“This is what change looks like,” announced a jubilant President Obama on March 21, shortly after the House passage of healthcare legislation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has likened in importance to Social Security and Medicare. Much as we are reluctant to agree with either Obama or Pelosi, it must be acknowledged that America’s move into full-blown socialized medicine is without a doubt a defining moment in American history.
For it is what America’s elites have wanted for a long, long time, from the stuffy manufacturers of consent in the media cartel to the pork-barrel plutocrats posing as public benefactors on Capitol Hill. And despite pervasive evidence that a solid majority of Americans oppose (as they should) nationalized healthcare, the establishment has finally succeeded in ramming it down our collective, and now collectivized, throats.
There can be, of course, no debate whatsoever on the legitimacy, constitutional or fiscal, of this latest, worst Big Government monstrosity to deface the Era of Obama. “The most troubling aspect of this bill is that it is so blatantly unconstitutional and contrary to the ideals of liberty,” Congressman Ron Paul pointed out shortly after the House vote. “Nowhere in the Constitution is there anything approaching authority for the federal government to do any of this.” And even were that not the case, there’s still the cost — nearly a trillion new dollars in government spending, and that’s only according to the rosy estimates of the bill’s cultish supporters. The bill will also soon require all Americans to purchase health insurance from a provider of their choice, and the government will levy hefty fines on those who refuse to do so. Fifteen thousand new IRS agents are to be hired, to harass and intimidate Americans into bowing under the new healthcare yoke. Funny thing — the very same people who promoted abortion on demand on the grounds that each individual is sovereign over his own body have now placed the bodies of every American under the authority of the federal government.
A majority of the states, commendably, have announced their intention to challenge the new legislation in the courts, deeming it unconstitutional. The Beltway punditry has already proclaimed that a lost cause because, they assure us, federal law always trumps state law, according to Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution. That, of course, is a blatant fabrication; what Article 6 actually says, regarding the relationship between state and federal law, is “this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof … shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the … Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” (Emphasis added.)Only federal laws that are constitutionally legitimate, in other words, have ascendancy over the states.
Assuming that the federal courts will discover some spurious basis in the Constitution for nationalized healthcare and dismiss the states’ lawsuits, what then? Well, the diffuse Tea Party movement is vowing to run out of office this fall everyone in Congress who voted for the healthcare bill. But purging both houses of Congress isn’t the same thing as repealing nationalized healthcare, not by a long shot. For one thing, by the time voters go to the polls in November, the same forces that brought about this latest revolution will have consolidated their positions. New bureaucracies will have been set up and thousands of new federal employees put to work micromanaging American healthcare. Potent new configurations of special interests, dedicated to maintaining the new status quo, will have coalesced around the new nerve centers of political power associated with one of America’s largest economic sectors. The opinion cartel will have done its best to recast those lingering dissenters as out-of-step, retrograde rebels who need to cool it and take their meds, as it were.
It will not do simply to elect Republicans in the fall; we already know from sad experience (1994, anyone?) that most freshly scrubbed freshman Republicans will sell their principles to the highest bidder the moment they get a taste of the fierce inertia of the Beltway status quo. They will be pilloried in the press and assailed by cleverly manipulated flash mobs of liberal constituents. They will be offered blandishments of every kind — bribes, quid pro quo legislative support, plum committee chairs, and the like — in return for allegiance to the System. Failing that, they will be threatened with every species of defamation and public humiliation should they fail to play along.
The only antidote to Obama’s bad medicine will be an incoming class of freshman Congressmen who will put their oath of allegiance to the Constitution above all other considerations, party affiliation notwithstanding. Only men and women determined to uphold the U.S. Constitution are worthy of our electoral trust, and only such can be expected to endure the slings and arrows of the establishment and truly undo what has been done to our healthcare.
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