one of those attorneys to resign from the DOJ and blow the lid on this incident. Testifying at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission (which has now opened an investigation into the Obama DOJ), J. Christian Adams further added the shocking detail that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes suspended enforcement of sections of the VRA’s “Motor Voter law,” which requires states to purge voter rolls of dead people, felons, illegal aliens and voters who have moved out of state.

According to Adams, Fernandes’ refused to pursue such cases: “We’re not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it.”

(Fernandes and Perrelli are both Obama appointees. New Black Panther head Malik Shabazz’s name appears on the White House guest list numerous times. But let’s not jump to any conclusions or rush to judgement here. No, leave that to be done by Obama anytime a pompous Harvard professor of Black Studies is arrested. In that case, let’s leap as far as we can to our conclusions about racial discrimination.)

And, unlike Obama, Bush didn’t carve a hole in the Commerce Clause, just wide enough to squeeze two disastrous radicals through. For two consecutive summers, we have endured the nonsensical babbling of Sonia Sotomayer and Elena Kagan. Asked during her hearings whether the Commerce Clause (an enumerated Constitutional power of the U.S. Congress, designed to facilitate interstate commerce among the several states) allowed Congress the power to require Americans to eat vegetables, Kagan had no clear answer. She simply refused to deal with the hypothetical in any direct manner.

Just to recap, this Congress just said, via their Commerce Clause authority, that all Americans must purchase health insurance. If you think the vegetable analogy is weak, or that Kagan was being “judicious” in not answering such frivolous questions and not disclosing how she would rule on hypotheticals, imagine this: What if a Senator asked, “Does the General Welfare clause allow Congress to require 18-25 year olds to tap dance three times a week?” Is there a judicious way of answering this? The answer is “NO,” simply put the answer is “NO.” Any person who can’t answer “NO,” whether you’re a lawyer or a plumber living in the United States, needs to be locked away permanently.

So, is there any credible reason that the answer to the question about vegetables would be something different? Or even, “No, but…”

And yet the same party that is requiring us to purchase health insurance via the Commerce Clause, and planting judges on the Court who can at least conceive of ways for them to require us to eat vegetables, just found the limit of the Commerce Clause. The Obama DOJ has decided to sue the state of Arizona on the grounds that its completely reasonable and lawful immigration law violates the Commerce Clause!

Equally bad? You must be drinking….

I had intended to complete a series on the faux outrage surrounding Pope Benedict XVI. I may yet return to the topic. Since my last blog, another scandal among certain members of the clergy has broken. Only, the pundits and editorialists aren’t wringing their fists over this one.

Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles is the focus of this scandal. Mahoney, a consummate disappointment, wrote in his blog that Arizona’s new immigration law is, “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law.” The boobishness of this statement shall become apparent if it is not already. On initial reflection, I wondered why something so “useless” is, at the same time, so enraging.

“The tragedy of the law,” Mahoney wrote, “is its totally flawed reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources. That is not only false, the premise is nonsense.” Illegal aliens (The term “illegal immigrant” being, most assuredly, nonsense) without a doubt “consume” public resources. Since they consume far more public resources than the amount of income taxes they contribute, “rob” seems to be an apt term (though a bit inflammatory, we must admit). “Plunder” is a term that is just rather illustrative and fun.

“[T]he present immigration system,” Mahoney went on to say, “is completely incapable of balancing our nation’s need for labor and the supply of that labor.” Our nation has reached its highest unemployment rate in almost thirty years. Which “need for labor” would that be?

Mahoney lamented, “[the] Census Bureau reports that every day a minimum of 10,000 baby boomers retire.” A lot of baby boomers standing outside of Home Depot looking for work, are there? Indeed, how many baby boomers on the brink of retirement are working at minimum wage or below? How many are working as day laborers?

Is this clown serious? Last month, the United States added 471,000 jobless claims (or, more than 10,000 per day). Which need for labor is Mahoney babbling about? There isn’t one. Not unless one believes that companies have a need for cheap labor that will push out more skilled (read: more expensive) American citizens.

This point ought to be the focus of the discussion whenever do-gooding bleeding hearts like Mahoney preach about “comprehensive immigration reform” (in contradistinction to forty years of the Fed’s “half-assed border control reform”). What they are saying is, in effect, in response to an apparent (if not imagined) need for fast-food workers, farm hands and day laborers, let us import a class unskilled, non-English speaking serfs who will work for a pittance. Liberal compassion: Creating slaves and second-class citizens since 1933.

In the midst of this mindless drivel, Mahoney’s most irresponsible moment came with this: “I can’t imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation.”

Last month, the state of Arizona passed SB 1070, a law prohibiting businesses and landlords from harboring illegal aliens. The law does no more than make federal laws enforceable by Arizona police (who must report illegal aliens to the proper federal authorities). Police officers may, when under reasonable suspicion that a suspect is an illegal alien, and in the course of a traffic stop or other police action, stop suspected-illegal aliens and ask for identification.

Today, at this very instance, police may, in every state in the nation, pursuant to forty years of Supreme Court decisions, stop anyone where a reasonable suspicion that the suspect is in the course of committing a crime. Under SB 1070, police may stop a person where they obtain reasonable suspicion that the person is an illegal alien. They may ask the suspect for identification. Under federal law, all legal aliens are required to carry proof of citizenship: Such has been the law since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law in 1940.

This law is not unique to America either. Nearly all European Union nations have similar requirements that aliens keep their documentation on them at all times. In Mexico, immigrants are required to provide their own health care, and authorities can keep track of every immigrant by demanding to see their papers. If you don’t produce your papers or if you produce false papers, you can be fined, imprisoned and even deported. Illegal immigration into Mexico is a felony. If a Mexican were to marry a foreigner with the sole intent of gaining residence in the country for that foreigner, he can be imprisoned for five years.

In American, we have anchor babies.

Arizona simply attaches a state penalty where one fails to abide by a federal law. And the penalty is, when all is said and done, a misdemeanor. The means by which officers are allowed to enforce the new state law is 100% compatible with well-established constitutional precedent (“reasonable suspicion” of a crime in progress extends no more than the power to “stop” a suspect).

Also, for federal law to pre-empt a state’s immigration law, it would need to do so expressly. Thus, Arizona’s 2007 law, prohibiting businesses from hiring illegal aliens, was already upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Barring the jurisprudence of a wise Latina, this precedent will obviously be upheld.

The law explicitly states that police, “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” for the purpose of determining immigration status. This provision is fully in keeping with constitutional precedent. It has never been held that race cannot be a factor in establishing reasonable suspicion; it has been established that race cannot be the sole determining factor.

Suppose a cop walks into a bank, and a teller pops up from behind the counter yelling ‘eight Chinese men just robbed us and went out the back door thirty seconds ago!’ If the cop walks out the back door and spots three Japanese men, two Chinese men and five black women, would we call it “ racial profiling” if he grabbed the three Japanese men and the two Chinese men? Possibly, but surely the time and location mattered as well.

Pulling up to the local check cashing store and demanding identification from every brown-skinned patron would more than likely exceed the powers granted by SB 1070. What about stopping a speeding van heading northbound twenty-five minutes from the Arizona border? If the cop looks inside and sees twenty-three pasty-white men wearing berets and speaking French, would it be “racial profiling” if the officer decided to let them go? What about eighteen brown-skinned men speaking Spanish?

Are we insane? We’re not looking for French-Canadians in the American southwest. But there is no reason to think that every brown-skinned person walking the streets has become a target. And even if a legal immigrant or naturalized citizen is stopped under reasonable suspicion, they will be let go as soon as identification is provided. It is only the illegal alien who should worry about 1070…. and that’s sort of the point.

Mahoney is right. The Arizona law is exactly like Nazism, except that the Nazi’s were keeping people in the country while Arizona is trying to enforce existing federal laws that require deportation. And, minus the racism and ethnic cleansing, yes, SB 1070 is precisely like Nazism. Surely, if the ten to fifteen million Jews and Catholics who were slaughtered in Hitler’s death camps were here today, they would agree with the wise Cardinal and his Marxist ilk. (Celebrating May Day protests ought to, at a minimum, qualify one as a Marxist.)

Mahoney has been a massive disappointment as Cardinal of Los Angeles. He is the worst example of a clergyman who would choose radical ideology over his Church. For popularity, fame, and adoration, Mahoney has fashioned himself a “Progressive.” For example, when the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops and even Catholic Democrats in the U.S. Congress were standing firm against federal funding for abortion in Obama’s health care bill, Mahoney triangulated. When asked if he agreed that the bill funded abortion he responded: “This is way beyond my field. My field is immigration. I really haven’t kept up on that, and I spend all my time on this other. You have to get somebody who spends time on that.”

Immigration is his field? Pardon me, I thought salvation was his field. Mahoney is comfortable discussing immigration law (which he clearly does not understand), the economics of labor and immigration’s effects (which he clearly does not understand), and the history of Nazism (which he clearly does not understand). Yet, strangely, he is not comfortable taking a position on an issue which the USCCB, the US Congress, and most of the country has taken positions on? Could he not have at least taken it on the wisdom of the USCCB that the bill might have funded abortions and stated that if the bill did fund abortions he would strongly oppose it? No, no, that’s not his field.

