Thomas Sowell Recognizes Tom Dewey In Mitt Romney

Thomas Sowell recognizes Tom Dewey in Mitt Romney here, as did we, and divines the horrible consequences of Romney's loss:

Quite aside from the immediate effects of particular policies, Barack Obama has repeatedly circumvented the laws, including the Constitution of the United States, in ways and on a scale that pushes this nation in the direction of arbitrary one-man rule.

Now that Obama will be in a position to appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his evasions of the law and usurpations of power, this country may be unrecognizable in a few years as the America that once led the world in freedom, as well as in many other things.

Barack Obama's boast, on the eve of the election of 2008-- "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America"-- can now be carried out, without fear of ever having to face the voters again.

This "transforming" project extends far beyond fundamental internal institutions, or even the polarization and corruption of the people themselves, with goodies handed out in exchange for their surrendering their birthright of freedom.

Obama will now also have more "flexibility," as he told Russian President Medvedev, to transform the international order, where he has long shown that he thinks America has too much power and influence. A nuclear Iran can change that. Forever.

Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama? You or your children may yet have reason to recall that as a bitter memory of a warning sign ignored on election day in 2012. 

US Embassy Cairo Decides Religious Feelings Trump Free Speech

I'm sure the Supremes are amused by the attempt to assert the priority of one clause of the First Amendment over another clause of the First Amendment.

I saved the screen shot from 9/12/12.

Speaking of not abusing the right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others, the news reports that The Piss Christ is back on display.

So let me get this straight. Muslims do not believe in the deity of Christ, nor of Muhammad for that matter, but if you insult Muhammad you must die.  But Christians in America worship Christ as a god but its government does nothing to protect them from hurt religious feelings when he is insulted.

So therefore the government of the United States thinks Islam is deserving of superior treatment, for some reason.

Gee, I wonder what that would be?

Conservative Supremes Insist It's An Unconstitutional Penalty, Not A Tax, But Romney Gets Attacked For Saying The Same Thing

So-called conservatives are upset with Mitt Romney's team for calling the ObamaCare mandate an unconstitutional penalty, not a tax, which is what the dissenting Supremes have called it.

Here's a question for y'all: Do you have the courage of your convictions and the brains to express them, or are you going to retreat into political expediency?

We already have the answer to that. They want Mitt Romney's man Fehrnstrom to go into hibernation in the summertime.

Here's another question: Are the dissenting Supremes conservative, or not? If they are not, then tell us why. Ignoring their arguments isn't going to make them go away. Real conservatives respect what they have to say. Anyone who's telling us to accept the tax argument as framed by Roberts for the liberal wing of the Supremes is doing it for political reasons and is a fake conservative. Prominent among these are Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham.

If Romney's camp keeps this up he might actually get accused of being a conservative by real ones. I'm suddenly feeling less alarmed by Mitt Romney.

Well, that's the spin from the Financial Times anyway, here, whose idea of a conservative is a Jack Welch or a Rupert Murdoch. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Pure agitprop.

ObamaCare Taxes Are In Fact New Income Taxes

The Wall Street Journal here agrees that the ObamaCare ruling has simply and incorrectly shifted government's drive for unlimited power over the people under a different part of the constitution, the taxing power, than the court had heretofore been accustomed to use, namely the commerce clause:

[Roberts'] gambit substitutes one unconstitutional expansion of government power for another and rearranges the constitutional architecture of the U.S. political system. ...

The rest of the column is a very useful and informative discussion of indirect vs. direct taxation, but it does not really make the proper equation demanded by the reasoning of the John Roberts' opinion. Since the tax penalty only arises when one fails to pay for health insurance, there is effectively no difference between the tax penalty which will have to be paid by those going without coverage and the premiums paid by those who have coverage.

Going forward under ObamaCare, if the refusal to buy health insurance results in a tax (which is in reality an unconstitutional police-power-type penalty, or fine), then the purchase of health insurance must be understood as a tax, too (penalty, fine). When the IRS comes calling, those who "gave at the office" are generally going to be treated as having already paid.

I don't think the editorial is correct to say this is somehow a new kind of tax which is really neither an income nor an excise. I think it's pretty clear that ObamaCare is a form of (increased) income taxation.

The tax penalty paid for not having insurance will be based on income. Government subsidy to purchase insurance will be based on income. Affordability of plans offered by employers will be scrutinized based on income paid to employees, and on and on. The IRS' new, main, and very intrusive interest will be in determining household income for purposes of ObamaCare compliance and participation. So it looks to me like it's all about income and comes under the income taxation umbrella, however tortured it may at first appear.

There is a longish discussion of this from the income angle by Liz MacDonald here which makes it pretty clear how everything in ObamaCare hangs on income, including this:


The percentage of income penalty rises at a lower rate than the fixed dollar amount, from 1% in 2014, to 2% in 2015, and to 2.5% in 2016 and after, and then is capped at the national average premium for what’s called “bronze” coverage, which provides the least amount of coverage under the new law, 60% before the patient must chip in for co-insurance, deductibles and co-payments.


Capping the penalty at the national average premium level for basic coverage means you're paying the basic premium. So the premium becomes a tax becomes a premium. It's all designed to fund the system, which is what taxes do. Penalties punish people for breaking the law. But lawbreakers under ObamaCare will be punished with Bronze Level Healthcare, which is why Roberts had to rewrite the law from the bench, construing the penalties as taxes, in order to save ObamaCare.

That was a political act, as The Wall Street Journal rightly goes on to say:


If this understanding is correct, then Chief Justice Roberts behaved like a politician, which is more corrosive to the rule of law and the Court's legitimacy than any abuse it would have taken from a ruling that President Obama disliked. The irony is that the Chief Justice's cheering section is praising his political skills, not his reasoning. Judges are not supposed to invent political compromises.

If anything good comes of this, maybe a new interest will develop out there to repeal the income tax once and for all as a way of getting rid of this new, very expensive and unconstitutional, monstrosity called ObamaCare.

Dissenting Justices' Opinion Lectures Roberts, Giving Up Debating Him

So Jan Crawford for CBS News, here:

The majority decisions were due on June 1, and the dissenters set about writing a response, due on June 15. The sources say they divided up parts of the opinion, with Kennedy and Scalia doing the bulk of the writing.

The two sources say suggestions that parts of the dissent were originally Roberts' actual majority decision for the Court are inaccurate, and that the dissent was a true joint effort.

The fact that the joint dissent doesn't mention Roberts' majority was not a sign of sloppiness, the sources said, but instead was a signal the conservatives no longer wished to engage in debate with him.

The language in the dissent was sweeping, arguing the Court was overreaching in the name of restraint and ignoring key structural protections in the Constitution.

From now on, we can legitimately expect to see Roberts making more alliances with the left than with the right. He is effectively unreachable.

George Will Only Imagines Congress' Power Has Been Limited, But It Hasn't

Here:

If the mandate had been upheld under the Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court would have decisively construed this clause so permissively as to give Congress an essentially unlimited police power — the power to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior for whatever Congress deems a public benefit. Instead, the court rejected the Obama administration’s Commerce Clause doctrine. The court remains clearly committed to this previous holding: “Under our written Constitution . . . the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.”

The fact remains, however, that with the stroke of a pen the Court has changed the locus of unlimited power-seeking from the venue of commerce to the venue of taxation. Congress' power "to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior" hasn't been diminished one bit, just shifted.

I can now be penalized (!) with a tax (!) for not buying whatever Congress' decides. This used to be a power reserved to the States, which can force you, say, to purchase a gun. Now the Court has given that power over you to the Congress, by-passing the States.

The issue was well-framed for us already, in the dead of winter, during the Republican primary debate about RomneyCare, here:

One difference between the health care bills is that Romneycare is constitutional and Obamacare is not. True, Obamacare's unconstitutional provisions are the least of its horrors, but the Constitution still matters to some Americans. ... As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws -- including laws banning contraception -- without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally. The only reason the "individual mandate" has become a malediction is because the legal argument against Obamacare is that Congress has no constitutional authority to force citizens to buy a particular product. ... States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive. There's no obvious constitutional difference between a state forcing militia-age males to equip themselves with guns and a state forcing adults in today's world to equip themselves with health insurance.


