FACT FICTION OR STRANGER THAN BOTH

The Healthcare Bill is back in the news in a big way as its constitutional fate is now in the hands and minds of 9 American jurists. Yet, it brings back a flood of images from its birth in 2009 to what might be its death in 2012.

Fact or fiction Obamacare was passed by the House and Senate as normal legislation and Bills become law?

Answer, strange!  Obamacare went from the House to Senate where the Senate made changes and sent the Bill to Committee. Committee made more changes and sent it back to the House. The House was supposed to vote aye or nay on those changes and if it passed House it should have returned to the Senate for final vote on the revised Bill.
Then if passed by the Senate it would need to return to House for final vote to become law. It never went back to the Senate floor for a vote.

Why? Nancy Pelosi looked at the Senate and committee’s revisions to the Bill and changed the wording of original House Bill to comport with the Senate claiming they were all of a budgetary nature. She then announced that because they were strictly cost differences she was going to not send the Bill back to the Senate but instead use a provision in the Budget Act of 1974 called Reconciliation. That parliamentary provision was intended to speed up the legislative procedure of Bills that were accepted by both bodies of Congress but hung up on small accounting differences and nothing more. The Healthcare Bill was neither a popular Bill nor a Bill that was only debated for its budgetary discrepancies.

Fact or fiction Obamacare was read by members of Congress before they passed the Bill?

Answer stranger still! No member of either body has read the Healthcare Bill before passage but worse no member can read the Healthcare Bill because is not completely written. Obamacare gives Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius huge bureaucratic power to write rules and regulations in governance over both insurances providers and healthcare providers. Therefore it is still a work in progress.

Fact of fiction Obamacare has a mandate requiring all Americans to buy health insurance or be fined a penalty?

Answer stranger than strange. Yes Obamacare claims that this penalty is not a tax or a mandate but an incentive without criminal prosecution if Americans ignore the fee. However, to the 50 States of the union who do not accept Obamacare they will be permanently shut off of Federal funds for Medicare in which the federal government will yet continue to force state citizens to pay in FICA contribution. In essence, if you don’t implement Obamacare the federal monies you paid for to fund the sick and elderly with be held hostage.

Fact or fiction ObamaCare’s Secretary writes provisions that violate the 1^st Amendment?

Answer turn and face the strange. Yes the forcing of faith based healthcare providers like Catholic Hospitals to pay insurances premiums that support contraception, sterilizations and abortions without recognizing a moral exemption is the State interfering with religious liberty. Everyone knows that purveyance is support and the Church is being forced to have its healthcare dollars directed to the support of abortions which they equate as a sin equal with murder. Equally the poor who have religious objection to their health insurance policy funding abortion would be forced to choose no insurance coverage or Obamacare leaving them a discriminated choice.

Fact or fiction if Obamacare is held to be constitutional then the government would be able to control  by a broad expansion of Commerce Clause every aspect of the citizen’s life altering our limited Federal power, States Rights and individual liberty heretofore guarantees?

Answer estranged. Indeed if the court ruled Obamacare was constitutional and both the Congress and the people accepted that ruling as the final word then such would be the end of our Republic. However that would assume that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter that would then exhaust remedy for the people. That would be incorrect.

Repealing Obamacare would not make the precedent of the court ruling go away. The people still would have two courses of peaceful action. One is nullification by the States to refuse to agree with the Constitutionality of Obamacare and the court’s ruling forcing the Federal government to back down. Another petition to the court from the people might result in a Supreme Court reversal but even if it did not it would muddy the water for a future Congress to proceed with an open ended Commerce clause precedent.

Two, an amendment to the Constitution ratified by the States that limits the Commerce Clause, Necessary and Proper Clause to not only make Obamacare no longer constitutional but to set a future constraint on Congress and the Supreme Court.

The other options are perhaps not so peaceful but still promoted by our forefathers in that ultimately it is neither the Supreme Court, Congress nor the Executive Branch that has authority over the people but the other way around. We the people give legitimacy to our government and we the people are the final arbiters of its legitimacy.

The idea that in order to resolve a financial cost burden in healthcare many Americans are willing to assign the federal government dictatorial power over the people would be considered too improbable a premise for a fiction novel.

Yet that is the fact that Americans are facing today as we await the Supreme Court ruling. Making myself and the majority of Americans feel like strangers in the land of the free!

" Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. 

The people themselves are its only safe depositories."
                                           (Thomas Jefferson)