The closest he came was when asked whether he thought the bill should fund abortion: “No, but that’s what the president said, too.” So, Obama championed the restrictions on federal abortion funding? Mahoney takes the word of a president who overturned the Mexico City policy in his first week in office, promised Planned Parenthood the Freedom of Choice Act (repealing all state abortion restrictions with federal preemption), said he doesn’t know when “babies” have human rights, said he wouldn’t want his daughters “punished” with a baby, proclaims himself pro-choice, and appoints pro-choice after pro-choice candidate to every executive post and board that opens up; yet, Mahoney can’t assume the USCCB knows what it is talking about regarding abortion funding?

Interestingly, Mahoney was asked all of this while speaking at an event funded by the leftwing Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress considers abortion to be one of many “reproductive” rights (it’s the one that stops “reproduction” dead in its tracks).

The Catechism is quite explicit about abortion. [Catechism n. 2270-2272.] While immigration is a natural right as defined in the Catechism [Catechism n. 2241], at no point has the Church ever taken the position that a sovereign nation may not regulate immigration. Now, it is immoral to willingly enforce and abide by immoral laws. [Catechism n. 2242.] Therefore, if a Catholic hospital were required to provide abortion services, the hospital must disobey the law or close its doors.

Mahoney has chosen to wash his hands of the abortion issue: That’s not his field. On the other hand, he has no problem throwing in with May Day protestors in the face of a “useless” law that does nothing to disturb existing Constitutional precedent.

This is not a debate about whether immigration is good; or whether brown-skinned people are equal or inferior. The demagogues like Mahoney, Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon who define the debate as such are worth less than dog feces. This is about the Rule of Law, and the protections it provides. If law were followed, legal immigration would allow persons to enter this nation in the light of day under the protection of law. Legal immigrants are given proper documentation, registered with proper authorities, given background checks, receive vaccinations, are inspected for disease, are in some cases given access to the vote (legally), do not live in fear of civil authorities, and would have bargaining power in the workplace. On the flip-side, if immigration law were enforced, American citizens would not live in fear of violent criminals flooding across their borders (Arizona is now the kidnapping capitol of America, and prisons throughout the Southwest are warehouses of Mexican drug traffickers and murderers. Hint: Mexico’s lawyers, doctors and aristocrats generally don’t make up the majority of our illegal alien community). American citizens would not have to fear the Balkanization of the Southwest. Americans didn’t worry about Ireland or Italy annexing New York during the immigration waives of the Nineteenth Century. Today, we meet righteous indignation whenever it is recommended that English be the sole language of government or that our schools teach American history and American Exceptionalism. May Day protestors don Mexican flags as they march through Los Angeles, and students get sent home from school for wearing American flags on Cinco de Mayo.

With proper immigration, we can enforce language requirements, American civics testing, and denunciation of one’s citizenship to other countries. Mahoney and his leftwing brethren prefer economic chaos, undocumented criminal elements, race wars, group identification, the disunion of a peaceful nation, and defiance of the Rule of Law.

Surely, Cardinal Mahoney is also aware that political authorities are morally obligated to regulate private ownership for the sake of the common good. [Catechism n. 2406]. In this country, the political authorities have extended hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded social services through tax and spend wealth redistribution, providing an incentive for millions to flood across a sovereign border in search of work, services, health care and education; all on the backs of tens of millions of American citizens (and their children) who are either loosing their bargaining power for low-skilled work or working to fund the difference for insolvent, irresponsible social service programs.

In Mexico, the political authorities are encouraging the citizenry to engage in this practice: the money being returned to relatives of illegal aliens has been a boon to the Mexican economy. Will Mahoney criticize our southern neighbors for fostering an environment where “Coyotes” kidnap, intimidate, rape, extort and kill immigrants attempting to escape to a better life? Is rape and murder not his field?

Mahoney and his leftwing ilk is the clergy scandal the NY Times won’t wring their fists over. He’s a disgrace, inasmuch as our president, his cabinet and his shills in the U.S. Congress are disgraces for giving a standing ovation to Mexican President Felipe Calderon as he stood before them denouncing Arizona.

Felipe Calderon is also a disgrace. This man presides over a nation in disarray, plagued by corruption, graft, human trafficking on its northern border, and abysmal poverty. His immigration laws are Draconian. This week, he gave the word “hypocrite” new meaning as he stood before the U.S. Congress criticizing Arizona’s new law. Our president, his cabinet (most of whom has claimed to have not read the fifteen page Arizona law; most of whom have claimed to have read the 2,400+ page health care law) and most of the senate applauded Calderon’s disgraceful display.

(If John McCain had any sense, he would have locked up his primary against J.D. Hayworth by walking out right there on live television. I am actually dumbfounded that the senators who were not applauding stood by. Was there any reasonable alternative to walking out of that room booing and hissing? I can’t see it.)

An especially stunning moment in this spectacle was when Attorney General Eric Holder stood and applauded: This disgrace claims to have not read the law, and yet he applauded Calderon as he lambasted the state of Arizona for passing the law. What was he applauding? Does he often oppose things he’s never read? Better yet, does he often lie to the U.S. Senate about not reading things?

We’ve reached the point where the highest level of government is joining a foreign diplomat in lambasting a state government for enacting a law that is 100% Constitutional and still less Draconian that the laws of the foreign diplomat’s own country. November cannot come quickly enough. If this nation has any luck left, we’ll replace the U.S. Congress with the Arizona Legislature.

http://cardinalrogermahonyblogsla.blogspot.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/opinion/29kobach.html

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/54397

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/09/more_than_a_choice.html

http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/ccc_toc.htm

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/14/local/la-me-0514-arizona-wiesenthal-20100514

http://factreal.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/mexico-vs-united-states-mexican-immigration-laws-are-tougher/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/20/felipe-calderon-gets-stan_n_583471.html

When two Catholics are properly married, divorce will be strictly forbidden. Your marriage shall be binding regardless of adultery, indeed, regardless of grave offenses like rape and molestation. Rather, the annulment procedure is followed: for good reason, marriages can be found to have never been effectively entered into. Unlike civil divorce, anullment is retroactive.

If you marry someone you know to be a rapist, chances are that neither party is copping out of that. But the vows are held to be null if, for example, a woman marries a man living a secret double-life as a rapist.

Likewise, when a priest takes a vow of celibacy, that vow is understood to be permanent. If the Vatican refuses to “defrock” a priest, absolving him of his priestly vows, it is not for the purpose of “protecting” him. In fact a priest, like an estranged married couple, can ignore the Church entirely on these matters: a couple can get a civil divorce and remarry in non-Catholic ceremonies; priests can abandon the priesthood. Sometimes priests are even removed from ministry by the Church, and not immediately defrocked. Such was the case with the former Rev. Stephen Kiesle of California (to be discussed in my next blog).

It’s easy to assume that not defrocking a priest who abused children (such as Kiesle) is tantamount to a show of approval, but this misunderstands the nature of the vow.

“Misunderstanding” is about the most charitable way I can bring myself to describe the current sentiment toward Benedict XVI and the Church.

For decades, the Church has been inundated with attacks from within, too numerous to explicate in a single blog: numerous Communists spies ordained as priests, for instance, have been outed over the last several decades; multiple convents have been transformed by rogue nuns, engaging in social and political agendas when they should remain chaste and in perpetually quiet devotion; Catholic charities have been abused by clergy and laity alike, again, in the advancement of political agenda; and Masses have been sullied.

These attacks are not new. For centuries, since the death of Christ, wolves have been infiltrating the Church that we Catholics believe was built on the rock of Peter by Christ himself. In 2000 years, that rock has not moved. But on many occasions, its been covered by mud, moss and filth, even, defiled by passers-by. Still, she sits unmoved by the slings, arrows and trappings of the age.

Over the last several decades, the seminaries, too, have been in a state of rot and decay. In addition to ordaining priests who, too often, twist theological precepts into conformity with politics and modernity—watering down the sacraments, liberalizing doctrinal teaching—the seminaries have widened their doors to gay men.

Let me pause here. Gay men, it will be said, have been unfairly called to attention for the recent sex-abuse scandals. To go right to the point, the only persons to be blamed are the perverse predators whose actions have unfairly defamed Christ’s own priesthood. Well over 90% of the world’s 400,000 priests have been unfairly called into question based on the actions of an exceedingly small percentage of their peers (and that’s a higher percentage than can be claimed of several other professions).

Whether it offends gay men that the Church forbids them from becoming priests is irrelevant. Whether it offends gay men that the Church has determined that their flock is better led—and that Christ’s priesthood is better represented—by celibate heterosexuals is not germane to the problem of, or the solution to clergy sex abuse.

While it is not an insignificant point, that is, while it is point that cannot be recalled enough, that the overwhelming majority of the sex abuse cases involve priests who are actually gay, I do not think the question of whether pedophilia bears a stronger correlation to homosexuality than it does to heterosexuality needs to be dwelled on. In fact, the opposite may well be true.

Or it may simply be that “homosexuality” is a modern construct, heretofore never thought of as an “alternative” lifestyle due to a simple fact: consensual relationships between adult men choosing other men as partners was only one among many kinds of sexual orientation crowding the field since the dawn of human history. In many ancient societies “heterosexual” men had wives, and young male lovers. Would this get them a free subscription to the GLAAD newsletter? No. Ancient man did not need to put on gay pride parades in order to choose alternative lifestyles. A 35 year old male might have had relations with a 14 year old male in some societies. This might have been the norm. Whether it was moral is a different matter.

