For the past few months I’ve been watching closely the progress of health care legislation in Congress. Of course, we’ve all seen what happened at the town halls in August. Citizens all over the nation were opposed to a government takeover of health care as represented by House Bill H.R. 3200 and the Kennedy bill in the Senate. Many of these protesters referred to the health care legislation as unconstitutional.
That’s an important point. The uproar over the health care bills was intensified by what Americans had experienced late last year and early this year with congressional passage of the trillion dollar bailout and stimulus bills. We saw how the administration used these bills as a platform for naked, unconstitutional power grabs over our financial and auto industries.
So, naturally the worry was widespread that the Obama health care reform would enable the completion of the government takeover of our health care system that was begun with Medicare and Medicaid.
Our overall problem is that our federal government is out of control. We have 2 trillion dollar annual deficits, a nearly twelve trillion dollar national debt, and over $50 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities for social security, medicare, and medicaid. And yet, even in light of this unprecedented fiscal irresponsibility, Congress and the President are continuing to act in almost complete disregard for the limitations on our government represented by the Constitution.
What we need if we are to have any chance to preserve our freedom and prosperity is to bring Congress and the executive branch back under the discipline of the Constitution.
Here's my video version of this blog, "Will Republicans Enable Unconstitutional Health Care Reform?":
At this point in the video version we have a video clip of Judge Andrew Napolitano giving a concise review of the powers given to Congress by the Constitution in Article I, Section 8. Authorization for Congress to arrange for our health care is nowhere to be found in the Constitution.
Although Congress has been passing unconstitutional bills for a long, long time already, the road back to freedom and prosperity in our nation leads back through a return to a Congress under the discipline of the Constitution. We’ve seen with the unconstitutional bailout and stimulus bills just how creative the executive branch can be in using such laws to take over entire segments of our economy, such as the finance and auto industries. We can be sure that almost any health care reform legislation that might be passed by this Congress will be used by the administration to complete the government takeover of our health care industry.
I was led to reconsider the whole topic of the constitutionality of health care reform proposals by both Democrats and Republicans when I read recently that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he will try again to find a bipartisan approach to health care reform by reaching out to a couple of Republican leaders in the House who say they agree with about 80 percent of the ideas that Democrats have proposed.
I realized that the whole contour of the health care reform debate the past few months is leading toward some kind of bipartisan health care reform that would enable the final and complete government takeover of health care.
Part of the problem is that too many Republicans are too eager to participate in the development of health care legislation with the Democrats. So far they have been shut out, except for the bipartisan working group on the Senate Finance Committee. Still, they keep coming back for more and offering to work with the Democrats on health care. As noted above, some of them even say they agree with the Democrats on 80% of the issues and would welcome working together.
The other part of the problem is that the health care proposals of many Republicans are unconstitutional. See for example what Republican (and former Secretary of Health and Human Services) Tommy Thompson has to say in this video about Republican proposals for health care reform.
It’s clear that the health care reform ideas Thompson is talking about here are also unconstitutional. It’s also clear that one of the leading bipartisan proposals, which some Senate Republicans have supported, the substituting of health care cooperatives for the public option would also constitute an unconstitutional approach to health care which would lead to the same eventual result as the public option.
The real answer is for Americans to convince their representatives and senators to “just drop health care reform.” Click here for an easy way to email your representative and senators with just this message. Of course, additional pressure must be put on Congress to drop health care reform through phone calls, personal visits, and public rallies.
As one pundit put it a couple months ago, the Democrats only need to pass the germ of a government-run health care system. That minimal health care reform legislation could be parlayed by the executive branch into a completely government-run health care system over time.
Given the radically unconstitutional orientation of our present presidential administration and Congress, the only safe course is to develop enough pressure on both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to get them to back away from any further work on health care this year and next. That would buy enough time to get a majority of constitutionalists elected to Congress in 2010 and 2012, which would ensure that any unconstitutional health care reform bills could not be passed any time soon.
Unbelievable as it might be, we're on the verge of congressional passage of a radical and unconstitutional cap-and-trade energy tax that would cost thousands of dollars per household per year, cripple the production and use of carbon-based energy, and destroy our economy. All this for the purpose of reducing man-made global warming, a completely unproven theory. See "Treasury Memo Resets Cap and Trade Energy Tax Debate" for more information.
