Wednesday, July 4, 2012

SCOTUS vs. Freedom

It is difficult to know exactly how to celebrate Independence Day when the days leading up to it have been particularly hard on Americans' personal freedom. I realize that the SCOTUS decision specifically has been heavily scrutinized this week, so many things I write here are in danger of lacking originality. However, after reading through the decision (available for you to read here) and dissenting opinions therein, I couldn't help but be gravely concerned about what happened. 

A good point raised in the opinions of Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito was in reference to the commerce clause argument. They observed that if the legislation was upheld using the commerce clause of the Constitution, the new law would classify not only action, but inaction, as "commerce," and make anything that exists subject to regulation and taxation, greatly expanding the scope of the federal government. If you breathed a sigh of relief that the commerce clause did protect you from being compelled to purchase health insurance, you may have lost your lunch when Justice Roberts unveiled the grander scheme he had cooked up to gently make you buy it anyway.

Because of the penalty being re-written by Justice Roberts as a tax, this monstrosity of a law magically became classifiable as "Constitutional." (Never mind that the law's advocates denied to the point of tears that it was a tax back when they were steamrolling it through the legislative branch.) And now, not only our actions are taxable, now our inactions can be subjected to penalty... tax, I mean, by the federal government. All this was accomplished by semantically slipping around the commerce clause.

This is, to the simple man and the scholar, lunacy.

One would think that the Supreme Court Justices would only read the law, judge it to be valid or not under the authority of the Constitution, give their judgment and move along. In this case, four justices stamped their automatic approval upon it, and the Chief Justice thought about it for a while and did the same. He also took time to reinterpret the main thrust of the argument, write up a dashing little opinion, and probably rehearse it in the mirror so that he could read it all the way through without chuckling.

Not to make light of what happened, because it is more dangerous than we can imagine, especially since much of the population actually believes that the government is a sincere and benevolent entity. But many of these people have been bought and paid for by one social program or another. As a result, stunts like what happened last week, when the Supreme Court rewrote legislation and stripped us all of another freedom in plain sight, can happen without much consequence. The majority of the Justices smile, the President smiles (and tells everyone to move along), the media smiles; and the average citizen wrinkles his nose for a minute, keeps watching the news until he sees his favorite team has won, and smiles as well.

God help a country willing to give away its freedom.

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