But wait: are men who are attracted to prepubescent boys heterosexual or homosexual? As a matter of fact, what exactly shall we call men who are sexually aroused by feet, dressing up as animals, soft-core anime porn, robots, or hot air balloons? Maybe two types of “sexual orientation” doesn’t capture the whole field, after all. Maybe this or that being genetic (something we are born with) starts to become a ridiculous and untenable position when we hear that our neighbor actually prefers jellyfish to women or men. Is there a soft core anime pore gene?

Maybe it’s not out of jealous bigotry that Christians hold all forms of non-heterosexual, non-consensual, extra-marital sexual relations to be deviant. What is it to be sexually deviant but to deviate from God’s plan? Indeed, man and woman, married before God is brilliantly simple: in nature, it’s actually what works. Moreover, it is categorically non-hateful, inasmuch as inviting only peanut butter and jelly to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is truly not intended to offend bologna and anchovies.

Thus, the Church has refused all persons drawn to sexual practices that deviate from God’s plan. The seminaries refused to heed this call. What has occurred is an explosion of sexual abuse by sexual deviants.

Is pedophilia the logical outcome of being gay and celibate? Of course not, and it’s certainly not the logical outcome of simply being celibate (gay or heterosexual) either. This point cannot be emphasized enough: since it is not a lack of sex that causes one to become a sexual deviant, let us disabuse ourselves of this patently absurd notion that the institutional framework of the priesthood (in a word, its celibacy) is the root cause of these sex scandals. The liberal Catholics and non-Catholics know-nothings can drop this idea that allowing priests to marry would have prevented the whole problem. (“Liberal Catholic.” That’s much like saying…. “Agnostic Catholic.”)

Patently absurd, yes, and I may further endeavor to declare it grossly offensive to all men, in general. What are we animals? Was St. Paul, then, or St. Augustine or, indeed, Christ himself on the slippery road toward pedophilia? Is one not stark raving mad to suggest that it all comes down to that oppressive vow of celibacy?

But pedophilia is just where we get bogged down: the vast majority of sex abuse cases are not dealing with pedophilia, they are dealing with pederasts. The former is the abuse of prepubescent children (male and female) while the latter is the sexual abuse of young male adolescents. Is there a correlation between being gay and being attracted to males? Well, I think that’s obvious. Is it totally out of the question that a gay man might be attracted to teenage boys (15, 16 or 17)? Ask the Ancient Greeks…

The point is this: while many would like to attack the Church and its institutions (the priesthood, the Papacy), it is most certainly the deviation from the Church’s teachings that have led to the current problems. It’s easy for people who have always hated the Church to claim righteous indignation and make it the target of all their hatred: it is oppressive, abusive of women, dogmatic, outdated, and, now, criminal.

Yet, the longstanding rule that gays may not become priests has done just that: it has stood, long. In 2005, the former prefect of the Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith – in a sense, the Catholic Church’s top theologian – was elected Pope Benedict XVI. That same year, Benedict reaffirmed the position that gay men must not be allowed into the seminary. Indeed, Benedict XVI has reaffirmed that the reforms of Vatican II did not liberalize the Church’s teachings. It did not move the rock from its sacred place.

In my next blog, I will address the supposed “cover up” of these scandals.

by Josiah Parker

Before leaving the Commerce Clause issue, it’s worth confronting the oft used analogy of the healthcare bill’s individual mandate to state laws requiring the purchase of car insurance. On Nov. 9, when the president was asked by ABC’s Jake Tapper about the constitutionality of the individual mandate, Obama responded that it works, “in the same way that everybody has to get auto insurance and if you don’t, you’re subject to some penalty… there’s nothing wrong with [that] penalty.” Unbelievably, this is an analogy that Amar uses as well: “True, the plan imposes mandates on individuals. So do jury service laws, draft registration laws and automobile insurance laws.” For several reasons, this analogy is a poor one (and I blush at correcting both Amar, as mentioned above, a scholar of high repute, and the president, often toted by the media as being quite the constitutional law professor himself, on an issue of constitutional law so basic).

First (and most importantly), States are governments of general jurisdiction, with authority to pass laws on every issue except those few reserved to the federal government. That includes the police power, the authority to make laws for public health and safety. State laws requiring individuals to have car insurance in order to drive are a perfect example of a public-safety and public-health laws under State police powers. By contrast, the branches of the federal government only possess the powers enumerated to them in the constitution. Thus, Congress can only pass the individual mandate if it can identify an express constitutional grant which such legislation is serving. Second, car insurance is not a mandate. It is conditional. One only needs to possess car insurance if one drives. But millions of people don’t drive, choosing instead to use public transportation, or ride a bicycle, or walk. Thus, unlike the individual mandate which unconditionally compels certain citizens to purchase insurance or face a penalty, car insurance must only be purchased if one chooses to exercise the privilege of driving on public roads. Accordingly, car insurance isn’t even necessary to legally drive; one can legally drive on back-roads, or on one’s own property without falling within state insurance laws. Third, state laws requiring that individuals purchase car insurance only require liability insurance—that is, insurance that will cover for the destruction to public or private property not owned by the insured. By contrast, the individual mandate requires that individuals purchase health insurance for themselves. In this way, the public health rationale is much clearer for laws requiring the purchase of car insurance than the individual mandate, which at the very least stinks of government paternalism.

The arguments for the difference between car insurance and the individual mandate are thorough and fatal. Let’s agree to put that analogy to rest, then, once and for all.

Supporters of the healthcare bill will likely respond to the above arguments by looking to Congress’ taxing power to justify the individual mandate. The revenue power under the Constitution is certainly expansive: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States ….” (Article 1, section 8, cl. 1). Indeed, according to the 1937 case of Helvering v. Davis, if Congress reasonably concludes that its taxing and spending programs promote the general welfare, they will be deemed constitutional. Although the power has for this reason been described as “plenary,” the Constitution prescribes several limitations on Congress’ taxing power. One limitation, found in the fourth Clause of Article 1, Section 9, mandates that “no Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” In other words, under the Constitution “direct” taxes must be apportioned to state population: if State X has twice as many people as State Y, the amount of revenue collected from State X must be twice that collected from State Y. Like most federal revenue raising devices, the individual mandate is not apportioned to state population.

So does the individual mandate run afoul of Article 1, Section 9? To answer this question we must first ask whether the individual mandate a “direct tax.” To the extent that supporters of the healthcare bill attempt to obviate a Commerce Clause justification by arguing that the individual mandate is simply a “tax,” the problem they will immediately encounter is that if the individual mandate is to be construed as a tax, it is difficult to see how it could be anything but a direct tax. As mentioned above, it is not an excise tax on the purchase of a good (indirect tax). It is not a consumption tax on the purchase of a service (indirect tax). It is not a tax on one’s gross income (if a direct tax, expressly made permissible notwithstanding Article 1, Section 9’s apportionment requirement by the 16^th Amendment). It is the requirement that individuals pay the price of a government approved insurance premium or face penalties. Thus it seems to have the character of a capitation tax—or “head tax”—which, as mentioned in both Helvering and the language of Article 1, section 9, is one of the few examples of a direct tax that the Supreme Court specifically recognizes (along with real estate taxes).

Healthcare bill advocates may counter that the individual mandate is merely a “penalty tax” like a tax for failing to file one’s income taxes by the prescribed date when one is indebted to the government—only, in the case of the individual mandate, the penalty is for not having government approved health insurance. But the disanalogy there is evident: in the case of a penalty tax, the duty to pay the tax is triggered by some noncompliance behavior which is not itself a tax—in the example above, failure to file one’s income taxes by a certain date. However, the individual mandate simply is a duty to pay. In other words, whereas filing one’s income taxes is not a tax, but the failure to do so triggers the penalty tax, complying with the individual mandate is a tax, and failure to do so triggers additional penalties. Thus, calling the individual mandate a “penalty,” turns out to be a semantic maneuver with little substance. Were this allowed, Congress could easily obviate the apportionment requirement for all sorts of surcharges by simply calling them “penalties” for noncompliance with the duty to pay some other government approved agency. For this reason, imposing a surcharge measured by the annual cost of a government approved insurance package is indeed a capitation tax subject to the apportionment requirement. Because the bill runs afoul of this requirement, this avenue also seems foreclosed to the constitutional advocate of the healthcare bill.

And yet there are further constitutional defects with the bill. Both recently debated versions command that states establish “benefit exchanges,” which will require state legislation and regulations. This is not a condition for receiving federal funds, which would still leave some kind of choice to the states—the bill requires states to establish these exchanges or the Secretary of Health and Human Services will supplant State procedures and do it for them. It renders states little more than subdivisions of the federal government. Not only does this violate long-established federalist and constitutional principles of government, but directly conflicts with Supreme Court precedent. In the 1992 case of New York v. United States, the Supreme Court struck down the federal Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1985, which forced each state to make its own arrangements for disposing of the low-level radioactive waste generated in that state, on the grounds that “Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative processes of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal [law].” Similarly, in the 1997 case of Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court struck down the federal “Brady Bill” which ordered local Sherriff’s Department officials to conduct background checks on prospective gun purchasers as a temporary measure until a national computerized system for doing the checks could be phased in. The Court found that Congress may not compel a state or local government executive branch to perform functions—even if the functions are fairly ministerial and easy to perform, and even if the compulsion is only temporary. Because the “benefit exchanges” proposed by the healthcare bill will require state legislatures to pass specific facilitating-laws (in violation of New York v. United States), and compel state administrative agencies to oversee and administer the exchanges (in violation of Printz), the Supreme Court’s “anticommandeering” jurisprudence limits the scope of federal authority over state governments in a way inconsistent with the federal authority required by the execution of this key measure newly passed healthcare bill. While perhaps not fatal to the bill as a whole, this does represent an important constitutional barrier to the implementation of the legislation.

