They are missing the main point of it all.
If someone broke into your home, would you stand there arguing with him as to what is okay for him to take and what is not? Of course you wouldn't. And yet that is what is happening with the health care law. People are arguing about what is in the law instead of the fact that the law is there to begin with and shouldn't be.
There is no power given to Congress that allows them to take over the privately-owned health insurance industry and turn it into a government-run health care system. The health care law is basically saying that there is no longer any such thing as health insurance. ObamaCare is a health "care" act, not a health "insurance" act. Hence the reason that no one can be turned down. It is not insurance. Insurance insures us in case something happens, not after it happens. We don't get house insurance after our kitchen burns down.
It is now health care, a government-run entity, in which everyone has to put into the pot. And it is beyond socialism. It is out-and-out communism because of the government's takeover of an industry, the dissolving of it, and the forcing of those who were in that industry to now work for a government-run entity. It is like this: You own a clothing store. The government says that you can no longer run it as a store; you now must run it as a place where people can come and just get whatever it is that they need to wear within the government's standards; and everyone who gets their clothing from you must pay a yearly amount to you that does not go over a government-set amount of cost to them. You no longer own a store. You now work for the government in a government-run clothing distribution place. And you are no longer allowed to own and operate a true store again. You are not allowed to make a profit above what the government allows you to get paid yearly from each person who comes into the government-run clothing distribution place. The government's claim is that it has a right to regulate what you do for the good of commerce (trade) in this country.
So how can the federal government do this? Legally, it cannot. It can only do it illegally. And this is how it is doing it, illegally. Congress is claiming that it has the power to regulate commerce under the commerce clause when in fact it does not have a flat out-and-out power to regulate commerce under the clause. It has a right "To regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states and with the Indian tribes." Its power is only to regulate the actual trade (the actual commerce) "among" (as in "between") these entities, not within. If the interpretation was really what Congress is claiming, then that would mean that Congress can take over and run every American business, Indian business, and even every business in any other nation, too. That which is true for one part of the clause has to be true for the rest of it. But the fact is, the interpretation is not right. It is flat-out wrong. So where did this come from?
Okay, follow me here: In 1938, a law (The Agricultural Adjustment Act) was passed by Congress. The act actually put limits on how much wheat American farmers could grow on their land. Congress wanted to stabilize the price of wheat in the national market, so Congress sought to control the amount of wheat produced. Congress actually wanted the wheat prices to go up to help the economy. One farmer, Roscoe Filburn, grew more wheat than the law allowed him to, but he was growing it for his own use (for his own animals.) This resulted in the 1942 Supreme Court case, Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court said that he could not grow more than what the law permitted him to grow. Because while he was growing his own wheat for his own animals, he was then not purchasing food for his animals from somewhere else. Hence, they said he was hurting the national market by growing his own, instead of buying the extra that he needed.
Does this sound crazy to you? That's because it is crazy! This is like saying that you cannot sew your own clothes because when you sew your own clothes, you are hurting the national economy by not purchasing your clothes.
Clearly in the case of Wickard v. Filburn, the Supreme Court made a bad ruling. And yet, today's Congress used that ruling in the case that was before the Supreme Court on ObamaCare. And both sides of the case acted as if the Wickard v. Filburn case was just fine. The argument against ObamaCare was simply saying that people cannot be forced into purchasing something. The media reported this as "forced into commerce." However, this was like saying it was okay to tell Roscoe Filburn that he could not grow the extra wheat as long as he was not forced to buy it from someone else. Not only was that wrong because we have a right to grow what we need, but also because stopping him from growing what he needed did in fact force him to buy it from someone else. And this is not to mention the fact that the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act was unconstitutional, in and of itself, because Congress only has the power to regulate what is sold to an entity in another state, nation, or Indian tribe, not within a state.
So here we are, in 2012, fighting a health care law that came to be on the back of a wrong interpretation of the Commerce Clause, supported by a bad 1938 law and a bad 1942 Supreme Court judgment. And the people who argued against the health care law in court just fought something within the law, instead of the law itself.
Debra J.M. Smith 10-08-12
www.InformingChristians.com
Photo credit: terrellaftermath.com
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment