A Blessing in Disguise?

Interesting stuff as per usual from our  CFG chapter. ---------------------------------------------------------------- July 1, 2015

A Blessing in Disguise? Neither our disgust with the groveling subservience of Chief Justice John Roberts to the Obama administration nor our anger at the damage he’s done to the constitutional separation of powers is diminished by the realization that his bad call last week puts the issue of ObamaCare back where it belongs, in Congress. And it has likely spared congressional and state-level Republicans another episode of self-immolation. Had Roberts read the law as written and invalidated ObamaCare subsidies, 34 states would have gone scrambling to protect more than six million victims of forced insurance purchases. Twenty-eight of the affected states have Republican governors.  All 28 adopting the same solution would be inconceivable; thus the escape of all 28 from further headaches in a congressional GOP “repeal and replace” initiative would be equally inconceivable. Repeal and replace is itself inconceivable unless Republicans elect the next president and retain their two-house majorities. Each achievement would have been rendered less likely had the GOP Congress hornswoggled itself into the actions it envisioned if the Court had ruled against Obama. The link above details how congressional Republicans hoped to parlay the undoing of subsidies into an Obama cave-in on the individual insurance mandate—as if the GOP still hasn’t grasped that this malignant administration would savor the opportunity to inflict widespread financial hardship and blame Republicans for it. Roberts should have solved the problem long ago by taking Democrats at their word, rejecting the individual mandate as an unconstitutional penalty for refusing to buy a specific consumer product, and blowing the whole totalitarian monstrosity to bits. That dereliction can never be excused, but ironically, Roberts’ latest bad call, while rescuing ObamaCare, for now prevents repeal and replacement, the best solution, being fumbled permanently out of reach. How They Get Away With It Reflecting last Friday on a Supreme Court unbothered by ObamaCare’s fatal contradictions, George Will raised the question of fundamental changes in American political culture without which the Court’s appalling decision and very likely ObamaCare itself simply would not have happened. Will quoted William Maurer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, writing that today, “We are not really a country of laws. Instead, we are a country where all the branches of the government work in tandem to achieve policy outcomes, instead of checking one another to protect individual rights.” We went hunting for the source of that quotation and found it in an article Maurer authored last fall for The Federalist Society, analyzing earlier developments in the very same ObamaCare lawsuit the Court decided so badly last week. Maurer’s words came by way of explaining the Court’s invention of excuses to pretend unconstitutional enactments and their subsequent unlawful revision pass constitutional muster: The Court is part of a governmental culture that sees its role as one of making laws operate efficiently, never mind whether those laws deliberately vandalize the country’s founding precepts. Our question: Why wouldn’t the Court behave that way, given the climate of intellectual slovenliness that invites people to disparage sorely-needed political controversy and ask, “Why can’t they just work together and do what’s right?”—without even wondering what might be right. In short, immersed in our purposefully dumbed-down culture, many people might easily mistake the abandonment of the constitutional separation of powers for a good idea.  Last week’s ObamaCare decision amply illustrates why it is not. Gone with the Windbags Stipulate that no government entity in the United States should display—other than in historical contexts—the Confederate flag.  One obvious reason is that it’s an emblem of the enemy defeated in the war that cost the lives of more Americans than any other in history. A nation with a workable understanding of its own identity does not use its official symbols to celebrate a vanquished foe. Those who envision government primarily as a means of punishing departures from their point of view—that is, those who are currently winning the civic debate—will object to the suggestion that disdain for racist sentiment falls short of pre-eminence among reasons to expel the stars and bars from official settings. This flows naturally from a reflexive desire to avoid encountering ideas deemed uncomfortable, a desire lately asserting itself with increasing vigor—dare we say ferocity?—in the realms of academia, government, and commerce seemingly twice a day.   Hence the moral exhibitionism of denouncing a flag rather than confront the reality that the cold-blooded murder of nine innocents in South Carolina proves the existence of evil among us. It’s easier to confront a flag.   What’s not so easy is to square this with the obvious enjoyment polite society derives from expression calculated to offend some groups, tellingly limited to those not known for litigating over perceived insults or conducting aggressive protests.   The flag frenzy may have reached its zenith last Thursday when a New York film critic proposed to ban future showings of “Gone with the Wind,” contending the story amounts to a racist apologia.     Whatever the movie is or isn’t, it depicts an American reality that once existed.  To hide it away would not be evidence of social progress, but rather one more example of societal cowardice.