Bloodthirsty Liberal

The Supreme Court hotline is temporarily experiencing heavier than usual call activity. Please wait on the line, and a Justice will be with you shortly. Your Constitutional challenge to the cluster-Fluke known as ObamaCare is important to us. Thank you for your patience:

Catholic archdioceses and institutions filed suit in federal district courts across the country Monday against the so-called contraception mandate, claiming their “fundamental rights hang in the balance.”

The plaintiffs include a host of schools and organizations, including the University of Notre Dame and the Archdiocese of New York. The lawsuits, though related, were filed individually.

The schools are objecting to the requirement from the federal health care overhaul that employers provide access to contraceptive care. The Obama administration several months back softened its position on the mandate, but some religious organizations complained the administration did not go far enough to ensure the rule would not compel them to violate their religious beliefs.

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We have tried negotiation with the Administration and legislation with the Congress – and we’ll keep at it – but there’s still no fix. Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now. … It is also a compelling display of the unity of the Church in defense of religious liberty. It’s also a great show of the diversity of the Church’s ministries that serve the common good and that are jeopardized by the mandate – ministries to the poor, the sick, and the uneducated, to people of any faith or no faith at all.

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This lawsuit is about one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference. It is not about whether people have a right to abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception. Those services are, and will continue to be, freely available in the United States, and nothing prevents the Government itself from making them more widely available. But the right to such services does not authorize the Government to force the University of Notre Dame (“Notre Dame”) to violate its own conscience by making it provide, pay for, and/or facilitate those services to others, contrary to itssincerely held religious beliefs. …

If the Government can force religious institutions to violate their beliefs in such a manner, there is no apparent limit to the Government’s power. Such an oppression of religious freedom violates Notre Dame’s clearly established constitutional and statutory rights.

The First Amendment also prohibits the Government from becoming excessively entangled in religious affairs and from interfering with a religious institution’s internal decisions concerning the organization’s religious structure, ministers, or doctrine. The U.S. Government Mandate tramples all of these rights.

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[I]f one Presidential Administration can override our religious purpose and use religious organizations to advance policies that undercut our values, then surely another Administration will do the same for another very different set of policies, each time invoking some concept of popular will or the public good, with the result these religious organizations become mere tools for the exercise of government power, morally subservient to the state, and not free from its infringements. If that happens, it will be the end of genuinely religious organizations in all but name.

The Church has the force of the Constitution behind it, for all that matters. Because, as Professor Obama—sorry, Senior Lecturer Obama—told us: many believe the Constitution is a document of “negative liberties” that is silent on what the government “must do on your behalf”. If a bunch of dead white men didn’t think to order the Roman Catholic Church to sanction and provide for abortions, that’s their problem, not Sandra Fluke’s.

Anyhow, “Obamacare: The Court Case” sounds like it will run longer than Cats!

Or the government will. Or you the doctor. Or you the government.

Does it really matter? Any way you look at it, you’ve still got the latex finger up the chute:

The Obama administration is quietly diverting roughly $500 million to the IRS to help implement the president’s healthcare law.

The money is only part of the IRS’s total implementation spending, and it is being provided outside the normal appropriations process. The tax agency is responsible for several key provisions of the new law, including the unpopular individual mandate.

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The law contains dozens of targeted appropriations to implement specific provisions. It also gave the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) a $1 billion implementation fund, to use as it sees fit. Republicans have called it a “slush fund.”

HHS plans to drain the entire fund by September — before the presidential election, and more than a year before most of the healthcare law takes effect. Roughly half of that money will ultimately go to the IRS.

HHS has transferred almost $200 million to the IRS over the past two years and plans to transfer more than $300 million this year, according to figures provided by a congressional aide.

That may sound like a lot of money, but jack boots don’t come cheap.

Neither do the consequences of an election:

The Supreme Court has long had the role of declaring what the law is. That’s becoming a harder and harder task thanks to the White House and Congress concocting laws so complex that no one knows their meaning before, during or after they’re passed.

In an era when people expect transparency and abhor complexity, three days of skeptical Supreme Court hearings on the president’s health law showcased a complex law collapsing under its own weight. Information is supposed to flow freely, but consumers of health care operate in the dark, including without any understanding of how the law is supposed to work. And they are not alone.

Consider how Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer—one Reagan appointee and one Clinton appointee—tag-teamed to declare the law unreadable. “What happened to the Eighth Amendment?” Justice Scalia asked during the oral argument, referring to prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? And do you really expect the court to do that? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?”

Justice Breyer made a similar point: “I haven’t read every word of that, I promise. . . . There is the mandate in the community, this is Titles I and II, the mandate, the community, pre-existing condition, OK? . . . There is biosimilarity, there is breast-feeding, there is promoting nurses and doctors to serve underserved areas, there is the Class Act, etc. . . . So what do you propose we do other than spend a year reading all this?”

