This is a fantastic accounting of how our government was allowed to grow so unconstitutionally powerful.
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With the public unconvinced of the wisdom of soaking the rich, the latest hot idea floating around in statist circles is not to soak the rich, but rather the really, super-duper, ultra rich.
In a class-warfare filled screed, James Surowiecki wrote in the New Yorker on the need to “Soak the Very, Very Rich.”
A better tax system would have more brackets, so that the super-rich pay higher rates. (The most obvious bracket to add would be a higher rate at a million dollars a year, but there’s no reason to stop there.) This would make the system fairer, since it would reflect the real stratification among high-income earners…
Ezra Klein then blogged at the Washington Post that he is “very sympathetic to the idea that there should be more tax brackets,” reasoning that “It would be a lot easier to fight the super-rich than to fight the super-rich, the really rich, the pretty rich, and well-off.” If there was a bracket just for the super-duper-really rich, you see, it could be more easily raised to unconscionable and economy killing levels without public objection.
Adding more tax brackets would complicated an already inexcusably incomprehensible tax code, resulting in increased economic waste and compliance costs, more expenditures on lobbying and even greater uncertainty than is currently holding down economic growth.
Furthermore, tax policy should not be decided based on which group is easiest to demagogue and demonize. Nor is it the purpose of the tax code to enshrine into law a particular view of economic fairness, which in the case of Surowiecki and Klein, means redistribution.
There is one legitimate reason and one legitimate reason only for taxes, and that’s to raise the funds necessary for the limited functions of constitutional government and rule of law. There is no honest assessment of those functions as enshrined in the US Constitution which can find that the present revenues received by the state are insufficient to provide for those functions.
I’m sure it’s too much to ask, but rather than ruminate on which of its citizens the government and its statist boosters should declare war on next, the Ezra Klein’s of the world should think about how government spending can be reduced, and our federal government brought back into the bounds of legitimate, constitutional governance.
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As I predicted back in December, the fight over Obamacare has moved to the states. Several big developments have hit recently which do not bode well for supporters of unconstitutionally government-run health care.
First, a Federal District Court Judge Henry Hudson rejected the government’s attempt to dismiss Virginia’s lawsuit against Obamacare (full decision here). The establishment line was that legal challenges to Obamacare were just partisan grandstanding, and that of course government has the power to tax a non-economic non-activity through the Commerce Clause. They were wrong as Judge Hudson noted that Obamacare’s constitutional argument “literally forges new ground and extends Commerce Clause powers beyond its current high watermark.” Whether or not the court eventually reaches the right conclusion and declares Obamacare’s individual mandate to be unconstitutional remains to be seen, but this is an important first step.
On top of this, the voters in Missouri turned out yesterday to give Obamacare their disapproval.
Tuesday’s 71 to 29 percent blowout vote on Proposition C left no doubt where voters stand as they handed President Obama’s health care law a stunning rejection.
The proposition attempts to protect Missourians from the new federal mandate to buy insurance.
It also tries overturning the new federal prohibitions on insurance companies selling insurance directly to people.
This is just the beginning of the long fight against massive government expansion and government-run healthcare. But so far, the battles are being won by the side of smart policy and Constitutional governance.
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Vitriolic left-wing Senator Al Franken has bought into the conservative courts myth. This myth is popular only so far as the courts have not yet completely embraced left-wing “progressive” interpretations of the Constitution that in reality render its existance entirely meaningless. Rather, such views only dominate academia, the political class and almost all levels of the court system below SCOTUS, where it only captures at least 4 of the 9 justices.
Nevertheless, he’s now on the attack against “conservative activism:”
The first-term senator launched a full-throated attack on originalism, the judicial philosophy often upheld by conservatives as an example for model nominees for the federal courts.
“Originalism isn’t a pillar of our constitutional history. It’s a talking point,” Franken said, adding a jab at Chief Justice John Roberts for his famous comparison between judges and baseball umpires during Roberts’s confirmation hearings.
“How ridiculous,” Franken said. “Judges are nothing like umpires.”
Like Al Franken is nothing like a Senator?
The idea that there is “conservative activism” on the court is what is ridiculous. How often are left-wing overreaches from the executive and legislative branches actually struck down? Not often. The fact that we even have to debate whether SCOTUS will strike down the clearly unconstitutional individual mandate shows just how passive the post-New Deal courts are when it comes to enforcing constitutional restrictions on the schemes of Al Franken and co.
Al Franken wants the courts to roll over and let his big government comrades expand their power without resistance. Unfortunately, they’ve done largely that for most of the last century. A court that actively defended the Constitution, as opposed to the left-wing activism of writing laws from the bench, would be a dream come true.
Not good enough, not smart enough, and people just don't like you.
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Congressman Mike Conaway interrupts the usual Congressional Circus for some rare talk on political philosophy:
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Reminding us again how important it is to place judges on the Supreme Court that actually adhere to the doctrine that the Constitution is the law of the land, another important case is before the court. The Ninth Circuit wrongly sided with the teacher’s unions and others with a vested interest in defending education’s status quo of failure, but now the Supreme Court has a chance to correct this error.
