Pirate's Cove

Seriously, around eight months ago, who would have thought there would be legal challenges to legislation that the majority of Americans hated overall, and found constitutional issues in? The Times is shocked, shocked, I tell you!

By contradicting two prior opinions, Monday’s court ruling in Virginia against the Obama health care law highlighted both the novelty of the constitutional issues and the difficulty of forging consensus among judges who bring differences in experience, philosophy and partisan background to the bench.

Love that “contradicting” word. They throw it out there as if there is something wrong with a different court saying “um, you’re wrong.” Then there is the “consensus” thing. Like science, law is not about consensus, it is about ruling on the actual merits of the law as it applies to the constitution.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to resolve the conflict, and many court watchers already expect a characteristically close decision. But what is now clear is that the challenges from dozens of states to the law’s constitutionality can no longer be dismissed as frivolous, as they were earlier this year by some scholars and Democratic partisans.

Obviously, in Liberal World Constitutional issues are frivilous. Weird, that.

The Supreme Court’s position on the Commerce Clause has evolved through four signature cases over the last 68 years, three of which have been decided since 1995. Two of the opinions — Wickard v. Filburn in 1942 and Gonzales v. Raich in 2005 — established broad federal powers to regulate even personal commercial decisions that, taken in the aggregate, may influence a larger economic outcome.

Funny that all the liberal supporters were throwing around those two cases, particularly the Gonzales v. Raich one yesterday. It’s almost like they all had the same talking points or something, and now it shows up in the Times.

Justice Department lawyers have responded that individuals cannot opt out of the medical market because they never know when they might be hit by a bus and require treatment. The act of not obtaining insurance, they contend, is thus an active decision to pay for health care out of pocket. Such individual decisions, when taken together, can shift billions of dollars in uncompensated care costs to governments, hospitals and the privately insured, and thus can be regulated.

Let’s explain this in terms even a liberal can understand. Let’s say you do not own a flat screen HDTV. You don’t want one. You don’t need one. But, now, the federal government decrees that you must purchase one, and uses the Commerce Clause. You ask yourself “what commerce? How can they regulate something that I haven’t even purchased? Sure, I watch TV now and then, but, I don’t actually own an HDTV, so, by what authority can they make me purchase one?”

FYI to liberals, commerce requires that something is actually purchased. Furthermore, interstate commerce, the power delegated to the Federal Congress, requires that the item pass over State lines or the countries international boundaries. They have no Constitutional power to force anyone to actually purchase something. And can only get involved with materials that cross the state lines (remember, there is that pesky 10th Amendment, which liberals hate.) Which is why they shifted to calling it a tax, which isn’t flying, either.

This will surely make it to the Supreme Court, if Republicans do not repeal it first.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU. sit back and Relax. we’ll dRive!