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Ed Feulner reminds us of the true Reagan legacy.
… so many politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, seek to portray themselves as a latter-day Reagan. To decide whether they deserve this mantle, however, consider this quote from his farewell address:
“‘We the people’ tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the people’ are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.”
Only a politician who agrees with this — and governs accordingly — can be considered Reagan’s true heir.
In Fortune, Keith McCullough says the Fed’s monetary policy is causing global inflation and fueling the unrest we are seeing.
…Captains of Keynesian economics don’t use the word ‘stagflation’ very much for a reason. The last time these bubble-makers plugged the world with stagflation was in the mid-to-late 1970s. That’s when US Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns was attempting to monetize America’s debt as President Jimmy Carter bet that it would not create any globally interconnected risk. Sound familiar?
We call it stagflation when real-world inflation readings are growing faster than economic growth. …
…It’s time to recognize what America’s debauchery of the US Dollar is doing to global inflation. If US monetary policy makers are still in the camp of the willfully blind and want to believe there’s no real-world inflation out there because Ben Bernanke’s conflicted and compromised calculation of CPI says so, Godspeed having the world agree with them on that. …
In the Washington Examiner, Lynn Mitchell tells us about the healthcare repeal vote of the Virginia senators who were Obama stooges last year.
Many in Virginia are questioning the votes Wednesday (or lack thereof) of their Democratic Senators Jim Webb and Mark Warner when the U.S. Senate took a vote on whether to repeal the health care law known as ObamaCare. It was defeated, falling along party lines and ending up 51-47 against repeal.
…Jim Riley at Virginia Virtucon blog noted Warner was a no-show even though he was in Washington that day to address the centrist think tank Center for American Progress. So the question begs to be asked … where was he for the Senate vote? Could he have skipped it, as some have suggested, to avoid a record of voting against the people of Virginia — again — or to avoid showing his lemming status voting lockstep with the Democrats?
Meanwhile, Webb lined up against repeal despite the outcry from Virginians who were for it, despite two election cycles that saw the Commonwealth’s citizens vote overwhelmingly for Republicans while throwing out Democrats, and despite two federal judge rulings declaring ObamaCare as unconstitutional.
…With this latest round, Webb and Warner continue to show that adhering to party lines is more important than listening to all the citizens they represent.
In the American Spectator, Ross Kaminsky comments on the defeat of the Senate repeal of Obamacare.
…Despite the rhetoric of the left, the vote was far more than symbolic as it forced some key vulnerable Democrats, including Claire McCaskill (MO) and Ben Nelson (NE), to show whether they stood with the citizens of their states or with the arm-twisting of Harry Reid and Barack Obama. In a vote in August, 71% of those Missourians who cast ballots voted to prohibit the government from requiring that a person purchase health insurance, the lynchpin of Obamacare’s takeover of the American health insurance system. McCaskill gave those 71% of voters the finger and, I predict, sealed her fate in the 2012 elections, as did Ben Nelson whose state is 2-to-1 against Obamacare.
“Conservative” Democrat Joe Manchin (WV) also voted with the Democrats to preserve Obamacare, proving right his Republican challenger in the 2010 Senate race who said that Manchin’s late-in-the-race conversion to being against Obamacare was a lie and that his earlier support of Obamacare represented who Manchin really is. A Rasmussen Reports poll of West Virginia likely voters in August, 2010 showed 69% of the state opposed to Obamacare, with 80% of those “strongly opposed” and almost twice as many supporting the state suing to block the law’s health insurance mandate as opposing such a lawsuit. &%^$! the people, says Manchin!
…If you want to understand the implication of the Republican assault on Obamacare (and of the Democrats’ defense of it), don’t bother with the lamestream media. Instead, look at betting on 2012 Senate control. It’s trading around 70% for the Republicans to win back control, the all-time high for that bet and up 15% from the November elections.