But now the Congress has this power, under the taxing authority, at least until some enterprising citizens challenge healthcare premiums they actually pay as a form of unapportioned direct taxation, and win.

Until then, we have no place left to hide. The whole country has become Massachusetts.

Dissenting Supremes Affirm The Principle That Coercion Voids Contracts

Here:

When federal legislation gives the States a real choice whether to accept or decline a federal aid package, the federal-state relationship is in the nature of a contractual relationship. See Barnes v. Gorman, 536 U. S. 181, 186 (2002); Pennhurst, 451 U. S., at 17. And just as a contract is voidable if coerced, “[t]he legitimacy of Congress’ power to legislate under the spending power . . . rests on whether the State voluntarily and knowingly accepts the terms of the ‘contract.’” Ibid. (emphasis added). If a federal spending program coerces participation the States have not “exercise[d] their choice”—let alone made an “informed choice.” Id., at 17, 25.

However, nowhere in the opinion do I see a discussion of how ObamaCare is a coerced contract between the government and the individual, and thus no contract at all. The dissent instead focuses on how the States are being coerced into a contract with respect to the Medicaid expansion.

The reason for this is that the Court is deciding a case brought by the States which think they have been wronged in that respect. The Court is not responding to hypothetical individuals who believe they may be wronged in future, and who cannot bring suit until the provisions of ObamaCare have taken effect and they become actual individuals and victims of the law.

It may be surmised that the Court's dissenting opinions in this and other areas are intended to telegraph possible avenues for future challenges to which they may be sympathetic.

Dissenting Supremes Decry "Verbal Wizardry"

Here:

"That carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists."

"Tax" is spelled with a "t", "penalty" with a "p".

As the country song says, "Look it up."

Dissenting Supremes Question Whether ObamaCare's "Tax" Is A Direct Tax Which Must Be Apportioned According To Population

I told you so.

Quite apart from the problem of the Court rewriting the legislation's penalty as a tax, which amounts to rewriting the dictionary, will every man, woman and child in the country pay the exact same insurance premium, and the exact same tax if they do not purchase?

HELL NO, in violation of the constitution's direct taxation provisions if the mandate is a tax and not a penalty as the Court now declares. What the Court's legerdemain on the penalty has done is transformed health insurance premiums themselves into unequal direct taxes, in violation of the constitution.

From the opinion, here:

Finally, we must observe that rewriting §5000A as a tax in order to sustain its constitutionality would force us to confront a difficult constitutional question: whether this is a direct tax that must be apportioned among the States according to their population. Art. I, §9, cl. 4. Perhaps it is not (we have no need to address the point); but the meaning of the Direct Tax Clause is famously unclear, and its application here is a question of first impression that deserves more thoughtful consideration than the lick-and-a-promise accorded by the Government and its supporters. The Government’s opening brief did not even address the question—perhaps because, until today, no federal court has accepted the implausible argument that §5000A is an exercise of the tax power. And once respondents raised the issue, the Government devoted a mere 21 lines of its reply brief to the issue. Petitioners’ Minimum Coverage Reply Brief 25. At oral argument, the most prolonged statement about the issue was just over 50 words. Tr. of Oral Arg. 79 (Mar. 27, 2012). One would expect this Court to demand more than fly-by-night briefing and argument before deciding a difficult constitutional question of first impression.

No, We Don't Miss You Anymore. Your Guy In The Supremes Just Screwed Us.

Our Enemy, The State

Justice Stephen Breyer, Secular Humanist: We'll Decide What's Enduring

Man the measure of all things:

“Why would people want to live under the ‘dead hand’ of an eighteenth-century constitution that preserved not enduring values but specific eighteenth-century thoughts about how those values then applied?”

