Archie Moses
Well-Known Member
Why don't you get wasted and make a thread about ajlajdfoihe aldjf and PM people and tell them how much you love them, guy?
Too Bad
- Thread starter PearlWatson
- Start date
Why don't you get wasted and make a thread about ajlajdfoihe aldjf and PM people and tell them how much you love them, guy?
There are certainly cases relating to the commerce clause that mandate positive action by agents in interstate commerce. The distinction you're trying to draw (restriction vs. mandate) is a false one that relies upon characterization.
For example the law at stake in Raich can either be characterized as a) a restriction on the sale of marijuana or b) a mandate on states regarding their marijuana laws.
The Supreme Court has historically upheld laws in the past on commerce clause/necessary and proper clause grounds that required individuals to use their private property or resources in specific ways.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Atlanta_Motel_v._United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katzenbach_v._McClung
I think health insurance is a little more intuitively linked to interstate commerce than the civil rights act of 1964.
Additionally there is one pretty landmark Commerce Clause in which Congress was able to prevent a farmer from making his own wheat because that would reduce his purchases on the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Being able to mandate specific economic activity is hardly unique to the current health care law.
After Wickard it was more than 60 years before any law was invalidated on commerce clause grounds.
Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court is about as messed up as any group of pot smokers. They've ruled in favor of federal laws giving the feds to regulate the growing of wheat on your own land for your own use, claiming that it ultimately impacts demand for wheat internationally not only interstate commerce and upholding the federal power to do basically anything. The same for virtually every other enterprise you might undertake. . . .
But excessive claims to power by the Feds are now causing a general negative reaction across the citizenry who still believe in freedom for human beings.
Those of you who don't believe in freedom, go pound sand. You don't believe a human being has the ultimate say on his/her own body or medical decisions, you don't believe people have the right to choose alternative health concepts like homeopathy and nutritional supplements or herbal remedies, so you force everyone to buy Big Pharma products that are given rubber-stamp appovals by the cartel-captive FDA. You don't believe in free speech either, and you don't believe people even have a right to think. That's what the whole PC culture is about. If you can "get your way" even for a while, what you will do is create a lot of passive-aggressive non-cooperative "hypocrits" who pretend to agree with you publicly, but who will ignore the state directives as a matter of principle every way they can. More kids will turn to gangs, and more adults to organized crime. And more folks will go "underground" as a way of life. The above-ground ecomomy will decline into nothing but government handouts, and nobody will "work for the Man" with any integrity at all.
As much as progressives whine about the teabuggers, everything they do is creating a surge in their ranks.
PearlWatson
Well-Known Member
The commerce clause says this: [The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.
Your examples really do show how the commerce clause has been abused to the point where it is now okay to prevent an individual from growing food on their own property, and requiring an individual to buy a specific product. Essentially the commerce clause has no limits if the individual mandate is upheld.
Who believes that? Who is trying to prevent people from buying placebos (homeopathy), unneeded and unhelpful drugs (nutritional supplements), or unregulated and inconsistent drugs (natural supplements)? Now, lots of people want the manufacturers of these products to acknowledge their ineffectiveness, but you don't mind that, right?
*chortle* What percentage of drug trials do you think result in usable products?
Who doesn't believe in free speech? Who has had their free speech rights taken away?
*guffaw*
Who is in the "PC culture"?
These things come and go, especially in bad economies. When the economy is up again, the Tea Parties will all but disappear.
PearlWatson
Well-Known Member
Like Clutch says that would be good.
Depending on your goal there are plenty of alternatives to improve health care.
PearlWatson
Well-Known Member
They'll be in charge.
PearlWatson
Well-Known Member
Thomas Jefferson saw it coming:
At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Monsieur A. Coray, Oct 31, 1823
As with all things related to the Constitution: that's not really black and white in meaning.
Does that mean that the methods by which interstate commerce is conducted are regulatable? (Generally yes)
Does that mean Congress can regulate persons and things that travel through interstate commerce? (Generally yes)
Does that mean Congress can regulate activities which substantially affect interstate commerce? (Generally yes, through the necessary and proper clause because otherwise the power would be functionally meaningless)
It's just not that simple. The type of legal trashing advocated by the Tea Party and their ilk is a true "baby out with the bathwater" solution with no understanding of why things came about to be the way they are.
It has limits. Those limits have been pretty clearly elucidated via Lopez and Morrison.
Here's the reality: The Tea Party doesn't love the Constitution as it's been understood for most of America's history. What they want is the Articles of Confederation where the central government is weak, states do whatever they feel like, and it's impossible for the federal government to fund itself. We've seen both how that worked out as a practical matter and what the founding fathers, who the Tea Partiers revere cartoons of, did about it.
Just like all those little parties that sprung up in the Depression? How grandiose.
Name one the does not continue/worsen spiraling costs and does not require that every person has insurance.
Costs being driven up is the whole point. You're not paying attention to what's really going on if you think otherwise (because I say so). A certain segment of the populace is mad that free Americans have made decisions to spend more and more of their disposable income to stay alive longer. This collection of free individuals making their own decisions obviously has to stop. Why, healthcare is 1/6th of GDP. We also hate the service sector as it's a direct sign of a rich world. All those great, err terrible, paying healthcare jobs? All service. My ohh my. They must go. We must bring the costs of healthcare down. We must eliminate the expanded use of healthcare that free Americans have chosen. Idea #1 was to first deny interstate commerce to insurance companies (how quaint, while not stereotyping, that the same side who wants to use interstate to justify fed mandates also used it to deny insurance availability), and then to pile on so many requirements that the price escalation overloads to the point of societal uproar. Then the only fix will be a state run mandate that lowers the costs by limiting healthcare, and thus making our corporations more competitive. The corporations win again. But wait, aren't they the dirtbags you, you who I'm not stereotyping, are against?