What's needed is a national firestorm of opposition such as we witnessed in the health care town halls in August. And we need it now. Already Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is preparing for legislative hearings on a Senate cap and trade bill in early October. A vote in the full Senate could happen as early as late October, but more likely in November or December.
We also still have a chance to stop cap and trade in the House, because even though the House narrowly passed its version of cap and trade back in June, if the Senate passes a bill, then the House and Senate will need to vote on a compromise version.
Click here to send an email in strong opposition to cap-and-trade legislation to your senators and representative. But don't stop there. Be sure to contact others in your sphere of influence. Apply pressure to your senators and representatives through personal visits, phone calls, letters to the editor, and participation in appropriate rallies and other events.
The "Cap and Trade" cover article in the September 28 issue of The New American magazine makes an excellent educational tool for convincing your friends and associates to actively oppose cap and trade legislation. It also provides many talking points for letters to the editor and radio talk shows.
We must preserve our freedom and prosperity by bringing Congress back under the discipline of the Constitution!
Although health care reform is still the main obsession of President Obama, Congress, and a huge number of Americans, a months-old Treasury Department memo that has been pried loose through a Freedom of Information request is rekindling the debate over cap and trade legislation. This memo, which was written sometime after President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress on February, 24, 2009, states:
[G]iven the Administration's proposal to auction all emission allowances, a cap-and-trade program could generate federal receipts on the order of $100 to $200 billion annually.
By my calculation assuming there are 117 million American households (116.7 million in 2008 per the Census Bureau), at the upper end of this estimate the cost of these cap and trade energy taxes would be about $1700 per American household per year. This is in line with a widely quoted article on this topic, which has calculated the annual cost to be $1761. Of course, the defenders of cap and trade came out of the woodwork to complain that this "months-old memo" doesn't take a couple of factors into account. First, the House cap-and-trade bill (H.R. 2454) is based on the government giving away most of the initial carbon pollution permits and second, there would also be an extensive rebate program to compensate some portion of consumers for the higher energy costs induced by cap-and-trade.
Of course, these apologists for cap and trade are merely serving to remind us of the deceptions that were used to get the House to pass its cap and trade bill in the first place. By promising to give most of the pollution permits away for free to industry in the startup of this new program, and by promising to compensate a large portion of consumers for their higher energy costs due to cap and trade, the Obama administration and congressional leaders were able to point to a Congressional Budget Office analysis which stated that their cap and trade bill would only cost Americans $175 per household annually by the year 2020. Here's an excerpt from the CBO analysis:
Reducing emissions to the level required by the cap would be accomplished mainly by stemming demand for carbon-based energy by increasing its price. Those higher prices, in turn, would reduce households’ purchasing power. At the same time, the distribution of emission allowances would improve households’ financial situation. The net financial impact of the program on households in different income brackets would depend in large part on how many allowances were sold (versus given away), how the free allowances were allocated, and how any proceeds from selling allowances were used. That net impact would reflect both the added costs that households experienced because of higher prices and the share of the allowance value that they received in the form of benefit payments, rebates, tax decreases or credits, wages, and returns on their investments.
So cap and trade was sold to Americans back in June as a way of fighting global warming by increasing the costs of carbon-based energy usage so radically that both American industry and consumers would be forced to begin using alternate energy sources. However, an annual cost per household of up to $1700 dollars as projected by the Treasury Department and others would have meant the cap and trade bill could not be passed by Congress. So, the cost had to be reduced by promising to give away pollution permits (initially) and promising that the government would compensate large numbers of consumers for their increased energy costs. So this was quite a balancing act. The increased energy costs had to be high enough to force Americans to adopt new energy sources, but not so high that Congress couldn't pass the cap and trade bill.
And, of course, first things first. The cost must appear to be so low that the initial bill could be passed and the cap and trade pollution allowance marketplace established. Once the new energy taxation regime was in place, it could be tweaked at will by the federal government to destroy any carbon-based energy company it placed in its crosshairs.