From an Institute for Justice press release:
Comments…This week, the Court agreed to decide whether Arizona’s scholarship tax credit program violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. That will thrust school choice back into the national spotlight to a degree not seen since 2002, when IJ defended the Cleveland school choice program in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that vouchers are constitutional.
…The ACLU claims that the state, by giving taxpayers the choice to donate to both religious and nonreligious School Tuition Organizations, is unconstitutionally advancing religion in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because most taxpayers to date have donated to religiously affiliated charities.
Mellor said, “This case is most notable for what it does not involve: state action advancing religion. Arizona structured its tax credit program to be completely neutral with regard to religion. Neither taxpayers nor parents have any financial incentive to donate to a religiously affiliated scholarship organization over a nonreligious scholarship organization or to select religious over nonreligious schools.”
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Despite the landmark victory in the Heller case, the constitutional right to bear arms for defensive purposes is still constantly under assault. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg recently testified in the Senate over a supposed “terror gap” in gun laws.
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told a Senate panel Wednesday that he strongly supports congressional efforts to close a “terror gap” in the nation’s gun laws, which currently allow persons on a federal terrorist watch list to buy guns and explosives legally in the United States.
Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee in the wake of the latest alleged terrorist plot against his city, Bloomberg (I) pointed to a new Government Accountability Office report showing that individuals on the terrorist watch list were able to buy firearms and explosives from licensed U.S. dealers 1,119 times over the past six years.
“That is a serious and dangerous breach of national security,” Bloomberg testified. The FBI should have the authority to block such sales, “but right now, they don’t,” he said. “It is time to close this ‘terror gap’ in our gun laws.”
It’s not hard to sympathize with the national security argument here, but I think mayor Bloomberg is wrong for several reasons.
First of all, the no-fly list is notoriously problematic. The list contains over 1 million names, all of which are most certainly not terrorists. Moreover, there is a huge difference between flying and owning a gun. That difference rests primarily with the fact that the latter is an expressly granted constitutional right. Rescinding such rights cannot be done merely by adding someone’s name to a list. If that’s all it takes to void the constitution, then this is no longer a nation of law.
Besides the fact that it’s unconstitutional and places a huge burden on the likely hundreds of thousands of Americans who have found themselves on that list despite lacking any terrorist sympathies, it wouldn’t offer any meaningful protection anyway. The idea that real terrorists wouldn’t be able to purchase guns on the black market is absurd. The end result would be that the people you actually want to restrict access to still get weapons, while law-abiding citizens are forced to deal with another (unconstitutional) burden on their basic freedoms.
This is not the first time an effort has been made to deny Second Amendment rights to citizens arbitrarily placed on some list. Assuming it fails, one can only hope it’s the last.
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The University of Washington held a “debate” over the constitutionality of the health care bill in which none of the participants argued it was at all unconstitutional. Explaining this farce, the university claimed they couldn’t find any law professors to argue the opposing view. Liberal blogs such as TalkingPointsMemo and Think Progress, the blog for the Soros funded mouth-piece known as Center for American Progress, picked up the story to brag that the left can’t find any law professors to argue that Obamacare is unconstitutional. Clearly they haven’t looked hard enough.
Cato Institute legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, who is also an adjunct professor at George Washington University Law School, has issued a simple challenge. He’ll debate the constitutionality of Obamacare “anywhere at anytime.”
It’s not as if he’s the only one. Randy Barnett teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University and recently wrote in the Washington Post about different possible challenges to Obamacare. He concluded that several “constitutional challenges to health-care reform have a sound basis in the text of the Constitution.” Richard Epstein, of the University of Chicago, is another well-known skeptic of the bill’s constitutionality, and several months ago authored a piece explaining why in the Wall Street Journal. There are plenty more.
Here’s the $64,000 question. If the brilliant scholars at the University of Washington couldn’t properly conduct a basic search to find any of the numerous legal scholars who find Obamacare unconstitutional, how seriously can they possibly expect us to take their legal scholarship?
Cross-posted at Big Government
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CNSNews asked John Conyers, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to justify the Constitutionality of an individual mandate to purchase health insurance.
CNSNEWS: “What part of the Constitution do you think gives Congress the authority to mandate individuals to purchase health insurance?”
Rep. Conyers: “Under several clauses. The good and welfare clause, and a couple others.”
Rep. Conyers, who has a law degree, made up this clause. There is obviously no “good and welfare clause.”
Nor can we be comforted that this might just be a slip of the tongue. The General Welfare Clause, to which he may have intended to refer, does not grant any actual powers to Congress. Rather, and contrary to popular understanding, it is a restriction on the powers granted elsewhere, preventing them from being used to advance a specific or special interest.
The disdain for which the left treats the Constitution is a direct result of the fact that it stands in the way, by design, of their deepest desires for power and control.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
