You are hearing a lot about the U.S. Constitution these days, and you probably know the Founding Fathers were skeptical of human nature so they set up a system of “checks and balances” to keep the nation from skidding off track. But it seems to me that the “checks and balances” are badly out of whack today.
Take the courts, for example. They have become so politicized that they are simply an extension of whatever party put the judge in power.
No one in their right mind would consider Justice Antonin Scalia anything but a conservative hack. He even attends Tea Party meetings to give them advice. And Chief Justice John Roberts has shucked any pretense of impartiality, handing down clearly biased rulings in cases such as the one in which the court made corporations into people.
But perhaps the most obvious display pf partisanship came yesterday when a federal judge ruled that it was unconstitutional for Congress to enact a health care law that requires Americans to buy insurance.
Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Florida, went even farther than a Virginia judge who earlier struck down the section requiring all citizens to buy health insurance. Vinson concluded that the insurance mandate was essential to the workings of the law, and invalidated the whole thing.
The latest ruling evens the score at two for and two against in the lower courts. Obviously, the issue will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court.
I think I know how the justices will rule.
This is probably the most conservative court in America’s history (click on illustration above). I think the health care law (in its current form) is doomed.
What beats me is why President Obama and his allies in Congress opted for such a convoluted way of solving America’s health care mess.
I can’t figure out why the president didn’t just expand Medicare to cover everyone. The revised program could have paid for itself by collecting realistic dues.
There would have been no question as to the constitutionality of that kind of reform.
Fortunately, it’s not too late. Americans could still get a “public option.”
The Supreme Court ruling will come just in time to present a clear-cut choice for the 2012 elections.
If the Supreme Court sends the law back to the drawing board, and if outraged voters give control of Congress back to the Democrats, we might see a sensible overhaul based on the much-maligned “public option.”
You think it’s possible that Obama knew all along how this thing would play out, with all those Blue Dog Democrats to contend with, and decided to set it up so, in the end, Congress would “have no choice” but to do the most sensible thing?
