Townhall.com ^ | June 30, 2012 | Bob Beauprez
The Supreme Court did not save us from ourselves, at least not entirely. That is still up to us, the people.
When the American people elected Barack Obama and large Democrat majorities, the die was cast. ObamaCare was coming. Popular or not, constitutional or not, affordable or not, it didn't matter. They were going to pass it, and then the rest of us could find out what they put in it.
After the Democrats shoved the 2700 pages of ObamaCare down our throats -- and we did find out how expensive, controlling, and coercive the legislation was -- a majority of Americans wanted the Supreme Court to toss it aside as unconstitutional.
In a 5-4 decision, the Court did not deem it a legal overreach by the Democrats. While I would have agreed with the minority (Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy), I respect the decision.
For those of us who originally disagreed with ObamaCare and now disagree with the majority opinion of the SCOTUS, the challenge remains the same as it would have been had the Court ruled otherwise. We need to elect Mitt Romney and House and Senate majorities that will repeal ObamaCare and replace it with free-market, pro-liberty solutions.
In a very real way, the Court just put the responsibility back on the voters to re-establish government of, by, and for the people. In the end, we get the government – and policies that go with it – that we deserve. So, who will we elect as our representative leaders in November? The importance of this election – already historic – just grew even greater.
As the nation absorbs and deciphers the SCOTUS ruling on ObamaCare, we thought our readers would find the following excerpts from NRO's analysis insightful. Included is a link to the entire editorial.
Chief Justice Roberts’s Folly
Posted June 28, 2012, 2:00PM-ET
National Review Online
By The Editors
…Rarely has the maxim that the power to tax is the power to destroy been so apt, a portion of liberty being the direct object in this case.
What the Court has done is not so much to declare the mandate constitutional as to declare that it is not a mandate at all, any more than the mortgage-interest deduction in the tax code is a mandate to buy a house. Congress would almost surely have been within its constitutional powers to tax the uninsured more than the insured. Very few people doubt that it could, for example, create a tax credit for the purchase of insurance, which would have precisely that effect. But Obamacare, as written, does more than that. The law repeatedly speaks in terms of a “requirement” to buy insurance, it says that individuals “shall” buy it, and it levies a “penalty” on those who refuse. As the conservative dissent points out, these are the hallmarks of a “regulatory penalty, not a tax.”…
It now falls to the Republicans, and especially to Mitt Romney, to make the case for the repeal of the law and for its replacement by something better than either it or the health-care policies that preceded it…Opponents should take heart: The law remains unpopular. Let the president and his partisans ring their bells today, and let us work to make sure that they are wringing their hands come November.
Read more.