These are only the constitutional defects with the healthcare bill of which I am currently aware. There are almost certainly others of which I am not aware, and yet others that will be triggered if the bill ever goes into effect. It’s worth reflecting, for me at least, on the character of the national discussion over the healthcare reform legislation which has taken place up until this point. While historically debates over legislative policy in America have often been heated, it was always generally assumed by both sides of the debate that the constitution was supreme—that despite the merits of various ideas, and excepting debates over the inclusion of constitutional amendments to reflect the core human rights of our heritage—at the end of the day, if an idea is unconstitutional it should be abandoned. A new trend seems to be developing—or perhaps its more accurate to say is becoming increasingly more popular—in which it is taken for granted that the constitution is actually the handmaiden of policy, rather than policy being the handmaiden of the constitution. That this is true is evidenced by the grand political push for legislation the constitutionality of which was barely understood by most, and outright disregarded by many. The result we have before us is a bill that represents perhaps the greatest challenge to spirit, letter, and meaning of the constitution in American history. And while respected but ideologically driven scholars like Amar and Chermerinsky may cavil at those of us who still revere our founding document and heritage, it is folks like us—the normal folks—who need to stand up, overcome our embarrassment at the task, and resist before the those who consider the constitution a thing to be conformed to whatever is presently politically expedient do such violence to it as to leave virtually nothing left for the future but a tattered old relic in a glass case.

In the wake of the passage of historic healthcare-overhaul legislation on March 21, 2010, promised by its acolytes to extend health insurance coverage to an estimated 36 million uninsured Americans—and dreaded by its opponents to engorge an ever-expanding federal leviathan with an additional 17% of the U.S. economy—scholars and pundits on both sides of the political spectrum have been debating the bill vociferously.  Neither the wisdom of such legislation from a policy perspective, nor the constitutionality of the undertaking have been absent from the national discussion. And in the latter category such constitutional heavy-weights as Akil Amar and Erwin Chemerinsky have weighed in, both recently having written op-eds in the Los Angeles Times assuring America in almost incredulous tones that this legislation is indeed constitutional—and pretty clearly so.

But despite the pre-eminence of both scholars in the field of constitutional law—Chemerinsky is the dean of Law at UC Irvine, and Amar is professor of constitutional law at that backwater joint known as Yale—I can’t help but be exceedingly underwhelmed by their arguments.  Indeed, even granting that op-eds are written for a general audience, both come off as if written by dismissive, second year law-student bloggers.  The analyses of both scholars miss the “gravamen” issues, and poor legal analogies are centrally featured.  Strong words, I know.

But let me explain, with due fear and trepidation, why I think that both scholars are mistaken; that is, why the recently passed healthcare legislation is unconstitutional…and if I may hazard, pretty clearly so.

Let’s begin with a general constitutional principle we all learn in high-school civics: the American government is a government of enumerated powers. The constitution specifically grants the different branches of the federal government authority to act in certain domains, carefully circumscribing the scope of their respective powers. Any power lacked by the federal government is reserved to the states under the 10^th Amendment. Despite the violence that has been done to many of these provisions by the Supreme Court over the years, clear boundaries remain. Article 1, section 8 of the constitution expressly enumerates the legislative objectives Congress may pursue, and notwithstanding the great deference that the Supreme Court has historically granted to Congress in passing legislation (with a nod to Article 1’s “necessary and proper” clause), any laws unanchored by a constitutionally specified objective will be swiftly struck down.

The section that has historically provided the greatest regulatory authority to Congress—and the one that has been appealed to by constitutional defenders of the healthcare bill—is the “Commerce Clause.” Article 1, section 8, cl. 3 of the constitution grants Congress the authority to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States…” Much case law has gone into defining the current scope of legislative power furnished by the Commerce Clause.  Because the lynchpin of the recently passed bill is the so-called “individual mandate” which compels certain Americans (those who are not dependents, persons receiving Medicare or Medicaid, military families, persons living overseas, persons with religious objections, or persons who already get health insurance from their employers under a qualified plan) to buy government-approved health insurance or face steep fines and/or prison time, much of the constitutional debate has centered on whether Congress, pursuant to the Commerce Clause, has the authority to pass such a mandate.

Supporters of the bill point to the line of Commerce Clause jurisprudence granting Congress extensive powers to regulate intrastate activity which has a “substantial economic effect” on interstate commerce.  In the case of Wickard v. Filburn, for instance, Filburn, a small plot-farmer, was fined for growing more wheat on his farm than was permitted under the federal Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which imposed strict limits on wheat production based on acreage in order to drive up wheat prices during the Great Depression.  Filburn brought suit against the United States, challenging the government’s right to set a quota on the wheat which he raised and consumed on his own farm on the grounds that this was a purely local activity beyond the reach of federal control.  In ruling in favor of the United States, the Supreme Court found that consumption of home-grown wheat is a large and variable factor in the economics of the wheat market. Because the aggregate effect of such home-grown consumption might have a substantial effect on the interstate wheat market by decreasing demand, Congress had authority to regulate, or indeed proscribe, such activity under the Commerce Clause.

This broad authority was upheld in the 2005 case of Gonzales v. Raich, in which the Supreme Court found that passage of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), making it a crime to possess, manufacture, or sell marijuana, was within Congress’ Commerce Clause authority.  Just as Congress in Wickard rationally feared that “when viewed in the aggregate, leaving home consumed wheat to be outside the regulatory scheme would have a substantial influence on price and market conditions,” so, here, Congress had “a rational basis for concluding that even the home consumed marijuana outside federal control would similarly affect price and market conditions.”  Of particular importance in this decision was Justice Stevens’ finding that the activity regulated was “quintessentially economic,” which he went on to define as referring to the “production, distribution, and consumption of commodities.”  Because the CSA regulated the “production, distribution, and consumption of commodities for which there was an established, and lucrative interstate market” (i.e., the marijuana market), and because the Court had long recognized that prohibiting the intrastate manufacture or possession of an article of commerce was a rational means of regulating interstate commerce in that product, the intrastate regulation of marijuana easily fell within Congress’s commerce powers.

Despite the sweeping authority granted by such decisions as Wickard and Raich, Congress has not been victorious every time it has attempted to flex its Commerce Clause powers.  In the 1995 case of United States v. Lopez, the Court struck down the federal Gun-Free School Zone Act, which made it a federal crime to possess a gun within 1000 feet of a school.  The Court found that the possession of a gun within the proximity of a school was non-economic in nature; it was neither “transactional” nor of a “supply and demand” character.  Similarly, in the 2000 case of United States v. Morrison, the Court struck down the federal Violence Against Women Act of 1994, which granted to victims of violent gender-motivated crime the right to bring civil suit against the perpetrator in federal court.  The Court found that “gender motivated crimes of violence are not, in any sense of the phrase, economic activity.” It further reasoned that while Congress had provided detailed findings that gender motivated violence deterred potential victims from traveling interstate or from being employed in intrastate businesses, virtually no deference should be given to these findings because they established far too attenuated a causal connection to interstate commerce: “if accepted [this] reasoning would allow Congress to regulate any crime as long as the nationwide, aggregated impact…has substantial effects on employment, production, transit, or consumption.  Indeed, if Congress may regulate gender motivated violence, it would be able to regulate murder or any other type of violence…” (activity which has traditionally been within the regulatory authority of the state).

The lessons to be drawn from these cases for our purposes are clear. Not just any activity falls within the constitutionally permissible regulatory zone of the Commerce Clause, but only activity which is “economic in nature,” i.e., referring to the “production, distribution, and consumption of commodities” (Raich), “transactional,” or of a “supply-demand” character (Lopez), and bears rather close (“non-attenuated”) connection to interstate commerce (Morrison).  Does the individual mandate meet these criteria?

Supporters of the healthcare bill have been less than careful in framing the inquiry, instead opting to emphasize the case-law featuring the reach of the Commerce Clause, but not its limits.  Thus, Chermerinsky recently argued,

“A few years ago, for example, the court held that Congress could prohibit individuals from cultivating and possessing small amounts of marijuana for personal medicinal use because marijuana is bought and sold in interstate commerce. The relationship between healthcare coverage and the national economy is even clearer. In 2007, healthcare expenditures amounted to $2.2 trillion, or $7,421 a person, and accounted for 16.2% of the gross domestic product.”

Analogizing the regulation of marijuana to the regulation of healthcare in general misses the point.  Surely Congress can and does regulate the healthcare industry in general all the time (witness the regulatory regime which has steadily driven up the cost of healthcare since the 1920s).  The question is whether Congress has the authority to pass the individual mandate, an unprecedented demand by Congress that individuals purchase health insurance or face stiff fines and/or prison time.  Surely a mere reference to the integrality of the healthcare industry to the U.S. economy does nothing to answer this question.

Does Amar’s framing of the issue fare any better? According to Amar,

“Under the interstate commerce clause of Article I, activities whose effects are confined within a given state are to be regulated by that state government, or simply left unregulated. But the federal government is specifically empowered to address matters that have significant spillover effects across state lines or international borders…[T]he founders authorized Congress to act even in situations that did not involve explicit markets, so long as the activities truly crossed state lines or national borders.”

