Delusions of Adequacy

From Don Surber on a history lesson:

From Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and then-Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray on April 2, 2010:

Nobody can seriously argue that the health care industry operates only in “intrastate” commerce and that the mandate provisions in this bill cannot be effectively disentangled from the comprehensive economic approach that Congress adopted to fix the deep flaws in our current health insurance system.

We live under mandates every day. Without them, society as we know it would disintegrate. Every criminal law tells us what we cannot do.

And sometimes the law tells us what we must do. Congress can require young Americans to register for the draft to serve in the military, for example, or can require us all to pay taxes for programs like Social Security and Medicare.

We can — and do — argue about what shape these laws should take, without claiming that our leaders are constitutionally barred from dealing with our most pressing problems.

Instead of pursuing lawsuits, we should work to find ways to improve the lives of the American people and protect our four most fundamental freedoms: of speech, of religion, from want and from fear.

Freedom from want and from free. It’s in the Constitution, alongside the right to sing the blues.

From Jonathan Cohn on April 24, 2010:

Most legal experts seem to think the lawsuits won’t succeed. Among other things, it turns out that the U.S. fought a large war, about a hundred and fifty years ago, in order to settle the issue of state nullification. But if the officials filing these suits seem not to understand that history–or at least, not to care about it — their opposition to the Affordable Care Act, like their supporters’, seems genuine. If they had their way, their states really would reject the new health care law.

You see, opposing Obamacare makes you part of the Confederate States of America and that makes you a racist.

For shame.

From Randy E. Barnett on March 21, 2010:

Can Congress really require that every person purchase health insurance from a private company or face a penalty? The answer lies in the commerce clause of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power “to regulate commerce . . . among the several states.” Historically, insurance contracts were not considered commerce, which referred to trade and carriage of merchandise. That’s why insurance has traditionally been regulated by states. But the Supreme Court has long allowed Congress to regulate and prohibit all sorts of “economic” activities that are not, strictly speaking, commerce. The key is that those activities substantially affect interstate commerce, and that’s how the court would probably view the regulation of health insurance.

There you have it. Constitutional. Now go away.

You are still there? OK, read this slowly — without moving your lips.

From the Atlantic Wire on March 23, 2010:

Why court challenges will fail

Mandates Are Constitutional. The Daily Beast’s Adam Winkler defends the Constitutionality of the mandate. “Because the individual mandate is a tax provision that promotes the general welfare, it is within Congress’ taxing power. This is one of broadest grants of authority the Constitution gives Congress.” He quips, “In fact, the Founding Fathers themselves included an ‘individual mandate’ in a law way back in 1792.” They wrote a law requiring “free able-bodied” serve in militias–with a gun they had to buy on their own.

Courts Give Congress Power Here. The New York Times’ John Schwartz writes, “The broad extent of the government’s power to regulate interstate commerce has been recognized since the Roosevelt administration. In fact, courts have backed Congress’s ability to regulate under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, even when the issues might not seem, at first blush, to even involve interstate commerce at all.”

Can’t Be Challenged Until 2014. The Washington Independent’s David Weigel reports, “The problem with a challenge, say conservatives, is that the mandate for health care — an idea with origins on the right that has become anathema ever since its implementation in Massachusetts — will not take effect until 2014. Whether attorneys general can successfully challenge the mandate until then is unclear.” By then, the anti-health care fire will have died down considerably.

Winning Isn’t the Real Reason To Challenge. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder says conservatives get it. “The chances of success in the Supreme Court are low, but the point of the lawsuits isn’t legal — it’s political. It advances the politics of conservative jurisprudence, and the political ambitions of conservatives, and it keeps the legislation itself in a state of suspended political animation.”

Got that last one? They see through you. This is not about a legal case. This is about politics. Embarrassing the president.

You are doomed. Doomed. Surrender Dorothy.

AND THIS DOOSY:

From Frank Rich on March 27, 2010:

When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

You see it? You teabaggers are doomed — doomed — and you will kill black men out of your misplaced anger.

So there are some views from the past.  What will happen with the SCOTUS ruling?