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Conservatives should be ecstatic that Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts sided with the four liberal
Justices in ruling the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is constitutional as a
tax, while siding with the four conservative Justices that the law is
un-constitutional under the Commerce Clause.
Roberts just humiliated President Obama as a dishonest and
contemptible politician, gutted the social welfare and regulatory state and
appears to have set-up the entire Obamacare law to be constitutionally
invalidated.
Senator Barack Obama cemented his relationship with John Roberts by leading the opposition by liberal Senators to Roberts’ confirmation as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Obama said he did not trust Roberts’ political philosophy on
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Constitutional questions such as: “whether the Commerce Clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce.”
Obama as a constitutional lawyer knew Congress’ power to exercise
control over individuals’ personal lives began through Supreme Court decisions
during the President Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration that expanded the
Constitution’s Commerce Clause far beyond its limited plain reading: “The Congress shall have Power”...“To regulate
Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the
Indian Tribes”.
President Obama may have stridently denied
Obamacare was a tax, but the legislation contains 21 new taxes that raise $800 billion over the next ten
years. On the same day as the Obamacare
decision, the Court also ruled 6-3 that a law convicting a California
politician named Xavier Alvarez for falsely claiming he won the Medal of Honor
was unconstitutional. Justice Kennedy
wrote for the majority: “Though few might find (Alvarez's) statements anything but contemptible,
his right to make those statements is protected by the Constitution's guarantee
of freedom of speech and expression.” Having ruled dishonest
boasting by politicians cannot be a crime; Roberts reasoned Obama’s dishonesty
does not invalidate Obamacare: “decisions
are entrusted to our nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office
if the people disagree with them, it is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their
political choices.”
Before 1937, Congressional efforts to pass
legislation forcing unionization, minimum-wage laws, restrictions on
agricultural planting and so forth were held
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as “not commerce.” After winning re-election in 1936, Franklin
Roosevelt proposed the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill that would have given him
the right to “pack” the Supreme Court in his favor by
appointing six more Justices. However,
in what became known as "the switch in time that saved nine", Justice Owen Roberts
capitulated to Roosevelt’s threat to rig the Court by reversing his position
and voting to expand the Commerce Clause to by uphold minimum wage laws as
regulating “commerce”. Four years later, an intimidated Court
dispensed with the 10th Amendment to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the
United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are
reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”, as
but a “truism” and not a limitation on
Congressional power.
Thomas Jefferson warned the natural tendency
is for government to grow, like a poisonous vine, it sprouts through any gap. Giving Congress the power to freely regulate nearly everything,
means they can choose which restraints to place on the self-interest of one
regulated party in order to provide advantages to another. Not only does this expansion of the Commerce
Clause lead to the continual rise of the social welfare and regulatory state,
it is the secret sauce that funds political crony capitalism.
The Roberts Opinion that Obamacare is “not
commerce” guts seventy-five years of the poisonous growth
of the vines of government under the expanded Commerce Clause:
“The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. Ignoring that distinction would undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. The individual mandate thus cannot be sustained under Congress’s power to “regulate Commerce.””
“The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. Ignoring that distinction would undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. The individual mandate thus cannot be sustained under Congress’s power to “regulate Commerce.””
In what may be Roberts ultimate legal
slam-dunk of Obama, Roberts’ ruling that the President and Congress’ passed a
tax now threatens to constitutionally invalidate all of Obamacare under Article
1, Section 7 of the Constitution: “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of
Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on
other Bills.” Although the law originated
and was narrowly passed in the House and then the Senate wrote and passed their
version of law, the House version hit a roadblock in the Senate. So Democrats to avoid an even riskier close
vote in the House and because they reasoned the legislation wasn’t a tax bill,
pulled the Senate version of Obamacare and deemed it passed. Failing to originate the final bill in the
House allows another constitutional challenge that the law is invalid.
Conservatives should praise John Roberts as a
brilliant legal tactician that has revived the Original Intent of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause and
vanquished Barack Obama’s quest for the Forward expansion of a Living Constitution. At the still young age of 57, Chief Justice Roberts may have two
more decades to honor the strict construction meaning of the Constitution of
the United States.
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