Now, I hate to simply say that Amar is wrong about the facts here, but the Commerce Clause jurisprudence which we surveyed above—the relevant line of Commerce Clause cases, that is, which does not focus on the channels, articles, or instrumentalities of commerce, but the specifically in-state activities which affect interstate commerce—was quite explicit that it is not merely matters that have “significant spillover effects across state lines or international borders” that can be regulated by Congress, but specifically activity that is “economic in nature” and that bears a close causal connection to interstate commerce. Amar’s framing of Congress’ Commerce Clause powers here is so broad as to make Congress virtually sovereign.  In doing so he may have given Congress enough regulatory room to pass the individual mandate—indeed, if Congress can regulate any “matter” that has “significant spillover effects” across state lines or international borders, it can regulate virtually anything—but his “achievement” is completely spurious; it does violence to the relevant case law, as well as to the very structure of the American federalist system of enumerated powers—a system that even few liberal constitutional scholars are willing to abandon.

Notwithstanding the fact that both Amar and Chemerinsky framed their arguments so as to avoid the crucial issue, it seems difficult to imagine how either scholar would go about arguing that the individual mandate regulates activity that has to do with the “production, distribution, and consumption of commodities” or that is “transactional” in nature.  For the individual mandate is in no way dependent upon a citizen’s entering into ANY transaction.  Indeed, the mandate applies even if a citizen does nothing at all.  To the extent that the Supreme Court has specifically differentiated between activity which is “economic in nature” and activity that is non-economic in nature, finding that only the former activity is regulable, it is difficult to see how doing nothing could fall anywhere but in the latter category. Likewise, to the extent that the Court has differentiated between activity which bears a close causal connection to interstate commerce and activity which bears an attenuated connection, finding that only the former activity is regulable, it is difficult to see how doing nothing could fall anywhere but in the latter category.

Now, I can already hear the cries of you critics: “The way YOU framed the issue is what is disingenuous.  People who do not buy health insurance enter into the stream of interstate commerce by purchasing all manner of over-the-counter medical products, doctor and hospital services at the point of consumption, and often times need emergency room care. They substitute these activities for paying premiums to health insurance companies. All these activities are economic, and they have a cumulative effect on interstate commerce in a manner similar to Wickard and Raich.  Thus, not buying health insurance really is an economic activity within the scope of permissible Commerce Clause regulation.”

Despite the fact that our hypothetical critic is correct about the cumulate interstate effect of such activities, the individual mandate does not attach to any such activities. Perhaps it’s the case that individuals who do not purchase health insurance are more likely to purchase the listed products and services, but the individual mandate does not directly regulate such economic transactions at all.  The mandate is not an excise tax on the purchase of over-the-counter medical products; it is not a consumption tax triggered when an uninsured person enters a doctor’s office or is brought to an emergency room by ambulance. Congress could very well have directly taxed such activities, and it would have been constitutional according to the “non-attenuated, economic-in-nature” standard set by contemporary Commerce Clause jurisprudence. The problem with such measures, however, was both political and economic.  Politically, the Democratic Party wanted to avoid the PR consequences of being perceived as hiking taxes so drastically; economically, they wanted to be capable of accruing sufficient revenue to provide health insurance coverage for millions more Americans, and all such “trigger-taxes” would have accomplished is the deterrence of the public consumption of medical products and services in a way that would have left the insurance of millions severely underfunded, and the medical industry reeling from lost profits.

Thus, while there are ways that Congress could have regulated the intrastate healthcare industry that is within Congress’ Commerce Clause authority, the individual mandate is not one of them.  Were the Supreme Court to recognize the authority of Congress to pass the individual mandate, it would all but eviscerate any meaningful limitations on the Congress’ Commerce Clause powers.  It would open the door to not only the compelled purchasing of anything that Congress deems reasonable to promote interstate commerce (like the purchase of a car from one of the new U.S. owned companies), but the compelled compliance of citizens to engage in any non-economic activity which Congress determines has an effect on interstate commerce.  To illustrate, it’s not just the purchase or non-purchase of health insurance which has an economic effect on the interstate healthcare economy: all manner of lifestyle choices go into the frequency with which the average American needs medical care.  But if Congress has the Commerce Clause authority to compel Americans to buy health insurance because of the effect of its non-purchase on the interstate healthcare market, it seems that it must also have the Commerce Clause authority to compel Americans to regularly exercise because of the effect of the failure of certain Americans to regularly exercise on the interstate healthcare market.  While the implementation of a “comprehensive exercise regime” may present certain practical difficulties that the individual mandate does not, the important point is that there is no clear principled difference in the rationale behind the two measures—and as already mentioned, both run afoul of the express limitations articulated by the Supreme Court in Lopez, Morrison, and Raich.

If you think that these musings are a bit extreme, I ask you to articulate the constitutional limitations once merely existing gives Congress the authority to compel individuals to enter into contracts with third parties—I can tell you, whatever you may come up with is not the standard set by the Supreme Court.

On fiscal issues there is a clear divide. As to whether America is generally good, not in need in of radical transformation, not in need of making amends to the [morally superior] World Community, there is a clear divide. On issues of federalism and the role of the federal government there is a clear divide. Perhaps an exception can be made when it comes to social issues: some Democrats are pro-life (so I’m told) and some Republicans support gay marriage, for instance. Yet, it can also be said that insofar as Republicans prefer a federal government of narrow scope and limited regulatory power while Democrats prefer sweeping federal regulation, many of our social issues become issues of federalism. Fundamentally, is gay marriage a state issue or a federal one? It is time to pick.

I have always considered myself a non-partisan ideologue. There is a timeless truth underpinning my refusal to pick up the flag for one particular political club: members change frequently, and so too do the platforms.

But in the last two years, the clubs have polarized enough for me to temporarily change my position. One party supports policies that are necessary components of a totalitarian government. To this end, while I may not be calling myself a Republican, the enemy of my enemy has at least become my ally. Every Republican voted against Obamacare and the 2009 Stimulus.

Surely, the vast majority of Democrats do not support a totalitarian government. Of course, Vladimir Lenin had a name for these folks. Unwitting Socialist appeasers can preach about civil liberties and privacy all they want. Socialist appeasers they remain, and I must support their opponents.

I can no longer tolerate moral equivalence arguments. The parties are not the same, the people in them are not the same, and the ideas are not all just as bad.

Nor is it true that both sides are equally guilty of harmful rhetoric.

Last summer, Sarah Palin said Barack Obama’s health care bill would be creating ‘death panels’ to ration and restrict care for seniors and the disabled. There is no “Death Panel,” so to speak, contained in the new health plan. There is rationing. Rationing indeed forms the foundation of Obamacare: we cut benefits, we rein in costs, and, at the same time, we expand subsidies to cover, heretofore, unsubsidized people. Still, Palin’s statement is branded “fear mongering.”

For decades, Democrats have accused the other side of fear mongering. (Lest we forget the racist, fear mongering Democrat and former President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign in which Johnson unambiguously insinuated that Barry Goldwater would instigate a Nuclear War). It was always Republicans who were going to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits for seniors.

(Republicans were also going to take away a woman’s right to chose by letting state citizens vote on abortion issues, and keeping the federal government out of the discussion (and the financing). Republicans are racists because they reject social engineering programs like Affirmative Action, race quotas, and amnesty for 12 million Mexican refugees. They are racists for not supporting political correctness, hate speech and hate crimes laws: liberal speak for censorship. Republicans are mean and heartless because of their opposition to unsustainable, often unconstitutional, social entitlements that often encroach on the rights of states and always seize mass amounts of money from taxpayers—programs that are slowly bankrupting the republic. Heartless, racist, bigoted, misogynistic, nationalistic, isolationist, hateful . . . .)

Well, after decades of—dare I say—fear mongering about cutting Medicare, Democrats decided to do just that themselves. Five hundred billion dollars shall be cut from Medicare as an Independent Medicare Advisory Committee is installed to determine which drugs and treatments are cost-effective for seniors. Seniors are the most expensive patients in our health care industry. Over the last year, we have become accustomed to Democratic talking points about old people gobbling up health resources in their last years. What about young people? Did Obama’s grandma really need that hip replacement, Mr. Compassionate wondered?

I know that Democrats have sat up many a night for many painstaking hours considering why this might be. It offends their Jacobin sense of égalité that some citizens might be using more of something than other citizens. If I may clarify: old people are old, young people are young. This may stand to reason why old people shall consume more health care resources than young people. There is nothing inherently inequitable with most of our health care dollars being spent on seniors in their last years.

“But this cannot stand. If older Americans are going to be so costly, it is high time this nation redistributed those resources to young people. But don’t worry about that rightwing fear mongering, its not like we’re going to “ration” in the process of “redistributing.” That’s crazy. You’re crazy!”

What Palin meant by ‘death panels’ is obvious: federal agencies shall be established to ration health care. And, so they shall. Billions are being cut, and more than 2 million Medicare patients are loosing their prescription drug plans.

More to the point, Canada, England, New Zealand, Australia and most of Europe ought to be cautionary tales. All of these nations are rationing care. Seniors, the sick and the poor are always the most disadvantaged when health services are rationed: you don’t need to worry about taking resources from the young, healthy and wealthy.

But when listening to Democrats and media spin doctors—or even the middle of the roaders—I hear endless moral equivalence. For a moment, I was just about to start complaining about how Democrats are never called fear mongers. Then I realized that this is because Republicans are not as stupid as Democrats (at least not in the aggregate). In all seriousness, “fear mongering” is their term, and they can keep the idiotic rubbish.