The justices focused on the complexity of the law to debate what happens if they find some parts unconstitutional, such as the individual mandate that forces people to buy insurance. Can the rest of it stay, or must it all fall, and the political branches start on health-care reform from scratch? And how could the court practically pick and choose, given the law’s great length and complexity?

This shouldn’t surprise even supporters of the law. Before the bill was passed in 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it,” and Rep. John Conyers complained, “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means?”

So, Congress doesn’t know what it means; the Supreme Court doesn’t know what it means—to the executive it’s just another slush fund (like TARP, ARRA, etc.). Are there any grown-ups in Washington?

I saw this in another blog, and it feels apt:

An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.
Ernest Rutherford

Same should go for legislation, Ernie.

PS: Maybe that’s why Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd were so fond of those waitress sandwiches. They were trying to get a feel… for complex legislation, of course.

James Taranto runs through all the apologists and explicators of Obama’s judicial threat:

What do you call it when a liberal law professor or commentator defends President Obama’s ignorant musings on constitutional law? Comedy gold. From WSJ.com:

Constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and former mentor to President Barack Obama, said the president “obviously misspoke” earlier this week when he made comments about the Supreme Court possibly overturning the health-care law.

Mr. Tribe, who calls the president one of his best students, said in an interview: “He didn’t say what he meant . . . and having said that, in order to avoid misleading anyone, he had to clarify it.”

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This, from the Daily Beast’s Jesse Singal, cracked us up:

Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University, didn’t think it was fair to take Obama’s statement at face value.

“Do we really think President Obama, a former teacher of constitutional law, believes that any act of Congress enacted by a strong majority is immune to judicial review?” he asked in an email. . . .

“I find that impossible to believe,” Yoshino continued, “especially when the President’s pronouncement is viewed in context”–that is, as following up upon the rather eloquent defense of the law that preceded it in his news conference.

At least Singal didn’t call the president “articulate.”

And then there’s Obama’s own understanding of that “charter of negative liberties”, aka the Constitution:

Obama taught “Con Law III” at Chicago. Judicial review, federalism, the separation of powers–the old “structural Constitution” stuff–is covered in “Con Law I” (or at least it was when I was a student). Con Law III covers the Fourteenth Amendment. (Oddly enough, Prof. Obama didn’t seem too concerned about “an unelected group of people” overturning a “duly constituted and passed law” when we were discussing all those famous Fourteenth Amendment cases – roe v. wade, griswold v. connecticut, romer v. evans, etc.) Of course, even a Con Law professor focusing on the Bill of Rights should know that the principle of judicial review has been alive and well since 1803, so I still feel like my educational credentials have been tarnished a bit by the President’s “unprecedented, extraordinary” remarks.

The 14th Amendment is a hell of an amendment—due process, equal protection—but it’s hardly all there is. Maybe that’s why he’s so down on the Constitution: he hasn’t read it.

Somewhere, Justice Alito is shaking his head and saying “Not true.”

“Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Obama told reporters today while speaking with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

Obama reminded reporters that conservative commentators, have complained about “judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint,” that “an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

First of all, that’s what the Supreme Court is supposed to do. It’s not “unprecedented”—in fact, it started in 1803! Marbury v Madison ring a bell, Mr. Law Review President? The Supremes have declared unconstitutional a total of 158 laws passed by “a democratically elected Congress” between 1798 and 2002, about one every year and a half.

“Strong majority”? By seven votes in the House—the ayes being unanimously Democrats, the nays a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans. So, that’s that lie dispensed with.

And “judicial activism”? The court spent a lot of time discussing how to avoid it! They didn’t want to be in a position of picking and choosing politically favored programs in the law—at least the conservative justices didn’t. Ginsburg seemed to think the law was peachy because it provided health care for “Indians” (feather, presumably, not dot), and why should Congress have to start all over again? But the court can’t rewrite the law; it can only deliver an opinion on whether it passes Constitutional muster.

So, this is all a bunch of bull crap from a president who slings it like a Cy Young Award winner.

Which is his history:

Let her tell it:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi today said she has “no idea” whether the Supreme Court will strike down a key provision of the health care law that she guided through Congress during her reign as speaker of the House two years ago.

“I have no idea. None of us does,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said. “We are all now talking about something of which we have no knowledge because we’re not members of the Supreme Court. We have knowledge of the legislation [and] we knowledge of the arguments, but we have no idea what the outcome will be.”

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Pelosi said congressional Democrats “have long believed in judicial review” as part of the country’s constitutional process, but said that as Democrats wrote the Affordable Care Act, “We were careful to honor our Constitution.”

