For your recent trifecta of decisions regarding federalized health care, border security, and state regulation of corporations. You have confirmed to a large swath of the American people something I and many others have been shouting from the rooftops for years: they are wasting their time fighting for justice or the rule of law within the current system. The common man sees this for himself as never before. In politics, as in physics, every action produces an equal but opposite reaction. If that reaction has nowhere left to go inside the system, it WILL find an outlet. And it already has, what with rumblings by governors and sheriffs that they will not roll over and die just because nine people in robes decreed that we live under a suicide pact.
If we gaze upon these decisions as if woven together, we find a giant
tapestry portraying a government that will employ any trick, artifice,
or semantic sleight of hand to increase its own (enumerated) powers and
destroy the States' (presumptive) powers.
With health care -- an area of endeavor clearly within the States' jurisdiction and none of the federal government's business -- we see John Roberts, a figure reminiscent of Richard Rich who lied in order to condemn Sir Thomas More and curry favor with King Henry VIII. Jealous of his personal legacy with the statist scribes of our time, Roberts has murdered precedent and the English language to open broad new vistas of federal authority. What makes this betrayal so perverse is that Roberts spends a great deal of time reminding everyone of the principles that should produce an opposite outcome. He reminds everyone that the federal government has only enumerated powers. He reminds everyone that the federal government's enumerated power to "regulate interstate commerce" does not mean the power to compel activity to regulate. And he reminds everyone that the "necessary and proper" clause is only parasitic rather than a separate fount of authority. Acknowledging these pillars of the federal system, he proceeds to demolish them by saying that the federal government's power to tax and spend is nigh infinite, unhindered by the enumeration of powers. I have written about this before, and it is a direct rebuke of the genius and integrity of James Madison in exchange for the wiliness and mendacity of the New Deal Court. Roberts also characterizes what is a penalty as a tax, the twist that the mainstream media have latched onto, but which should not make a dime's worth of difference to holding this monstrosity unconstitutional. Roberts also gives a lame explanation of why the "tax" is an indirect tax rather than a direct capitation (i.e., on the head of the taxpayer), showing that he cares little for the Constitution's requirement that direct taxes be apportioned among the States. This decision is a temporary triumph for Roberts that will be seen by future historians as yet another disgraceful example of how power overcomes truth in a decaying society.
Despite contorting itself into a pretzel to justify an illicit federal program that intrudes on the power of the States, the Supreme Court wasted no time in smacking down Arizona for supposedly intruding on the power of the federal government. An analogy best serves to illustrate what happened here. Let us say the tenants of an office building hire a security guard and charge him with keeping out anyone not authorized to enter. The guard begins falling asleep on the job and letting vandals slip by him; worse yet, he opens the doors to several of his buddies to enter the building at night and steal precious items and information. The tenants -- who for some insane reason still have faith in the security guard despite his obvious unfitness for duty -- decide to help him by spending some of their own time and effort keeping vandals out. The security guard notices this and draws his gun on the tenants as the vandals keep streaming past him, and he tells the tenants that it's his job and only his job to keep the building safe. That's what the Supreme Court did to Arizona, which faces a foreign invasion and now must simply lie down and die while Mexico completes its Reconquista. The federal government was created by the States to secure the borders, but the federal government refuses to do so. The federal government was NOT created by the States to regulate health care, but the government insists on doing so. The contract is breached six ways to Sunday, so it is no longer binding.
Which brings us to corporations and the right of free speech. Once again, the Supreme Court flexed its muscle to strike down the law of a State (Montana) that is clearly within a State's presumptive power to regulate speech. Corporations are creatures of state law, so it makes no sense to argue that a State cannot regulate a corporation's ability to engage in speech or any other activity. As I explained before, the First Amendment was designed as a reminder of the limits of federal power, not as a restriction on the States. As I also explained before, the outcome in Citizens United was correct (albeit for incorrect reasons) because that case concerned a federal law. And notice the public outcry at this rare instance of the Court's striking down a federal law -- many Americans truly want an all-powerful central government to care for them, and I would not be surprised if Citizens United were overturned in the next ten or fifteen years for this pathetic reason.
In summary, the federal government is not playing by the rules, so neither should we. Let us remember that the Constitution itself resulted from an illegal rejection of the existing system under the Articles of Confederation; nine states left the building and set up a whole new set of rules in blatant violation of the Articles' established procedures. Let us also remember these words from the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it . . . ." And let us also remember that the author of those words, Thomas Jefferson, refused to concede that federal judges had final say on the scope of the federal government's own powers, a suicidal formula if there ever was one.
These bedrock notions of the American experiment are being dusted off and re-examined, and not a moment too soon. Real Americans do not meekly follow government into the abyss; real Americans fight to preserve their inherent and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness against all foes, foreign and domestic. It makes no difference whether the real Americans are now a minority, for might does not make right, and the minority always drives history. We need only a critical mass of governors, sheriffs, other officials, and ordinary citizens to continue thinking outside the box and make the choice confronting us: the rule of law, or the rule of government?
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