For, does anyone really think people vehemently object to things because they like fear? What exactly would be the point of fear mongering for the sake of mongering fear? What does Palin have to gain by convincing people that Obamacare will ration health care? Either she truly believes it will or she does not. If she does, this is not fear mongering (even if she is wrong). If she does not, then why is she claiming it will?

Is it just to slander Obama, so she can run for president against him in 2012? Some will say this is naive, but that’s really just too absurd to entertain.

If Sarah Palin agreed with Obamacare, she would simply be a Socialist. It is fine if you are a Socialist, but I am fairly certain Palin is not a Socialist. Moreover, her point about rationing is manifestly true given that this bill, (1) cuts $500 billion from Medicare patients, (2) extends new subsidies to tens of millions of new beneficiaries, and (3) purports to rein in overall costs.

If she had said something crazy with no basis in truth or reality, like, “orange dragons will descend upon the earth firing hot dogs from their eyes, as a direct causal result of Obamacare,” perhaps this would constitute fear mongering. Rather, her statements carry a grain (mill) of truth. Moreover, she herself is on the record as being philosophically opposed to Obama’s approach to fixing health care.

Given these considerations, why spread fear for its own sake? If she agreed with the bill, she could easily become a Socialist, switch parties and support the bill. She does not. Thus, liberals can either live in a fantasy world where their opponents simply have no serious reason for their opposition; or they can acknowledge that, while they may disagree with the reasons of their opponents, the reasons do, nonetheless, exist.

For example: Republicans are not Socialists; Republicans do not like Socialism; therefore, Republicans do not like Socialist federal health care plans. In conclusion, Republicans honestly and actually do not think Obamacare is a super-awesome hopily-changey-change idea. When they were opposing it, it was because they actually disagreed. Thus, when they make statements that happen to inspire fear, it is because they themselves are actually afraid.

Perhaps Palin was ginning up support for a possible run in 2012, but that does not mean her statement was disingenuous. Fear mongering—just trying to scare people for political gain—suggests cynical political posturing.

Certainly, I do not call all Democrats fear mongers. But is there any question that they frequently use fear to gin up opposition to Republicans?

For years now, Democrats have been preaching that the world is going to melt unless we pass cap in trade, spend hundreds of billions financing indefinable “green-sector” jobs, stop extracting the energy resources from the 3.7 million highly-endowed square miles the U.S. is sitting on top of, submit to the regulatory oversight of the Environmental Protection Agency and send more than $100 billion to the United Nations to curtail Global Climate Change. Unless we do this, the ice caps will melt and the sky shall fall. Evidence? “Er, eh—we’re working on it . . . .”

Just in the last year (to say nothing of the last seven decades), Democrats constantly stressed that 45 million people do not have insurance (until Congressman Joe Wilson sounded the alarm that Obamacare purported to subsidize illegal immigrants. Suddenly, then, Obama cut the illegals out of that number and went with a more modest 32 million).

Of course, the Census reports tell us that this number is bunk (see two blogs ago for more analysis). Indeed, most of the uninsured are not people without access to insurance. Insurance is tied to employment: when you are out of work, you are uninsured. America has and never will be at 0% unemployment. (“Full unemployment,” what economists call the inevitable number representing only those who are cyclically unemployed, is thought to be somewhere between 3 and 6%. Even in the best possible economy, there will be a certain number of unemployed people at any given point).

Also, most of the uninsured are young people, and/or people making more than $50,000 per year (half of those are making more than $80,000). In a word, rational economic agents have made the choice that health care costs more than they are willing to pay, given their good health. But does this stop Democrats from being vague? Is it not more politically advantageous to create the image that America is a banana republic?

Notice also, that while Palin’s hyperbole is based on truth (Obamacare will ration), the statement that 32 or 45 million are insured is intentionally misleading. Yes, there are 45 million in America without insurance, but what has that got to do with a health care overhaul if most of them are, (a) not citizens and/or (b) simply choosing not buy insurance? Wouldn’t it have been more honest to fight for the 10 million or so citizens who truly do not have access?

Also, 18,000 die each year as a result of a lack of insurance, according to Democratic talking points. Obama, Hillary and would-be HHS Secretary Tom Daschle have all repeated this ad museum. Before my head explodes as I confront the necessary and copious illogic applied in reaching this statement, let me explain.

Democrats rely on a series of separate, unconnected—indeed, inconclusive—studies which were done to test clinical outcomes of persons on Medicaid. One of these studies actually showed that the women in the control group who had Medicaid were statistically more prone to die of breast cancer than women without any insurance. If we accepted the results of this study, we would say that women without insurance are better off than women with Medicaid.

Of course, even had I not read about these reports, the statement is ludicrous on its face. The sheer number of variables that might affect the efficacy of such a determination—that 18,000 die as a result of a lack of insurance—is mind-boggling. If a homeless drug addict dies on the street, is it because he lacked health insurance? Huh? Possibly. Oh, you know what, it could have been all the drugs too, come to think of it. If a seven hundred pound man dies of a heart attack, it might be that but for his lack of insurance he would have lived. Or, in the alternative, it might be that but for his love of jelly donuts he might have lived, also.

Again, I’m not saying this was all for the sake of creating fear—morons like Tom Daschle surely believe that 18,000 people are dying each year as a result of having no health insurance. I believe in his sincerity.

Yet, there are actual examples of naked fear and smear tactics perpetrated by elected Democrats. Last summer, Pelosi called town hall protesters ‘Brown Shirts’ and went on rambling about the Harvey Milk assassination from thirty years ago, making an unveiled and bizarre association between Obamacare protestors and the wholly unrelated assassination of a gay icon from the 1970s (Milk was assassinated by San Francisco City Supervisor, Dan White: a crazed DEMOCRAT). She also spent a week howling about swastikas being brandished by the protestors. To my knowledge, there was at least one protestor who did this. The Hasty Generalization is the logical fallacy in which one leaps to condemn an entire group based on the actions of a single  member or set of members. Luckily for Democrats, the leftwing anti-war protestors who show up at the funerals of soldiers almost never brandish swastikas.

Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) said on the House floor that Republicans were aiding and abetting a “holocaust” by stalling Obamacare—again, relying on misleading and inaccurate numbers about thousands dying as a result of having no health insurance. In fact, just what was the truthful claim, ala Sarah Palin ‘death panels,’ upon which this hyperbolic pissing-fit was grounded?

Democratic lawmakers have spent the last week shedding crocodile tears and feigning martyrdom for their courageous vote. Congressman Barney Frank (D-mASS), alleges he was called homosexual slurs leaving the Capitol. Black Congressmen claim they were called racial slurs. Video footage does not exist of any of these incidents. It wouldn’t matter if they were verified. Angry Americans protesting a health care bill they spent more than a year vocally opposing deserve better than to be generalized on the basis of isolated incidents.

In fact, the Democratic Party has stood idly by during decades of angry protest and vitriolic speech. This last year, liberal college students were engaging in violent protests, damaging public and private property. Actual violence. Not the threat of tea party protestors scarily exercising their Second Amendment right by buying a gun. Not theoretical violence based on a piece of hate-mail.

Everyone in public life receives regular threats and hate mail. Both political parties have nut cases. Only one is run by them.

What else is un-debatable is what I just implied, and what I made explicit in my last my post: all people who support, vote for, advocate or engage in centralized economic planning and the take-over of vast portions of the private economy are without a doubt Socialists. Henceforth, we can and should proceed stridently in all debates, charging swiftly toward the issues and arguments at hand. The consummate misrepresentation by modern American Liberals—Ms. Progressive, if you’re nasty—of their own platform won them two straight elections. Call them Progressive, and it seems like they support progress; but accurately call them Socialists, and it rings of totalitarianism.  It should, and it’s not just tea bagger talk.

Never again should we tolerate any nonsensical jibber-jabber about this one and that one not being Socialist, or about Socialism being an unfair or inflammatory label. What was good enough for Marx should be good enough for Obama.

So, what is Socialism? I have always said modern American Liberals (a term I must shortly retire) are experts on Socialism in that they are always prepared to tell us what it is not. “Taking over the auto companies is Socialism;” “No its not!” “Bailing out banks and buying shares in them with tax dollars, then directing the CEOs as to how much they may take in per year is Socialism;” “No its not!” “Taking over the health care industry and mandating individuals to buy insurance under threat of fine or imprisonment is Socialism;” “No its not, Tea-Bagger!”

Admittedly, there is no one definable point at which we can point at a society and declare “Socialism,” but neither is a specified point at which we can declare “Democracy,” “Freedom,” “Republicanism,” or “Aristocracy.” The organizing political principles upon which societies govern almost always run along spectrums. Rarely do they manifest themselves in simple binary states. Was pre-Revolution France a monarchy or an aristocracy? Could it not have been both, just as the European Union mixes democratic and Socialist principles?

Still, I’ve been told Socialist, Marxist, Communist, and Fascist all have refined, historically defined places in our lexicon. We can’t call people Fascist and Communist!

Yes, we can.

Nazi Socialism may not have looked just like Soviet Socialism any more than Cuban, Venezuelan, Chinese, Vietnamese, Canadian, European Union or American Socialism all look exactly alike. What we have with Socialism is a broader family with a single, unifying set of economic principles.