In the WaPo, Charles Lane explains that Congress cannot lie to the American people in order to enact a law. Lane is the Post’s Supreme Court reporter, so him leaving the dark side is an indication the legal challenge to healthcare is gaining momentum.
…Ezra says this is all about “semantics.” Congress has the power to levy taxes; and the “penalty” attached the mandate really is a tax, but Congress couldn’t use the word “tax,” because it’s politically “toxic.” “I don’t believe our forefathers risked their lives to make sure the word ‘penalty’ was eschewed in favor of the word ‘tax,’” he writes. Wrong again: Actually, one purpose of the Constitution is to prevent government from engaging in politically expedient deception. …
This passage from New York v. United States, from which Judge Vinson also aptly quoted, puts it rather well:
Some truths are so basic that, like the air around us, they are easily overlooked. Much of the Constitution is concerned with setting forth the form of our government, and the courts have traditionally invalidated measures deviating from that form. The result may appear “formalistic” in a given case to partisans of the measure at issue, because such measures are typically the product of the era’s perceived necessity. But the Constitution protects us from our own best intentions: It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the crisis of the day.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — not exactly a right-wing nut — wrote those words, in 1992. What she was basically saying is that, under our Constitution, the ends do not justify the means.
In the Agenda from National Review, Avik Roy puts together an excellent review of the verdict in Florida v HHS. Roy highlights Judge Vinson’s compelling rejection of the Necessary and Proper Clause.
Florida v. Health and Human Services, if upheld by the Supreme Court, could go down as an important landmark in the history of American liberty. But that’s a big “if.”
Most people expected Judge C. Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida to rule that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, based on his questions and comments during hearings on the case. Less expected was his decision to overturn the 2010 health care law in its entirety.
…Indeed, Judge Vinson has penned a persuasive, well-researched, and tightly-reasoned opinion, one that will surely have some impact on what the Supreme Court eventually ends up doing. Judge Vinson marshals statements from both sides to show that PPACA indeed represents an unprecedented expansion of federal power, one that, if upheld, makes it difficult to argue that the Constitution restrains Congress in any way. Equally importantly, he points out that even the White House believes that the PPACA’s other provisions will destabilize the health insurance market without an individual mandate, thereby making it difficult to uphold the rest of PPACA in the mandate’s absence.
There are four key components to Judge Vinson’s opinion: (1) a ruling that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s dramatic expansion of Medicaid is not coercive to the states; (2) that the individual mandate exceeds Congressional powers to regulate interstate commerce; (3) that the individual mandate exceeds Congressional prerogatives to enact laws that are “necessary and proper” for executing its delegated powers; (4) that the individual mandate was essential to the functioning of other critical components of PPACA, and therefore the entire law must be overturned. …
…3. The Necessary and Proper clause does not allow Congress to impose an individual mandate
…Judge Vinson spends more intellectual energy in this area, pointing out that the Constitution only allows Congress to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers” that were explicitly laid out in the Constitution (p. 58).
Vinson points out that advocates of the law assert that the mandate is essential because without it, the law’s requirement that insurers take all comers, without regard to preexisting conditions, would “[bankrupt] the health insurance industry.” But that doesn’t rise to the level of Constitutional justification (p. 60):
Thus, rather than being used to implement or facilitate enforcement of the Act’s insurance industry reforms, the individual mandate is actually being used as the means to avoid the adverse consequences of the Act itself. Such an application of the Necessary and Proper Clause would have the perverse effect of enabling Congress to pass ill conceived, or economically disruptive statutes, secure in the knowledge that the more dysfunctional the results of the statute are, the more essential or “necessary” the statutory fix would be. Under such a rationale, the more harm the statute does, the more power Congress could assume for itself under the Necessary and Proper Clause. This result would, of course, expand the Necessary and Proper Clause far beyond its original meaning, and allow Congress to exceed the powers specifically enumerated in Article I. Surely this is not what the Founders anticipated, nor how that Clause should operate. …