Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, while debating the Affordable Care Act of 2009’s Constitutionality, asked Solicitor General Donald Verrillia a stunning question that gets right at the heart of this controversial matter:
“Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?”
It is an important question to answer, especially when the answer could put 30 million people back onto a sinking cruise ship, wreak apocalyptic havoc on our weak economy and eviscerate the enthusiasm behind a once-Hopeful Presidency. But before we dive head first into this pit of madness, it is interesting to know who started digging the hole.
Way back in the 1990’s, Bill Clinton campaigned on achieving universal healthcare for all Americans. Once in office, he appointed First Lady Hillary Clinton to head a task force charged with finding a way to accomplish this impossible feat. Mrs. Clinton began coagulating her team around a plan that required employers provide insurance to all employees. Still not the best idea, but the promise of even basic care began to excite many Americans.
The Speaker of the House at the time, Newt Gingrich, had other ideas. He saw the momentum building behind the Clintons and had to come up with something to kill it, quick. With liberals already calling for a single payer system, Gingrich saw his opportunity. He dealt the moderate plan a death blow by introducing to the House floor the most vile, unnatural and evil idea he and the Heritage Foundation think tank could stitch together: the Individual Mandate.
Newt, on ‘Meet the Press’ in 1993, said, “I am for individuals…being required to have health insurance.”
The plot worked to perfection. Clinton’s notoriously glass-jawed supporters vanished instead of rallying behind him. The healthcare debate was knocked out of the ring, sent into an early retirement and was sitting on the couch watching old C-SPAN footage, when a long awaited knock finally came at the door…
Barack Obama campaigned on universal healthcare for all Americans. Once in office, he had an historic opportunity to present a reasonable health plan.
“If I were designing a system from scratch,” Obama told some 1,800 people at a town hall meeting during the 2008 campaign, “I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.”
Liberals were buzzing again and this time, they felt they had elected the right man for the job, despite that fact Obama never really said he would consider instituting a single payer system…but his plan would be something just as awesome, right?
When it came time to get down to business, Obama absorbed all that charged campaign electricity, rose before his frenzied legions, and like Moses coming down from the mountaintop, offered unto them…torn pages from Newt Gingrich’s old neocon playbook? Huh?
And then the Republicans vowed to destroy it? Wait, what the what?
The fight spanned a disastrous Summer string of Town Halls, another possible defection by America’s Left flank, Sarah Palin’s ‘death panels for Grandma’ nonsense and the stunning, inexcusable loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate before the ACA was barely passed.
Twenty-six states sued the Federal Government in response, winning enough appellate decisions, including one by Clinton appointee Frank Hull, to drive this case all the way to the Supremes.
Despite its’ unholy conception, Democrats are desperate in their attempt on remaking this old GOP horror flick into a happy-ending romantic comedy, even if it costs more than ‘Avatar’ and is destined to flop bigger than ‘John Carter’. Never mind that the very idea of the government forcing people to buy a product ‘for your own good,’ is directly opposes what the party stands for. Allegedly. Politics is like sports, you pick your team and root like hell ‘till the bitter end.
The craziest part comes from the Right, of course. Here you have a group of people screaming that ‘Obamacare is Socialism!’, which it is not, and simultaneously warning him to ‘Keep off my Medicare!’, which actually is socialized medicine. Also a single payer option, the best solution to the crisis may be to simply remove the ‘over 65’ requirement from that program and let all Americans ‘opt-in’ if private insurance is too costly. But Republicans would probably find a way to retroactively hate that, too. The ink on the paper is too black, or something.
This is where Justice Kennedy and his aforementioned question on commerce become so important.
Four staunch Democrats sit on the bench. Ruth Bader Ginsberg; Stephen Breyer; Sonia Sotomayor and Elana Kagan. So do four staunch conservatives, Antonin Scalia; Clarence Thomas; Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. Then there is Ronald Reagan-appointed Anthony Kennedy, seen by all interested parties to represent the deciding swing vote. For Obamacare to survive, Kennedy will have to answer his own query in the emphatic words of candidate Barack Obama: “Yes, we can!”
If not, we are all back at square one — thirty million uninsured, spiraling costs and no end in sight. Although some parts of the ACA may survive without the individual mandate, will there be enough left behind to rebuild a better law? Or is it back to the drawing board for a fumbling Obama and his band of dim-witted Democrats? Chances are Obama may soon be held to his, “if I were starting from scratch” comment.
Well, already the decision’s been made and the results will be public sometime in June. Is it telling that in the days after the SCOTUS’ closed-door wrangling, Obama went to the press and reminded Americans that no one elected these folks? Maybe, but the only thing we can count on for sure is that when this is all over, there will be little substantial change.
Whether Obama wins or loses this fight, we know the ‘vampire squid’ will be the ultimate victor. That’s what this is really all about anyway — what cut do Aetna and Horizon get and how much interest can Goldman, Sacs finance it for. Not about actually making America healthy, not with McDonald’s making more money than ever before and pink slime oozing through our ground beef.
What We the People will likely be left with is only more madness, more insanity and pre-existing nausea due to the stench coming from our bottomless pit of recycled, out-of-touch leaders.