Socialism, in sum, demands that all decisions affecting all of society’s interests be funneled into the hands of small groups of central planners. Those central planners set prices and wages, ration goods and services and control the market. In effect, the central planners take the place of the free market’s price system. The price of eggs is not set by a government bureaucrat, it rises and falls based on how many eggs there are in the market, how many egg-sellers there are, how many people are willing to buy eggs, and how the egg-sellers respond to consumer demand. If ten people sell eggs for $3 a carton, and two are selling the same carton for $2, the latter are likely to attract all the consumers. The other ten respond or go out of business selling eggs.

Central planners have a different agenda: equality. The central planners take it upon themselves to engineer the best society for all by price fixing, rationing, taxing, seizing private property and redistributing. If the market forces the price of eggs so low that some egg-sellers are endangered, the central planners might decide to set a minimum price to keep them in business.

In the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration for the purpose of raising the market price on agricultural commodities by creating artificial scarcity. Farmers were paid to not use their farmland, and fined if they did use their land (their land). Millions of acres of cotton were destroyed or left to rot, and over 6 million pigs were killed. One day, someone will have to explain to me why, during an economic depression where people were starving and in search of work, the wisest idea government could come up with was to destroy crops and livestock and pay farmers to not produce! Fortunately, the incomes of farmers increased slightly, as the nation’s unemployment ballooned and hunger became commonplace. Problem solved, I suppose.

So, under Barak Obama, the central government has re-ignited its decade’s old war on federalism (the principle that the federal government is a government of limited purpose, supreme to the states, but distinct in scope. While the states retain all powers not Constitutionally-delegated to the federal government. These powers include the regulation of police, education and public health). The central government has subsidized, bought equity in, increased its regulation of, and, or taken over student loans, auto companies, mortgages, and now health care: these sectors alone account for nearly 48% of the private market.

They have bought shares in private banks and now direct salaries with a “Pay Czar.” (Much to my chagrin that last part is not an amusing joke). The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to gain a regulatory power on par with the Internal Revenue Services once cap and trade is passed. Speaking of which, the new health care plan established 16,500 new IRS agents as enforcers of the new health bill.

Federal spending has soared over the last year. It is set to reach 100% of gross domestic product within Obama’s first term. That’s more than $13 trillion spent by the federal government: a number equal to all that is spent by 300 million Americans on all of their good and services in a given year.

Taxes will increase, and the top bracket will be giving more than 40% to the federal government (once state, local, sales and property taxes are accounted, those citizens will be paying well over 50% of their incomes to some form of government).

What shall we call Barak Obama, then, a free market man? A Jeffersonian?

Welfare programs remain insolvent, and the health care plan aims to make them worse. Yes, aims.

The trustees of Social Security say the program has $ 17 trillion in unfunded liabilities. (The Congressional Budget Office projected that Social Security would, for the first time, have yearly budget deficits by 2016. This week we were told that will occur this year instead. By contributing pennies to an Individual Retirement Account, one can expect a large account waiting for them in retirement. Yet when government seizes their money in every paycheck from high school to the nursing home, one can now expect no more than an IOU).

The trustees of Medicare claim that unfunded liabilities are now approaching $90 trillion. That means that promised benefits for current and future beneficiaries are expected to exceed what tax revenues will be able to take in by $90 trillion. If we do nothing, Medicare will be $90 trillion in debt in today’s dollars, come the 2070s and 80s. Obama’s solution: let’s make a health care system that’s even bigger and more expensive!

(Illogic: getting leftwing liberals elected since 1933).

By making these systems even worse, opportunity shall soon knock for big government. The individual mandate should not fool anyone. Taking a fine for not carrying insurance shall ultimately be cheaper than carrying insurance and paying a premium. In Massachusetts, the individual mandate which that state enacted several years ago has caused premium prices to soar, leaving more state citizens uninsured today than there were before the plan was set up. No one should be fooled. Once this happens on a national scale, Socialists like Dennis Kucinich (tireless advocate of single-payer, socialized medicine) shall be pleased for having switched his vote. Once the system becomes so expensive and out of control, the central government can step in with another fix: a public option. The public option will be cheaper than private premiums, and attract the entire market. At this point, we shall have a single payer health care system.

Still Obama, assures us that the individual mandate will be economically efficient. Instead of paying for people who get sick without insurance, we shall force all citizens to buy insurance. This will save the whole of society money in the aggregate. To this end, we shall also tax sins: tanning beds, condoms, fatty foods, cigarettes. The day is not far off where we will seriously discuss banning cigarettes and fast food all together: lifestyle choices tax the system; all our interests have been placed into the system; the central planners must develop the system that saves money for the whole; the central planners must work for the interests of the whole; if one person gets cancer from smoking, he burdens the system. Take away those smokes!

Indeed, while we are at it, why not daily morning exercise? It will save the nation billions, I’m sure, if everyone in the new health care plan gets fit, right? Why should anyone think this state of affairs is far off, less than a week after being commanded to buy health insurance by the central government?

This is how Socialism operates. In a free market, we buy our own services from companies competing for our business by selling low. The individual–the free agent of the market–is king. In Socialist systems, our interests are put into a blender with everyone else’s, and the products and services are equally distributed in a one-size fits all manner. Want a cigarette? Too bad, it causes cancer. Don’t want to buy health insurance? Too bad, it costs everyone else money. Eat your vegetables and brush your teeth. Want to buy a health insurance plan that doesn’t cover prenatal care? Too bad!

The reason the slave in the cotton field was a slave is because he did not own his body or its output. The product of his labor, the cotton, belonged to someone else. We become morally outraged when we recall that during Reconstruction, sharecropping depended on a system where Black farmers were effectively rendered serfs, giving the majority of their output to rich landowners. The line between the former type of servitude and the latter is, in effect, paper-thin.

What do we call it when more than 50% of a person’s earning is claimed by the government? What do we call it when more than 50% of all industry is claimed by the government? What do we call it when people are told fall in line or pay a fine?

If this is not Socialism, what is this?

Mike Madden, “The Health Care Bill: 10 Things You Need to Know, Salon, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/03/19/healthcare_facts_slideshow/index.htm; http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/03/19/healthcare_facts_slideshow/slideshow.html#

(Emphasis added on “the theory goes.”)

Number six was my favorite: the government will charge industries, in exchange for those industries getting more customers. How does that work? And which customers, by the way?

We know that there are not 45 million perpetually uninsured Americans. That would make us a Banana republic, and since I live here, I’m pretty sure that’s not what the United States is, in fact. Actually, very few are without insurance for the long-term, and those that are, are largely comprised of people who choose not to buy (but could otherwise) due to the exorbitant costs. The exorbitant costs are due to seventy-five years of federal tinkering with health care, in addition to more than 1,800 state regulations on the health care industries.

On that note, aren’t liberals the ones who think every state action poses a Commerce Clause issue? Why not eliminate these state burdens in one fell swoop by letting Americans buy insurance, interstate; and let health insurance companies flock to the state with the least regulations, ala, Delaware (Because of Delaware’s lax corporate tax policies and regulations, most U.S. companies are incorporated under that state).

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) states that 74.7% of the current uninsured will become insured within one year, 84% within two years, and 97.5% will have insurance within three years. Yet, in three years time, we will again have “45 million” uninsured. The cause is simple: employer provided health insurance has been incentivized by the federal government since the 1940s. Thus, when one loses his job, he tends to lose his insurance. We he gets a new job, he regains insurance. (With health savings accounts, proposed by Congressional Republicans and every one with a brain [two groups which sometimes overlapped], one would not lose his insurance between jobs.)

So, I ask again, from where will all these new customers come? How shall companies make even more money….. you know, as the theory goes.

That industries will make “more money” this way when they are be taxed to pay for more patients is absurd. Is this the logic being applied by the people at the CBO who say we are going to cut $138 billion over 10 years?

How? Which variables are they counting on occurring that assures us we will cut this much? We could just assume, for instance, that if everyone in the United States who smokes, quit tomorrow, the new plan would cut $1 trillion over the next fourteen days. Or, we could theorize that medical companies will get to add all sorts of new customers, while costs remain constant.

Or we could assume, as President Obama has informed us, that premiums will decrease by 3,000 percent…… I see…..

To be sure, my favorite cost saving provision is the magic beans subsidy, which I believe is item fifteen on page 8 billion.

Keep in mind, also, the CBO ALWAYS under estimates the cost of government programs. (Medicare was also supposed to reduce health care costs, how’s that working out?) And let’s say it did save all sorts of money: would that make it good?

Another favorite section of this cost-saving bill, is the establishment of the Independent Medicare Board. That board will be required to (1) reduce Medicare costs by $500 billion and (2) evaluate which drugs and treatments Medicare patients get to have. That’s an interesting set of prerogatives. I wonder how that will work.

Madden snidely refers to people crazily raving about a “socialist scheme,” and yet Obama himself (as well as countless advisors, Congressmen and Senators) has (have) said on numerous occasions that he (they) envision(s) a single-payer health care system in the United States “10, 15 years down the line.” There is no question that lawmakers have been pushing for incremental steps toward a single payer system for decades. Why should we believe that they will not institute a public option in five years (that is, once we find that, like with Medicare five years out, the magic formula didn’t work, and costs keep rising)? Dennis Kucinich certainly thinks this will happen.

