**** these people.

And we’ll march with you all the way. If I may mix my metaphors: Obama and his Democrat cronies have just crossed the Rubicon, but the Battle of Waterloo is only now beginning.

Mandatory Insurance Is Unconstitutional
Why an individual mandate could be struck down by the courts.
By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. AND LEE A. CASEY

Federal legislation requiring that every American have health insurance is part of all the major health-care reform plans now being considered in Washington. Such a mandate, however, would expand the federal government’s authority over individual Americans to an unprecedented degree. It is also profoundly unconstitutional.

An individual mandate has been a hardy perennial of health-care reform proposals since HillaryCare in the early 1990s. President Barack Obama defended its merits before Congress last week, claiming that uninsured people still use medical services and impose the costs on everyone else. But the reality is far different. Certainly some uninsured use emergency rooms in lieu of primary care physicians, but the majority are young people who forgo insurance precisely because they do not expect to need much medical care. When they do, these uninsured pay full freight, often at premium rates, thereby actually subsidizing insured Americans.

The mandate’s real justifications are far more cynical and political. Making healthy young adults pay billions of dollars in premiums into the national health-care market is the only way to fund universal coverage without raising substantial new taxes. In effect, this mandate would be one more giant, cross-generational subsidy—imposed on generations who are already stuck with the bill for the federal government’s prior spending sprees.

Politically, of course, the mandate is essential to winning insurance industry support for the legislation and acceptance of heavy federal regulations. Millions of new customers will be driven into insurance-company arms. Moreover, without the mandate, the entire thrust of the new regulatory scheme—requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions and to accept standardized premiums—would produce dysfunctional consequences. It would make little sense for anyone, young or old, to buy insurance before he actually got sick. Such a socialization of costs also happens to be an essential step toward the single payer, national health system, still stridently supported by large parts of the president’s base.

The elephant in the room is the Constitution. As every civics class once taught, the federal government is a government of limited, enumerated powers, with the states retaining broad regulatory authority. As James Madison explained in the Federalist Papers: “[I]n the first place it is to be remembered that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws. Its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects.” Congress, in other words, cannot regulate simply because it sees a problem to be fixed. Federal law must be grounded in one of the specific grants of authority found in the Constitution.

These are mostly found in Article I, Section 8, which among other things gives Congress the power to tax, borrow and spend money, raise and support armies, declare war, establish post offices and regulate commerce. It is the authority to regulate foreign and interstate commerce that—in one way or another—supports most of the elaborate federal regulatory system. If the federal government has any right to reform, revise or remake the American health-care system, it must be found in this all-important provision. This is especially true of any mandate that every American obtain health-care insurance or face a penalty.

The Supreme Court construes the commerce power broadly. In the most recent Commerce Clause case, Gonzales v. Raich (2005) , the court ruled that Congress can even regulate the cultivation of marijuana for personal use so long as there is a rational basis to believe that such “activities, taken in the aggregate, substantially affect interstate commerce.”

But there are important limits. In United States v. Lopez (1995), for example, the Court invalidated the Gun Free School Zones Act because that law made it a crime simply to possess a gun near a school. It did not “regulate any economic activity and did not contain any requirement that the possession of a gun have any connection to past interstate activity or a predictable impact on future commercial activity.” Of course, a health-care mandate would not regulate any “activity,” such as employment or growing pot in the bathroom, at all. Simply being an American would trigger it.

Health-care backers understand this and—like Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen insisting that some hills are valleys—have framed the mandate as a “tax” rather than a regulation. Under Sen. Max Baucus’s (D., Mont.) most recent plan, people who do not maintain health insurance for themselves and their families would be forced to pay an “excise tax” of up to $1,500 per year—roughly comparable to the cost of insurance coverage under the new plan.

But Congress cannot so simply avoid the constitutional limits on its power. Taxation can favor one industry or course of action over another, but a “tax” that falls exclusively on anyone who is uninsured is a penalty beyond Congress’s authority. If the rule were otherwise, Congress could evade all constitutional limits by “taxing” anyone who doesn’t follow an order of any kind—whether to obtain health-care insurance, or to join a health club, or exercise regularly, or even eat your vegetables.

This type of congressional trickery is bad for our democracy and has implications far beyond the health-care debate. The Constitution’s Framers divided power between the federal government and states—just as they did among the three federal branches of government—for a reason. They viewed these structural limitations on governmental power as the most reliable means of protecting individual liberty—more important even than the Bill of Rights.

