We Have Been Betrayed

I reserved judgement on the Supreme Court's ruling on ObamaCare until such times as my blood cooled down to a low boil. In the meantime, I have been reading various opinions about it, and I have been trying to find the silver lining. But I can not see it.

One writer, for instance, points out that this will seal the end of Obama's career. He will be voted out. Really? Well, perhaps, but ObamaCare will remain, and it remains problematic. Costs will go up, care will be more difficult to obtain, and innovation in the medical world will come to a grinding halt. Obama will be hailed as a hero on the left from now on. No doubt solar panels and windmills will be named in his honor.

A more common line among our "conservative" pundits is that John Roberts has cleverly boxed in the Congress by circumscribing the Commerce Clause. He has certainly set up language that allows him at a future point to cite it as precedent, if and when such a case ever comes before the Court. But what the "conservative" pundits have let go unmentioned is that he could have struck down ObamaCare by saying that ObamaCare represented a stretch of the Commerce Clause that finally snapped the fabric of the Constitution.  But he didn't do that.  Why he didn't simply strike it down is a question that will haunt conservatives from now on.  Perhaps the appointment of Roberts is the last poke in the eye by the Bush Administration.  Perhaps Roberts is that wolf in sheep's clothing known as a RINO. 

There is jubilation in some corners that someone has finally acknowledge that ObamaCare is a tax. I did not know that these people required that kind of validation. Of course its a tax. The underhanded manuevering to get it passed by calling it a mandate was illegal, because it in fact the largest tax increase in American history. Some want to repeal it before the elecction, when a number of vulnerable Democrats can be expected to join with the Republicans in voting to repeal. Hannity had this nonsense last night.  But why would any Republican care to keep a single Democrat in power after they were so shabbily treated during the debate on ObamaCare? It was, remember, so-called "passed" without a single Republican vote. So let them twist. In any case, such a vote would be symbolic because Obama will veto it, and they are unlikely to have the votes needed to over ride his veto.

Roberts, in saying to Congress that the Commerce Clause here is invalid, but you can make the whole ObamaCare mess Constitutional by calling the individual mandate a tax, has made a distinction without a difference. They can now compel me to buy a Chevy Volt, or for that matter, broccoli, by threatening me with a tax if I don't. So, from now on Congress will use it's unlimited power to tax instead of the Commerce Clause. I just don't see where Roberts is laying the ground work for limiting the expansion of the Federal government here.

Then, there are all the provisions in the ObamaCare law that will affect different people differently. The Gun Owners of America highlighted, again, one of the provisions that will affect gun owners in the future:

Centralizing these medical records will allow the FBI to troll a list of Americans for ailments such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to deny them their gun rights, in the same way that the Veterans Administration has already denied more than 150,000 veterans their right to bear arms.

Ironically, the Boston Globe last week reported how snarky liberals have been shocked to learn that hundreds of pages of their most intimate psychiatric notes have been posted into the database -- available for reading by hundreds (perhaps thousands) of strangers who work for their provider.

So, just as the military knows the status of each unit, and each units capability to immediately deploy for war, so now must the government know the intimate and juicy details of each of us. The Godless philosphy behind such outrages is that we do not own ourselves, but belong to the State. Therefore, the State has a right to these details. I have counselled people privately not to take certain problems to their doctors because it will end up in a database. Databases, in turn, can be hacked, so that everything about you can be known by anybody. There is no privacy. John Roberts has said this is Constitutional.

I now await the "conservative" pundits doing the Dr. Strangelove* on us, telling us that, "you know, ObamaCare isn't so bad."

* For reference, see here.

Update: For a humorous take on the ObamaCare ruling, see A Modest Proposal

Update 2: Andrew McCarthy's take is a PJ Media here.