Like “deeming” it passed? Offering kickbacks and side deals to buy swing votes? Creating a bureaucratic monstrosity that compels supposedly free citizens to purchase a health insurance plan of the government’s liking? Maybe Pelosi was speaking of the South African constitution (Justice Ginsburg’s preferred charter), ’cause she sure as heck ain’t speaking about the US Constitution.

As someone who’s not a lawyer, I generally defer to those with the education and the training to make better informed judgments.

Well, not really, but I hold their opinions in at least some regard.

Well, not really, but I accept that mine might not be the last word.

Well, not really. Especially after reading Justice Ginsberg’s weak-ass defense of this lame-ass bill:

As in yesterday’s hearings, the four Democratic appointees ended up advocating for the administration’s position more effectively than its own lawyers. Ruth Bader Ginsburg offered a metaphor in the course of questioning former solicitor general Paul Clement, who argued the case for the 26 states challenging ObamaCare:

Mr. Clement, there are so many things in this Act that are unquestionably okay. I think you would concede that reauthorizing what is the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act changes to long benefits, why make Congress redo those? I mean it’s a question of whether we say everything you do is no good, now start from scratch, or to say, yes, there are many things in here that have nothing to do frankly with the affordable healthcare and there are some that we think it’s better to let Congress to decide whether it wants them in or out.

So why should we say it’s a choice between a wrecking operation, which is what you are requesting, or a salvage job. And the more conservative approach would be salvage rather than throwing out everything.

This is so intellectually dishonest as to leave me dizzy! “Why throw the whole meal out just because of a little e coli? The broccoli is excellent!” Seriously, I have to lie down.

And who cares what her opinion is of the… what is it? The “Indian Healthcare Improvement Act”. It’s not up to her whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing—if Congress passed it, and it doesn’t violate the Constitution, it’s the law. Whether she likes it or not! Me, I think what would improve Indian health immeasurably is jobs. Unemployment rates differ radically from rez to rez—I see estimates ranging from 15% to 85%—but it’s fair to say the situation overall sucks. (I assume these are Blackfoot-type Indians, and not Bangalore, btw.) A couple of casinos, and the sickly Sioux will be right as rain.

Compare this liberal claptrap—we have to uphold ObamaCare for the sake of the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act—with the serious thought Scalia, Kennedy, et al are giving to the constitutionality of the individual mandate, severability, and judicial activism, and she’s an utter embarrassment. I am horrified to learn that our precious Constitution is being metaphorically folded, spindled, and mutilated by a second-rate mind.

Yes, really!

Here’s hoping this is it:

The Supreme Court just wrapped up the second day of oral arguments in the landmark case against President Obama’s healthcare overhaul, and reports from inside the courtroom indicate that the controversial law took quite a beating.

Today’s arguments focused around the central constitutional question of whether Congress has the power to force Americans to either pay for health insurance or pay a penalty.

According to CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, the arguments were “a train wreck for the Obama administration.”

“This law looks like it’s going to be struck down. I’m telling you, all of the predictions including mine that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong,” Toobin just said on CNN.

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Toobin added that he felt that U.S. Solicitor General David Verrilli simply wasn’t prepared for the conservative justices.

“I don’t know why he had a bad day,” he said. “He is a good lawyer, he was a perfectly fine lawyer in the really sort of tangential argument yesterday. He was not ready for the answers for the conservative justices.”

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KENNEDY: Health care law “changes the relationship between the individual and the government in a very fundamental way.”

KENNEDY: Can you “create” commerce in order to regulate it? Suggests govt has “heavy burden” in health care case.

I can’t say the lawyer was at fault. Kennedy was just asking the tough (and right) questions. Besides, the four liberal justices are entirely in the bag. They see no problem with changing the relationship between the individual and the government in a very fundamental way, or creating commerce in order to regulate it. They can’t [bleeping] wait.

I try not to demonize (too much) those who disagree with me, but this law is an abomination. I don’t agree with socialized medicine, but I understand why some do. I can’t understand—at all—how anyone can support the government compulsion to purchase health insurance, and which kind. Even more fundamentally, who feels comfortable with government running anything as complex and fraught as a nation’s health care system? They way they wrote and passed the law was malpractice—you think its implementation will be any cleaner?

You say dhimmi, I say dummy—really, what’s the difference?

Following are excerpts from an interview with US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which aired on Al-Hayat TV on January 30, 2012.

It is a very inspiring time – that you have overthrown a dictator, and that you are striving to achieve a genuine democracy. So I think people in the United States are hoping that this transition will work, and that there will genuinely be a government of, by, and for the people. [NB: This is after a 3/4 majority Islamist bloc has been seated in the Egyptian parliament.]