Yet if that imperative is insufficient to prompt reconsideration of the mandate (and the approach to reform it supports), then the inevitable judicial challenges should. Since the 1930s, the Supreme Court has been reluctant to invalidate “regulatory” taxes. However, a tax that is so clearly a penalty for failing to comply with requirements otherwise beyond Congress’s constitutional power will present the question whether there are any limits on Congress’s power to regulate individual Americans. The Supreme Court has never accepted such a proposition, and it is unlikely to accept it now, even in an area as important as health care.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey, Washington D.C.-based attorneys, served in the Department of Justice during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

You have my vote!

TL/DR: We blew it & let Obamacare pass, so now we have to repeal it.

We can’t blame ourselves entirely, but let’s not forget how we ended up with the most liberal President ever: We took the post-Clinton and 2002 victories, and squandered them by pandering to the center-left. A Republican majority in congress spent like liberals, spent way too much time trying to “get along with our friends” on the other side of the aisle, and lost our way.
If there is any silver lining, it is that BHO and his minions (masters?) in congress have acted so foolishly that they have virtually guaranteed GOP takeover(s) in November. Let’s win, and then govern accordingly. Repeal, repeal, repeal!

and my money.

But deeds not words. No Surrender, No Compromise. Victory or Death — politically speaking.

Very few candidates and even fewer incumbents have this type of zeal. But this is what gets my support.

This is the end of America. If this cause isn’t worth going to the wall for, what is?

but I’m a supporter and contributor.

I hope you win and hope your ideas are made law.

Proper grammar saves lives.

Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.

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Activists Taking Action: Unified Patriots

The majorities in both chambers MUST be veto-proof in order to repeal this monstrosity during the next congress. Something tells me – given the outrage that will no-doubt ensue after tonight’s brazen power grab – that this may actually be within the realm of possibility. The GOP needs to specifically tell Americans that this is what must happen in November in order to affect repeal so they’ll be chomping at the bit to go to the polls and do just that.

Otherwise, I guess they still have options, such as flat refusing to fund this thing or enforce it in any way until January 2013 rolls around.

In the meantime, there’s still hope that SCOTUS will gut it, provided Justice Kennedy is up for it.

how about obamas hiroshima.

full use of our rights to bear arms. What is even sadder about this whole mess is it is only the beginning. Obama has potentially another 8 months to force more of his commie agenda down our thoats with the criminal actions we saw over the last few weeks/months. It very well may not be the end of it all. My guess is the next thing he shoves down our throat is some sort of amnesty bill in the attempt to secure million of illegal votes for the demmies. We better act with absolute defiance comes November and change the power or it may boil down to two choices and two choices alone: 1) Take the beating and lay down or 2) raise arms and take this country back. I hope neither becomes our only choices, but I am afraid of what is coming over the next few months and if Obama gets a full scale amnesty bill through, the influx of illegal voters for the dems may make it to where we will no longer have a say at all. When you consider this country is split nearly in two, even taking into account heavy dissatisfaction in the middle to right of the voter block, adding in heavy independant unhappiness, it still pales in comparison when you would add 50 plus million illegal votes that would go dem. Keep an eye on our government, but be prepared to keep that eye looking through a scope!

And you definitely have my vote.

I’ll be at your next rally in the SF bay area.

ObamaCare, Repeal. Investigate. Prosecute.

Until it’s “as dead as a door-nail.”

I hate to use Hitler in any way as a positive example, but I can’t forget newsreels of him waving his fist in the air, and shouting, with great anger and commitment. It was effective. I can’t stand seeing people reacting to this, calmly, as just another political event. Let’s see our leaders get angry and aroused as they should be when it concerns the preservation of the American Dream..

I live in a different state but you have my financial support and my efforts to spread the word to friends in California and wherever and whenever I can! Good Luck

Anybody who thinks this is going to be repealed is giving them self and others false hope. It’s not going to be repealed. Period.

The only chance we have is for the Supreme Court to strike it down and that’s a 50/50 shot at best.

to heighten the attack. What if every one of these clowns were being attacked with a Recall effort now as well as the prospect of being voted out in November? It would put some fear in them about voting on the next big issue coming down the pike which is “Immigration Reform”. Let the electorate cut their legs out from under them!

But remember ,even if RINO Campbell wins the primary, anybody but Barbara Boxer is the watchword. Why my gal friday´s boxer,Turbo would take less of a bite out of the taxpayers and never stick his paws in their pockets the way Barbara does. Make no bones about it.