-- Justice Stephen Breyer, Bill "Depends on what the meaning of is is" Clinton appointee, quoted here

He might as well have said:

“Why would people want to live under the ‘dead hand’ of an eighteenth-century constitution archaic Hebrew narrative that preserved not enduring values but specific second millennium BC thoughts about how those values then applied?”

Hmm. Why would they?

The New York Times Discusses Bi-Partisan Culpability For The Imperial Presidency

Here:

Mr. Obama's new approach puts him in the company of his recent predecessors. Mr. Bush, for example, failed to persuade Congress to pass a bill allowing religiously affiliated groups to receive taxpayer grants -- and then issued an executive order making the change.

President Bill Clinton increased White House involvement in agency rule making, using regulations and executive orders to show that he was getting things done despite opposition from a Republican Congress on matters like land conservation, gun control, tobacco advertising and treaties. (He was assisted by a White House lawyer, Elena Kagan, who later won tenure at Harvard based on scholarship analyzing such efforts and who is now on the Supreme Court.)

And both the Reagan and George Bush administrations increased their control over executive agencies to advance a deregulatory agenda, despite opposition from Democratic lawmakers, while also developing legal theories and tactics to increase executive power, like issuing signing statements more frequently.

The bipartisan history of executive aggrandizement in recent decades complicates Republican criticism.

Prof. Stephen Presser Says Obama Should Be Ashamed Of Himself About Activism Charge

For CNN.com no less, here:

"[I]t is the task of the Supreme Court to rein in majoritarian legislatures when they go beyond what the Constitution permits.

"This is not, as Obama implies, judicial activism, or political activity on the part of the justices. This is simply, as Hamilton explained, fidelity to the Constitution itself, fidelity to the highest expression of "We the People of the United States," the body whose representatives ratified that Constitution. ...

"Judicial review is not usurpation -- it is the manner in which the rule of law is preserved in this nation. It is certainly true that sometimes courts, and even the Supreme Court, have erred in their interpretation of the Constitution, and some legislative acts that clearly were permitted by the Constitution have been struck down. But if the ACA's individual mandate is rejected, this will be fully within the legitimate exercise of judicial powers. ...

"If, as it should, the Supreme Court declares the individual mandate unconstitutional, it will be reaffirming our traditions, and not usurping them. The president, a former constitutional law teacher, should be ashamed of himself."

There Is No Lie Obama Will Not Tell

"[T]he Supreme Court has been overturning acts of Congress ever since [1803], on average every 16 months. So overturning Obamacare would be about as unprecedented as the sun rising in the east tomorrow morning. ...

"Franklin Roosevelt called the [National Recovery Act of 1933] 'the most important and far-reaching ever enacted by the American Congress.' But that didn’t stop the Supreme Court from overturning it in May 1935, by a vote of 9-0.

"The National Recovery Act passed the House by a large majority and the Senate by 46-39. The “strong majority” mentioned by Obama in the passage of Obamacare did not exist. . . . It garnered not a single Republican vote in either house, the first time so important a piece of legislation was passed on a totally partisan basis.

"As I said, one can only admire his chutzpah. It seems there is simply no lie President Obama will not tell in pursuit of his agenda. He can count on the mainstream media buying it, but will anyone else?"

-- John Steele Gordon, "Presidential Chutzpah"

Don't miss the full opinion, here.

Evidently Obama Learned Hostility Toward Marbury v. Madison (1803) at Harvard Law

From an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, pointing out there would be nothing unprecedented in the Supreme Court overturning ObamaCare:

In Marbury in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall laid down the doctrine of judicial review. In the 209 years since, the Supreme Court has invalidated part or all of countless laws on grounds that they violated the Constitution. All of those laws were passed by a "democratically elected" legislature of some kind, either Congress or in one of the states. And no doubt many of them were passed by "strong" majorities.

Read the full opinion rebuking Obama's complaint about judicial activism here.

I don't buy the argument that Obama is ignorant of these fundamentals of the history of American law. I think he's hostile towards them, and wants them all swept away, along with the Constitution.

Obama Calls Supremes "An Unelected Group of People" Like That's a Problem

Now that we know that the constitutional "scholar" grasps the fact that the Supremes are not elected but appointed by the president, I guess we can safely conclude that Obama's period of learning the ropes of the presidency is finally over.