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I can’t speak about what the Egyptian experience should be, because I’m operating under a rather old constitution. The United States, in comparison to Egypt, is a very new nation, and yet we have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world.

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I would not look to the US constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa. That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights, had an independent judiciary… It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done. Much more recent than the US constitution – Canada has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It dates from 1982. You would almost certainly look at the European Convention on Human Rights. Yes, why not take advantage of what there is elsewhere in the world?

Goodness, look how free people are in Canada! Just ask Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant.

Conservatives believe in American Exceptionalism, based almost solely on the Constitution itself. Liberals like “Not Look to the US Constitution” Ginsburg and “Document of Negative Liberties” Obama believe in Except Americanism.

The Supreme Court holds that discrimination does not exist where it does not exist:

The Supreme Court on Friday threw out electoral maps drawn by federal judges in Texas that favored minorities. The unsigned opinion left the fate of Texas’ April primaries unclear.

The justices ordered the three-judge court in San Antonio to come up with new plans that pay more attention to maps created by Texas’ Republican-dominated state Legislature. All four of the state’s new congressional seats, and perhaps control of the House of Representative, could swing based on the outcome.

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The high court said the judges appeared in some instances not to pay enough attention to the state’s choices. The judges made mistakes in their plans, particularly in altering district lines for state legislative and congressional seats in parts of the state where there is no allegation of discrimination on the part of the Legislature, the high court said.

“In the absence of any legal flaw in this respect in the state’s plan, the district court had no basis to modify that plan,” the justices said, talking about state House districts in north and east Texas.

Right. The state judges missed one little step in their process: providing any evidence of wrongdoing.

I don’t know beans about Texas, but I feel possessive about at least one of those Congressional seats, as it came from Massachusetts. And I didn’t sacrifice a gerrymandered Democrat seat here only to see it turn up in a gerrymandered Democrat district there. It’s Republican by rights.

And have for 20 years:

This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court. In his first two decades on the bench, Justice Thomas has established himself as the original Constitution’s greatest defender against elite efforts at social engineering. His stances for limited government and individual freedom make him the left’s lightning rod and the tea party’s intellectual godfather. And he is only halfway through the 40 years he may sit on the high court.

Godfather? Is that a veiled reference to Herman Cain? How rich would it be if two of the most powerful figures in conservatism over the next decade turn out to be an African American Supreme Court Justice and President?

Clarence Thomas set the table for the tea party by making originalism fashionable again. Many appointees to the court enjoy its role as arbiter of society’s most divisive questions—race, abortion, religion, gay rights and national security—and show little desire to control their own power. Antonin Scalia, at best, thinks interpreting the Constitution based on its original meaning is “the lesser evil,” as he wrote in a 1989 law journal article, because it prevents judges from pursuing their own personal policies. Justice Thomas, however, thinks that the meaning of the Constitution held at its ratification binds the United States as a political community, and that decades of precedent must be scraped off the original Constitution like barnacles on a ship’s hull.

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Strictly obeying the original meaning of the Constitution can lead Justice Thomas to liberal results. Based on his reading of the Commerce Clause, for example, he unsuccessfully urged his brethren to strike down most of the federal drug laws—which made him an unlikely hero in my hometown of Berkeley, Calif., if only for a day. He joined a majority to invalidate thousands of criminal sentences because judges, instead of juries, had found the vital facts—in violation of the Bill of Rights.

Justice Thomas opposed the court’s pro-business decisions that capped punitive damages because he believes the issue is for the state courts to decide. He voted to suppress evidence produced by police using thermal-imaging technology to scan homes for marijuana growth as unreasonable searches in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Because the Framers wanted broad protections for political speech, Justice Thomas joined opinions protecting violent movies and offensive protesters at military funerals.

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Not surprisingly, Justice Thomas reserves his deepest scorn for the government’s use of race to determine society’s winners and losers. In his dissent from the court’s approval of affirmative action in higher education in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), he quoted Frederick Douglass: “If the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!” Justice Thomas has declared himself on the side of individual effort and choice against elite visions of social justice: “Like Douglass, I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators.”

In Adarand v. Pena (1995), striking down racial quotas in government contracting, Justice Thomas traced the nation’s commitment to racial equality through the Constitution directly to the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all men are created equal, just as did Abraham Lincoln. Affirmative action is “racial paternalism,” he wrote, whose “unintended consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of discrimination.”

One has to ask if consequences can be unintended any more if they have been demonstrated as inevitable for decades.

But nothing becomes Justice Thomas as his critics. Trolling for something about his memoir My Grandfather’s Son, I came across this patronizing review from Slate which only made me want to read the book for myself.

Assuming it’s not available in any of the left-leaning local loony bookstores, I’ll have to go to the library.

Hello, Amazon?