And that brings us back to the Treasury Department memo. It has inconveniently (for the administration) restarted the whole debate over the real cost of the cap and trade legislation before the deal could be sealed by Senate passage of a cap and trade bill. This is where you come in. The House narrowly passed its cap and trade bill, H.R. 2454, by 219 to 212 on June 26. The Senate hasn't passed a cap and trade bill yet. And, of course, the health care debate is slowing down its timetable for considering cap and trade. However, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is expected to start legislative hearings on cap and trade the week of October 5. This means that a vote on a cap and trade bill by the full Senate could occur as early as late October, but more likely in November or December.
Contact your senators now in strong opposition to any cap and trade bill. Don't listen to their assurances that the cost will be minimal. The whole point of cap and trade is to make carbon-based energy so expensive that we'll be forced to adopt new energy sources. It's ridiculous. All of this turmoil in order to reduce man-made global warming, a completely unproven theory. Energy prices are already going up for a variety of reasons. Let's not allow our government to force prices up still more through an economy-killer such as cap and trade.
An excellent article, "Cap and Trade," has just been published by The New American magazine in its September 28th issue. This article gives you the details for the increased energy costs we could expect from a cap and trade energy tax regime. It also provides you with an excellent tool for activating others to oppose Senate passage of a cap and trade bill. And, of course, you can send a link to the article to your senators to give them an opportunity to learn about the numerous downsides to cap and trade.
Here's another excellent article about cap and trade, "Mr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall!" by Arthur Robinson, which was published in the September 1 issue of Environment and Climate News. Here's an excerpt:
Free enterprise built our energy industries, and only free enterprise can build the new energy capacity we need. It cannot do this, however, unless the enormous burden of taxation, regulation, and litigation (and subsidies of favored industries) Washington has placed on the backs of American workers is removed, not increased by the additional oppression of “cap and trade.”
There is no resource problem. The United States is awash in essentially unlimited quantities of all the fuels—uranium, coal, oil, natural gas, and methane clathrates—these industries require. The Obama administration and its congressional retainers insist, however, that these fuels not be used.
What's needed is an expansion of the anti-health-care-reform fervor to the cap and trade battle. Based on what we've seen the past couple months, I'm betting Senate passage of cap and trade will be no cake walk.
One last thing. I got so caught up in the huge costs of cap and trade that I completely forgot to say it's totally unconstitutional. We must bring our government back under the discipline of the Constitution or we can just kiss our freedom good-bye.
First off, I was gratified to see that Baucus did what I, and a whole lot of other people, had predicted. He substituted “health care cooperatives” for “the public option” of the House bill, H.R. 3200 and the other Senate bill. This is conveniently in line with President Obama’s artful downplaying of the importance of the public option in recent weeks. In fact, if you read my article, “Beware Obama’s Bipartisan Compromise Strategy for Health Care Reform,” you’ll see that the Obama administration has been acting in their negotiations with health care industry representatives as if the public option would not be in the final bill for a few months now. Which means that President Obama has had a Plan B in place for a long time now for just such an event as the widespread opposition to a government takeover of health care via the public option in the August town halls.
Nonetheless whether or not Obama had prepared for a dramatic ditching of the public option months ago, let’s consider whether the health care cooperatives are really the public option with lipstick. To decide this you need to read closely and compare “Subtitle E -- Creation of Health Care Cooperatives” in the Baucus “Chairman’s Mark” proposal and “Division A, Title II, Subtitle B -- Public Health Insurance Option” in House bill H.R. 3200.
I won’t take the time and space for a paragraph by paragraph and line by line comparison here. In fact, I haven’t done such a detailed analysis for myself yet. However, as I’ve compared the two texts by skimming and skipping back and forth, I can see that such a detailed analysis will be fruitful. For example, in both cases it will be the Secretary of Health and Human Services that will be organizing for health care insurance that will be available in four levels of cost and coverage. In both cases, the federal government will provide startup grants and loans for these new government-sponsored health care plans. In both cases all aspects of providing these health care plans will be heavily regulated by the federal government. And, you can bet that the government regulation and subsidies would be such that private insurance companies just couldn't compete, and would be "crowded-out" as they say.
