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In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel reviews how the liberals are experiencing constitutional derangement syndrome.
…in order to avoid the political inconvenience of a “tax,” Democrats based the very core of their bill on a new and untested legal premise—one that is a far bigger affront to the Constitution than New Deal legislation. That’s why Judge Hudson struck it down. And since Congress adopted this theory sloppily, in response to political pressure, it has left a record that is killing the Justice Department in court.
Knowing how audacious the commerce-clause theory is, Justice has been trying to argue that the penalty is, in fact . . . a tax. This has only annoyed Judge Vinson, who is well aware of the history, and in fact rapped the Justice Department for the bait-and-switch.
“Congress should not be permitted to secure and cast politically difficult votes on controversial legislation by deliberately calling something one thing,” Judge Vinson wrote in October, “after which the defenders of that legislation take an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ tack and argue in court that Congress really meant something else entirely.” Ouch.
And yet the Justice Department has continued to put forward wild theories in court—about the Commerce Clause, about the Necessary and Proper Clause—that have no basis in the statutory language of ObamaCare. And it is now playing games with the appeal of Judge Hudson’s ruling, arguing against having it go straight to the Supreme Court, where the nation could get some quick clarity. The administration believes its best shot is to drag out the litigation, and hope that time pressures the courts to leave the law alone. …
Victor Davis Hanson looks at various sectors of the angry, spoiled Left.
…The green lobby got all it wanted—subsidies, insider dealers, fame, money, influence. And then came Climategate, the multimillionaire Al Gore’s personal and professional meltdown, the coldest, iciest, and snowiest winters in memory, all the false warnings about record hurricanes and tsunamis becoming the new norm, the Orwellian metamorphosizing nomenclature (global warming begat climate change that is now begetting “climate chaos”).
Gorism is becoming a permanent fixture of late night comedians. When the New York Times keeps publishing op-eds about how record cold proves record global warming, the world wonders: what would record heat prove?
But whom to blame? The bad earth that is not boiling this winter? Right-wing zealots who cannot comprehend that very cold proves very hot. Red-state yahoos that don’t understand the brilliance of cap and trade? Broke governments that did not subsidize enough green power, green farming, and green energy? …
David Warren draws an accurate analogy between Robin Hood, and how the Left romanticizes stealing from taxpayers to fund their dream programs.
…The attraction of Robin Hood, perhaps then as now, to youthful and disordered minds, is that he himself “cuts to the chase,” or cuts the corner, discovering an effective method for redistributing wealth, centuries before the imposition of the Nanny State. He becomes, thus, a “romantic hero,” or to my mind, a wonderful illustration of the close connection between the “do-gooder” impulse, and the criminal one; or as Ann Coulter might put it, between a “liberal” and a “psycho.”
…We enter a new year in which, despite the usual setbacks from reality, Robin Hoodlumism is alive and well, both as esthetic flourish and bureaucratic policy. Vast government departments continue to do what the outlaws did on medieval highways — though on a fiscal scale and with a crushing efficiency unimaginable in former times, upon travellers denied any of the traditional defences. Attempts to romanticize this operation, in which human generosity itself is obviated by arbitrary power, will continue for as long as the criminal impulse can be sublimated in moral pride, which is to say, probably forever.
Example, U.S. President Barack Obama is reported to be attending church again, and shows a “fresh start,” by persistently misquoting from the Book of Genesis, chapter four. “I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper,” he suggests it says. Check out the original. It is a scene in which no sisters appear, and the brothers in question are Cain and Abel. In particular, the intellectual leap from “you must not murder your brother,” to “you must create and sustain a vast and ponderous welfare system, that is funded by taxing him and borrowing the rest from China,” is not Biblical. …
As NYC recovers from the blizzard, Nicole Gelinas, in the NYPost, makes a great case for what is wrong with government decisions. The mayor has cut sanitation department services and employees, while leaving unsustainable pensions and benefits in place. The result?
…When Bloomberg took office, Gotham spent $1.3 billion annually on the Sanitation Department.
Today, we spend more than $2.2 billion on “New York’s Strongest.”
That increase is almost 3½ times the inflation rate. …
Today’s budgeted sanitation force — from supervisors to garbage collectors — is 392 people smaller than nine years ago, a 4 percent decline even as New York City’s population is up. And the department will shrink further, as Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith knocks 200 people off the rolls to save $21 million by “modifying the supervisor span of control.”
Where did the money go? To pensions, health care and debt. Taxpayers now spend $144,000 in salary and benefits for each sanitation worker, up from $79,000 nearly a decade ago.
Nine years ago, taxpayers contributed about $10.5 million annually to support sanitation pensions. This year, it’ll cost $240 million — a more than 20-fold increase. Back then, health and other “fringe” benefits for the department cost $150 million; they’ve since more than doubled to $313 million. …
…Plus, the snowstorm has made it obvious that New York under Bloomberg has not perfected public-sector management to such an extent that it can cut and cut and cut to feed the benefits monster without harming the public. …
A story about bogus environmental fears with pictures of a buxom woman is tailor-made for UK’s Daily Mail. They give us the story of Erin Brockovich and the growing suspicion the cancer scare in her California town was overblown .
…Today, however, more than a decade on from one of the most celebrated ‘David and Goliath’ legal battles of recent times, a less flattering assessment is emerging.
Fresh scientific evidence has come to light that casts doubt on Brockovich’s claims that PG&E was responsible for the continuing legacy of ill-health in Hinkley.
That evidence is contained in a new survey by the California Cancer Registry and its key, controversial finding that the number of people diagnosed with cancer in the Hinkley area between 1996 and 2008 was not only not excessive, but was lower than would normally be expected for a town of its size — 196 cancer cases over the 12-year period of the study, when the statistical expectation for the region was 224. …