It took him long enough, except all we've really learned is that he thinks that's wrong and that the Supremes should be elected, or subservient to the Congress, at his beck and call, or something.

Here's the line:

"That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law."

Here's the source.

Isn't it the argument of the likes of Obama that the Civil War was fought to overturn the duly constituted and passed laws upheld by the Supremes' Dred Scott decision?

Just doing our job, sir.

A tirade like this from a president should be an automatic verdict against the law, just to put him in his place for a change, since no one else seems to have the balls to do it.

Justices Appointed By Republican Presidents Have Been Opponents Of Conservatism

In the attack on the traditional values of the American people, Republican presidents bear heavy responsibility for betraying them by their Supreme Court appointments.

Reagan is a particular disappointment. In the history of conservatism, he should assume the status more of "Democrat in recovery" than "conservative." And if it weren't for his signature on the 1986 law known as EMTALA, we might not be in this mess today.

So don't get your hopes up about Roberts and Alito on ObamaCare, let alone Kennedy.

Consider Roe v. Wade, 1973:

"In disallowing many state and federal restrictions on abortion in the United States, Roe v. Wade prompted a national debate that continues today, about issues including whether and to what extent abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, what methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication, and what the role should be of religious and moral views in the political sphere. Roe v. Wade reshaped national politics, dividing much of the United States into pro-choice and pro-life camps, while activating grassroots movements on both sides."

In the majority were:

Blackmun (NIXON APPOINTEE, 1970),

joined by

Burger (NIXON APPOINTEE, 1969),

Douglas,

Brennan (EISENHOWER APPOINTEE, 1956),

Stewart (EISENHOWER APPOINTEE, 1958),

Marshall,

Powell (NIXON APPOINTEE, 1971).

Or consider Lawrence v. Texas, 2003:

"In the 6-3 ruling, the Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas and, by proxy, invalidated sodomy laws in the thirteen other states where still existed, thereby making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory."

In the majority were:

Kennedy (REAGAN APPOINTEE, 1988),

joined by

Stevens (FORD APPOINTEE, 1975),

Souter (BUSH APPOINTEE, 1990),

Ginsburg,

Breyer,

with concurrence by O'Connor (REAGAN APPOINTEE, 1981).

The sheep will get in line and follow their shepherd Romney this year. But if you believe that as president he will appoint anyone substantively different than this lot, fuhgehtaboudit. The Senate would never confirm such a person anyway, especially its Republican members, as disgraceful and disreputable a lot as you'll find anywhere in America.

US District Judge Says Hutaree Militia Entitled To Oppose Government With Words

AP Obama reports, here, via mlive.com:

"They're entitled to oppose the government with their words," Roberts said. "It's still unclear to me after hearing all these arguments how that speech crossed the line into becoming illegal, and how I get there without building inferences upon inferences."

The case against the Hutaree, who seem to have been arrested to quell opposition to the passage of ObamaCare, appears to be unconvincing to the judge and may unravel shortly just as the Supremes hear arguments against the healthcare law.

May the case and the law die with a whimper.

The Individual Mandate: An Unprecedented Assertion of Government Power

Adam J. White for The Weekly Standard here makes the case that the Supreme Court of the United States has quite a history of ruling against sweeping innovations which have no precedent, which means ObamaCare just might not pass muster:

"[T]he [Obama] administration’s latest actions encapsulate precisely the concerns embodied in the Roberts Court’s decisions regarding Sarbanes-Oxley, Guantánamo, and preelection book banning, as well as the New Deal Court’s unanimous refusal to simply acquiesce to FDR. Unprecedented powers asserted by the government threaten to give rise to stark abuses of power​—​some foreseeable, perhaps many more unforeseeable. Faced with similarly novel assertions of government power in previous cases, the Court drew a constitutional line in the sand, out of an abundance of caution. The Court’s review of the individual mandate poses no less a challenge, and merits no less a response."

We're all in deep trouble if the individual mandate survives.