I’ve always maintained that soldiers tend to “get” the Constitution better than our betters in government. My own father certainly did. After all, it’s the soldiers who’ll always have to do the bleeding to “support and defend” it.
Small wonder, then, that a young soldier at an ObamaCare protest rally in St. Louis yesterday could pack so much sense into so few words. The crowd certainly appreciated it and let’s hope Sen. Claire McCaskill appreciates it as well.
For a look at what “moderate” Republican senators have in mind for our future medical care, below is a letter to moi from Sen. Olympia Snowe in response to a polite missive hoping that she would emphasize private sector solutions in any “reform”. This is what I got back (click image for pdf).
Sen. Snowe sits on Max Baucus’s Finance Committee, so she’s right in the middle of the Senate’s health care brain trust. As you can see from the letter, the Senator voted for Porkulus and even boasts of her support for America’s version of the British NICE, which will centrally control what care we can get based on some bureaucrat’s notions of “comparative effectiveness”.
I particular like her invocation of eschatological perfection in health care: “Rather, we are on the cusp of at last achieving the enactment of broad health reform to assure that health plans better serve the public while preserving both choice and innovation.”
Barack Obama couldn’t have said it better himself.
Hat tip to Ed Morrissey on the soldier video.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm… “Get” the Constitution, I wonder if he “gets” this part.
Section 8 – Powers of Congress
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and GENERAL WELFARE of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
I wonder what the Founding Fathers may have meant by “general welfare? Probably had nothing to do with health, sorry to waste your time.
Your comment is a good one and worthy of serious discussion because there have been differing interpretations of the “spending clause” from the very beginning. Hamilton, for instance, took an expansive position (i.e. Congress could do just about anything it wanted) with the restrictive interpretations of Madison and Jefferson (that the clause only applied to the enumerated powers in the rest of section 8). It’s safe to say, however, that before the Civil War, use of the clause was reasonably limited in that “general welfare” really did mean “general” (James Monroe’s position) – applying to all the people of the US. It’s only when we reach the New Deal era and the Butler decision that we see the USSC essentially adopting Monroe’s position. Justice Reynolds did state that while the power to tax was not unlimited, the meaning of the spending clause was to be found in the clause itself and not in the rest of the enumerated powers in section 8.
I suppose another way to view the clause in the context of the health care debate is to ask whether appropriation of one-seventh of the economy falls within the power to “lay and collect taxes”.
Thanks for your comment, which raises important questions.