George WIll on the Unilateral Rewrite of ACA

"Barack Obama's increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency.

 

Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and redlines is floundering. And at last week's news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.
 

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act, he said: "I didn't simply choose to" ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with healthcare. No, "this was in consultation with businesses."

 

He continued: "In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn't go to the essence of the law . . . it looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let's make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we're not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so."

 

Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: "Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the 'executive authority' to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?" The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: Brevity. Because there is no such authority.

 

Obama's explanation began with an irrelevancy: He consulted with businesses before disregarding his constitutional duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." That duty does not lapse when a president decides Washington's "political environment" is not "normal."

 

When was it "normal"? The 1850s? The 1950s? Washington has been the nation's capital for 213 years; Obama has been here less than nine years. Even if he understood "normal" political environments here, the Constitution is not suspended when a president decides the "environment" is abnormal.

 

Neither does the Constitution confer on presidents the power to rewrite laws if they decide the change is a "tweak" not involving the law's "essence." Anyway, the employer mandate is essential to the ACA.

 

Twenty-three days before his news conference, the House voted 264-161, with 35 Democrats in the majority, for the rule of law — for, that is, the Authority for Mandate Delay Act. It would have done lawfully what Obama did by ukase. He threatened to veto this use of legislation to alter a law. The White House called it "unnecessary," presumably because he has an uncircumscribed "executive authority" to alter laws.

 

In a 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, David Frost asked: "So, what in a sense you're saying is that there are certain situations . . . where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation . . . and do something illegal?"

 

Nixon: "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

 

Frost: "By definition."

 

Nixon: "Exactly, exactly."

 

Nixon's claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama's actions regarding the ACA. Nixon's claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) "a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude." Obama's audacity is more spacious; it encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political "environment" is difficult." - George Will, Obama Ignores Law, Like Nixon, 08/18/2013, Newsmax.

 

 

Link to the entire article appears below:

 

http://www.newsmax.com/GeorgeWill/Obama-Executive-Authority-Unconstitutional/2013/08/15/id/520555

 

 

Under a “Some People” System: the Inequality of Enumerated Rights.

The right of free-speech and the rights of property both appear in the US Constitution. One might want to consider this observation by Thomas Sowell regarding the unconstrained vision regarding differing “rights“:

“Free-speech rights or property rights are therefore justified or not by their relative importance to individuals that exercise them. Given the uneven distribution of property and the universality of speech, freedom of speech logically becomes a far more important right than property rights in this vision. Free-speech rights are thus entitled to sweeping exemptions from interventions of public authority, but not so property rights.” - Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions, page 210.

One then must ask oneself: setting aside for the moment the concept of equality of rights regarding man, what about the equality regarding the rights in and of themselves? Is one “right”, as defined by the US Constitution for example, more important than another right? Are each of the enumerated rights treated as having equality of rights among themselves or what one might describe as equal weight? If one assigns differing equality or weight to differing rights is that not discrimination among the rights?

Returning to Sowell’s observation, freedom of speech receives an abundance of attention and rightfully so. However, private property rights have been abrogated, intruded upon, regulated, removed, compromised, etc. over the past two centuries. Right to bear arms? All the other enumerated rights? How have these other rights been treated?

Hence we have the proposition of equality of rights regarding man yet the underlying rights themselves have no equality. How can one achieve equality of rights regarding man if the underlying rights suffer discrimination regarding equality? Consequently, the proposition of equality of rights regarding man, is best described as equality of discriminatory rights regarding man.

If the underlying rights are in and of themselves equal, that is, a series of equally weighted rights bestowed, and man has this series of equally weighted rights to rely upon, then equality of rights regarding man would be in fact based from beginning to end on equality.

Since we know for a fact that intervention has indeed occurred, and what was a series of equal rights have become a series of unequally weighted rights, the rights obviously become unequal due to intervention by man. The intervention was not by all men, intervention was achieved by some men.

Therefore, we do not have all people wanting all people to have all rights of equal weight, rather we have some people wanting all people to have equality of rights albeit the rights are those rights as determined by some people.