Let me put it this way: if the government were doing things that are Socialist in the area of health care, what would that look like? Liberals are experts on what IS NOT Socialism (i.e., everything Obama ever attempts to do) yet we never hear what Socialism would actually be/look like. So what is it? The government strengthening its regulatory role in an area of the economy that it’s already spent the last seventy-five years destroying (health care) seems to me to be Socialism.

Tens of millions of Americans have moral, philosophical and economic objections to Socialism. Telling tens of millions of people to just get over it and accept what the government is planning for them is dangerously close to totalitarianism. I would find it laughable that so many liberals and Obamabots maintain mirthful irreverence to the “tea partiers” and their crazy shrieks of Socialism, if not for the fact that they are dancing my country down their merry path to Hell with them.

Obama acting like there are just no possible alternatives to his federal program in the face of countless reforms, all of which would increase access, decrease cost and remove third party-oversight into people’s medical decisions (government, and insurance companies), indicates that Obama simply likes government regulation. I call this a Socialist and anyone who does not needs to go find out what Socialism is all about.

So much for a right to privacy once 7,000 new health boards are working together to benevolently decide which drugs and treatments we get to enjoy. Then, I suppose public concerns for privacy, human dignity, constitutional violations, Socialist economic planning, and outrageous spending that will prompt either increased taxation or serfdom to our Chinese lenders, is just “political noise” to this Salon columnist.

Glenn beck is a sideshow. As evidenced by message boards, twitter and facebook feeds as well as numerous columns and news segments this week, Glenn Beck is the now loudest cartoon clown in modern politics. (Momentarily, Beck is greasing up Michael Moore’s head to remove the honorary crown for this illustrious title, held by Moore since 2003).

On his radio show last week, the comedian-turned Thomas Paine aspirant “begged” his fans to, “look for the words ‘social justice, or ‘economic justice,’ on your church website. If you find it, run as fast as you can!” Beck went on: “Social justice and economic justice. . . . are code words [for Communism and Socialism].”

My infrequent experiences with Glenn Beck’s shows (on radio and television) invariably leave me with the same dilemma: while I agree with most of his conclusions, I cringe at nearly all of his arguments. I’ll put it another way. It is not enough to preach that the answer to the problem in your mind is four, when only a minority of the people listening have a subjective understanding that you are working with two added to two.

First off, the modern Democratic Party is without doubt Socialist. To take a page from the Pope of “Global Climate, non-Static, Eventual Event Happening,” Al the Gore, the science has spoken and the debate is over: Democrats are Socialists.

Indeed, this Party’s answer to every social problem is this: Government. They are expanding the federal government’s regulatory role, expanding the debt limit and using public dollars to buy up and invest in private industries. They are manipulating and conniving evermore citizens onto the public dole through works projects, endless new government jobs created by endless new bureaus, and by expanding federal welfare through the creation of insanely expensive and unmanageable new SOCIAL entitlements. Soon enough, they shall be increasing the tax burden in order to pay for this government banquet.

You will not have a choice about the increasing tax burden, nor shall Obama. This is how you pay for government largesse. Without exception, the central planners in Socialist systems incrementally increase their regulatory authority over the marketplace as they strive to plan the ideal economic landscape for everyone. Without exception, the central planners fail to explain that what is best for everyone is serfdom: at a cost of, only, the product of all of your labor, the planners shall provide “equality.” For modern liberals, “social equality” is one Hell of a drug.

The Environmental Protection Agency shall have a regulatory role on par with that of the Internal Revenue Service once Cap and Trade is passed. Your home, as well as the appliances therein, shall be ‘yours’ in name only. An omnibus health care plan shall be the ultimate in Socialist coercion. Your medical decisions shall be between you and 7,000 new health boards. The drugs and treatments you will have access to shall be subject to federal rationing policies, and innovation shall slow.

These are not opinions. I defy anyone to argue that the new health program is not grounded in Socialist economic philosophy. I defy anyone to assert that rationing shall not occur, that spending shall be kept under control or that access to care shall increase.

That being said, Glen Beck’s boobery of the first order has, like usual, done little more than feed the flames of our malcontented brethren. Now Keith Olberman can add Beck to his Worst Person in the World list and bring on three or four liberal Christians to bash crazy, heartless Conservatives. The substance behind Beck’s claim notwithstanding, Beck ought to know as well as anyone that Democrats don’t argue substance to begin with. Let alone when you provide them with a month’s worth of fodder.

Thus, as a rule, I avoid terms like “Nazi,” even where I might find an apt comparison.

Last week, Sean Penn wildly raved that the American press should be jailed for calling Hugo Chavez a dictator. I’ve come to expect that liberal entertainers—our contemporary answer to Court Jesters—will take every possible chance to rape the hand that feeds them: i.e., the First Amendment. “Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it,” said Penn. “And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”

Now, one could effortlessly retort, “Yea. . . . Hitler was elected too, skippy. Guess that makes him a man of the people, no?” But I can already hear the squealing response: “Are you saying Chavez is like Hitler!?” Or worse, “Are you calling Sean Penn a Nazi?!”

Although the name “Nazi” (or maybe just good old “Fascist”) wouldn’t be totally out of line here considering that Herr Penn just single-handedly obliterated Freedom of Speech, I was actually just calling him an idiot. (By the way, can we say enough with taking celebrity commentary on law, science, politics, or any topic requiring a brain, seriously? I am almost positive Ferdinand and Isabella did not summon the Court Jesters before heading for the New World or declaring war on France. Why must the Polis be continually berated with the gibberish of sycophantic cocaine addicts?)

I could say Obama is much like Hitler: both men are Socialists, elected on a message of hope, change, egalitarian populism, and social reform. Still, shouldn’t I be aware that everyone is going to think “genocide” when I bring Hitler into the conversation? Indeed, maybe I’ll avoid that one.

But Glen Beck preaches to the Conservative choir. So he flashes images of Marx, while turning on the red lights and sinister music, as he scarily talks about Obama and the Democrats. He knows what his audience wants to hear, and he knows his audience knows where he is coming from. They can sense the, otherwise, logical argument leading to Beck’s claim that Barak Obama is a Socialist.

Unfortunately, non-Conservatives never get that argument. Rather, they witness silly theatrics and straw men, then change the channel in disgust. This is no way to change hearts and minds. Isolationism is no way to win elections.

I can’t blame liberal Christians for being immediately turned off by Beck’s remarks. However, Glenn Beck is right, in substance (trust me, its in there).

First, social justice was not the foundational message of Christ. Salvation is what Christ brought. Even all that is theologically consistent with the message of Christ remains of secondary value to His act of being crucified for the salvation of our immortal souls.

Second, there is no question that Christians ought to be concerned with “social justice,” insofar as Christ preached a Gospel of caring for the poor and the sick. We are called to be stewards of the Earth and its resources. To the extent that the Earth is divided up among us, it would be wrong to horde and deny these resources in the face of the poor and the meek. The ownership of property is only good insofar as it ensures the benefit of many. A farmer can produce food for a whole community. It would be wrong for him to produce the food and throw it away; or to produce it and charge unreasonable sums. (Luckily, in a free market, there are many farmers to keep one another honest, and selling at fair prices. We can also expect the good Christian farmers to give to the poor at no cost.)

There is no question that this mission of social justice is often distorted, by Christians and non-Christians. I will refrain from explicating the many instances of Christian groups misusing Christian ethics in the name of some very anti-Christian social missions.

Instead, I’ll examine the following passages:

All that believed were together, and had all things in common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. (Acts 2:44-45)

There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. There was a Levite, a native of Cyprus, Joseph, to whom the apostles gave the name Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”). He sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet. (Acts 4:34-37)

These and other passages are regularly cited by Progressive Christians in support of big government taxation and welfare. Am I obtuse for not seeing the connection? Indeed, did Paul demand that Barnabas give all that he had to the Church, or threaten penalties if he refused? I am aghast. Do my liberal Christian friends consider the Church to be one with the state?

What about this passage:

Thou Shall Not Steal. (The Seventh Commandment)

Not only does this forbid the unjust and unreasonable taking of another person’s property (the product of their labor) it presupposes the notion of private property. The Bible is bursting with examples of property ownership, freedom from slavery, freedom from oppression, respect for life, and voluntary sacrifice and donation on behalf of the poor and meek. Would Christ have loved the woman in the temple who quietly gave her donation more, had she been compelled to give a fixed amount to the Roman government for the purpose of an inefficient welfare program?

Taxation is not donation; a government welfare program does not satisfy our Christian obligation to care for the meek. Let’s say a government official was assigned to enter my home each day and take money to pay for my groceries and the local police and fire. Let’s say he decided one day he was going to take $10 extra to pay for the groceries of the woman across the street. Let’s say I had no choice, and the administrative overhead cost $3. Do I say this was a very Christian act of the government official? It certainly wasn’t my Christian act: I’m being compelled at the force of law, not compassion.

Moreover, to the extent that the centrally planned welfare programs of the Great Society have, arguably, had a direct casual effect on destroying the family, with corresponding increases in drug use, violent crime, divorce and abortion, no, I don’t suppose Christ would be thrilled by Socialism.

The farmer can produce food for his whole community. But should the farmer allow a mob of homeless people to ravage his farm? Should he be allowed to charge a reasonable sum for his labor? Should a central planning authority have the power to tell him what to farm, how much to farm, how much he can keep, and how much he must give?

Communism and Socialism are theologically inconsistent with Christian ethics. Glenn Beck is right. But condescending to liberal Christians and bouncing around like a cartoon clown will not change a single mind.