So, you might ask what’s the difference between the health care cooperatives and the public option. Well, one noticeable difference is that according to Baucus' proposal these cooperatives “must not be sponsored by a State, county, or local government, or any government instrumentality.” And, “Governance of the [cooperative] organization must be subject to a majority vote of its members (i.e., beneficiaries).” So, you see that these cooperatives will definitely not be government-sponsored by definition, but government-sponsored, government-subsidized, and government-regulated in reality. Furthermore, there’ll be precious little left for these “members” to vote on in light of the extensive government regulations of their health care cooperatives. Looks to me like the difference between cooperatives and the public option is little more than lipstick to enable congressional passage of a government takeover of the health care industry with a minimum of political backlash.
Given that Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership want to complete the government takeover of health care that was started by Medicare and Medicaid, and given that they’ll apply lipstick to their legislation to help get what they want, the best thing we can do to avoid helping them toward their unconstitutional, anti-free market goal is to tell our representatives and senators to “just drop health care reform!”
The growing concern among Americans about the federal government’s headlong rush toward bigger government and bigger deficits, as revealed by the widespread Tea Party movement, is bringing a momentous question to a head. That general question is: Should the federal government be free to do whatever a majority of Congress approves? Or, to restate the question in terms of the present health care reform debate: Should the federal government be free to provide any health care services approved by a majority of Congress?
By stating the general question above, we are forced to consider whether there is any limit on what Congress can approve. A growing number of Americans are beginning to understand that there really is a limit -- the U.S. Constitution. So, our situation is coming to this: Are American voters going to permit the federal government to do whatever it decides to do, or are they going to insist that it adheres to the Constitution?
I’ve heard some say that telling people a piece of legislation is unconstitutional just doesn’t resonate with them. I agree that most people don’t really understand what this type of statement means; however, I also think that many more are awakening on this score. But consider this, we’re witnessing a federal government that is increasingly out of control. We’re seeing trillion dollar deficits projected for many years to come. On top of this we have President Obama’s health care reform plan for increased government control of the health care industry, the Cap and Trade bill which is expected to cost thousands of dollars per household per year, the Law of the Sea Treaty which would give the United Nations control over everything that happens on, under, and over the earth’s oceans and seas, not to mention the naked power grabs over the financial and auto industries by the Executive Branch.
In short we have a government that threatens to completely destroy our unique life of freedom and prosperity as Americans. I know that this vision is resonating with Americans in a negative way. So, what’s the answer? Grassroots Americans must force a majority of Congress to obey the Constitution, or be replaced next election. We can still preserve our freedom and prosperity, if we just follow Thomas Jefferson’s exhortation, "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
Thankfully, we’re seeing some constitutionalists applying the Constitution to help stop Obama’s health care reform plan. Just yesterday that rising star, Judge Andrew Napolitano, did this in his article in the Wall Street Journal, “Health-Care Reform and the Constitution.” He wrote:
What we have here is raw abuse of power by the federal government for political purposes. The president and his colleagues want to reward their supporters with "free" health care that the rest of us will end up paying for. Their only restraint on their exercise of Commerce Clause power is whatever they can get away with. They aren't upholding the Constitution—they are evading it.
Two days ago, libertarian Anthony Gregory had his opinion piece, “Can Obama force you to buy health insurance?”, posted on the Christian Science Monitor website. He wrote: “Nothing in the Constitution authorizes any federal involvement in healthcare -- yet Congress may soon require everyone in America to buy insurance.”
Here’s a recent three-minute video of Judge Napolitano explaining exactly what the Constitution does authorize Congress to do and why Obama’s health care reform plan is unconstitutional:
Although health care reform is still the main obsession of President Obama, Congress, and a huge number of Americans, a months-old 
Since I’ve been following pretty closely the drama over whether the final health care reform bill will have “the public option” or “health care cooperatives” (see my articles, “
The growing concern among Americans about the federal government’s headlong rush toward bigger government and bigger deficits, as revealed by the widespread Tea Party movement, is bringing a momentous question to a head. That general question is: Should the federal government be free to do whatever a majority of Congress approves? Or, to restate the question in terms of the present health care reform debate: Should the federal government be free to provide any health care services approved by a majority of Congress?