I’m not up to date on yesterday’s hearings, but here are a couple of columns to comment on.
EJ Dionne who cannot believe that Congress doesn’t have unlimited power to pass whatever it wants to pass (I am very curious what he thinks the Supreme Court’s job is) has this to say [my comments are in brackets]:
The conservative justices were obsessed with weird hypotheticals. If the federal government could make you buy health insurance, might it require you to buy broccoli, health club memberships, cellphones, burial services and cars? All of which have nothing to do with an uninsured person getting expensive treatment that others — often taxpayers — have to pay for. [Yet everyone agrees that lifestyles DO make a difference in how much health care costs. So if people live badly and all the “weird hypotheticals” are of course metaphors for living unsafely, then why on earth couldn’t the government mandate other acts if it can mandate purchases? It’s a real question EJ.]
Liberals should learn from this display that there is no point in catering to today’s hard-line conservatives. The individual mandate was a conservative idea that President Obama adopted to preserve the private market in health insurance rather than move toward a government-financed, single-payer system. What he got back from conservatives was not gratitude but charges of socialism — for adopting their own proposal. [Are you saying that because a conservative came up with the idea that it is by default constitutional? I don’t think so. And thank God for people willing to point that out.]
The irony is that if the court’s conservatives overthrow the mandate, they will hasten the arrival of a more government-heavy system. Justice Anthony Kennedy even hinted that it might be more “honest” if government simply used “the tax power to raise revenue and to just have a national health service, single-payer.” Remember those words. [This is not irony. Nor is it necessarily true. The reason the less “government-heavy system” got passed was because a more government-heavy system could not get passed. Health care and fixes to it have become a part of the national discussion and there have been many, many good ideas passed around. None of which are nationalized.]
And then this column by John Podheretz was good concerning the shock the left is feeling that this mandate really is being honestly questioned as unconstitutional. As if the rest of us out here are complaining just to be partisan and mean. No one gives a rip about that old document do they?
The panicked reception in the mainstream media of the three-day Supreme Court health-care marathon is a delightful reminder of the nearly impenetrable parochialism of American liberals.
They’re so convinced of their own correctness — and so determined to believe conservatives are either a) corrupt, b) stupid or c) deluded — that they find themselves repeatedly astonished to discover conservatives are in fact capable of a) advancing and defending their own powerful arguments, b) effectively countering weak liberal arguments and c) exposing the soft underbelly of liberal self-satisfaction as they do so.
That’s what happened this week. There appears to be no question in the mind of anyone who read the transcripts or listened to the oral arguments that the conservative lawyers and justices made mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s advocates and the liberal members of the court.
That was a good quote, but this was a truism that can be taken to the bank:
There’s no telling which of 10 possible ways the high court will finally rule. But one thing is for certain: There will again come a time when liberals and conservatives disagree on a fundamental intellectual matter. Conservatives will take liberals and their arguments seriously and try to find the best way to argue the other side.
And the liberals will put their fingers in their ears and sing, “La la la.”
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