TIM WILSON: THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE…OBAMA VS. THE SUPREMES
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11734/pub_detail.asp
President Obama is wrong in oh so many ways on Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act), perhaps historically, unprecedentedly so. It is the role of the Justices of the Supreme Court to rule on Obamacare, and indeed, if they are truly to act as arbiters of the will of the people, to rule against it. Indeed those Justices who support the President in his assertion that Obamacare is Constitutional will be the ones demonstrating “Judicial Activism”. As a Constitutional lawyer, he knows this, but as a politician he ignores it in the same way he apparently ignores anything and everything that he disagrees with, including the Will of the American People.
The Founding Fathers brilliantly set up our government to be limited, using three separate but equal branches to counterbalance each other. They wisely chose to have staggered but regular elections for two of the branches, the Presidency (Executive) and Congress (Legislative), while providing for the best legal minds of each generation to be appointed with life tenure to the Supreme Court (Judicial) by the elected bodies in order to provide checks and balances on those elected bodies. The particular role of the Judicial body is to ensure that the Legislative and Executive bodies follow the Will of the People.
President Lincoln expressed that founding principle of limited government succinctly and beautifully at Gettysburg, “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The key phraseology so well understood by almost every President except perhaps the current incumbent is “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. It is exactly this principle that President Obama is trying to ignore with his attack on the Supreme Court.
The Will of the People was clearly expressed after the passage of Obamacare through Congress, not by “a substantial majority” as President Obama would have it but by a narrow majority in which members of his own party voted against it and then had to use legislative legerdemain in the Senate (remember the use of “reconciliation” when they couldn’t otherwise gain the votes they needed to avoid the filibuster, despite cornhusker tactics?). The Will of the People was clearly expressed by the one unambiguous method available to The People in a democracy, the ballot box, in the 2010 elections – a “shellacking” for the Democrats and their President!
In November 2010, the “bums” were thrown out of the House in historic numbers and the Democrat Senate majority was greatly reduced. The Tea Party, much disdained by President Obama and his followers, grew out of dissatisfaction with Obamacare and the process used by the Democrat majority in Congress to pass it. Democrat members of Congress were unelected in droves and by sizable margins. “Safe” seats were lost to long term incumbents, even in heavily Democrat districts, thanks in very large part to that same Tea Party.
Those who lost were almost unanimously replaced by people opposed to Obamacare – a clear expression of the Will of the People which the President is now desperately recasting and obfuscating in the hopes of ignoring. What sort of arrogant, presumptuous President did we elect who ignores such a clear expression of the Will of the People?
What is unprecedented is that never before has the Supreme Court had to rule on such an egregious power grab by a President and Congress, attempting to gain control over one-sixth of the economy and the ability to regulate every aspect of individual behavior related to health. The freedoms we enjoy have never before been so grossly and widely usurped by Congress and a President, except in time of dire national emergency verging on or involved in global conflict. One obvious but scarcely mentioned tactic suggesting the egregious nature of the Affordable Care Act was the need to rush votes through before Legislators had a chance to read its 2,409 obfuscatory, confusing, legalistic pages. Nancy Pelosi’s comment on the necessity to vote for it in order to find out what was in it was excellent comedy and fine propaganda but also an obvious warning sign of serious legislative legerdemain.
Also unprecedented is the President publicly pressuring the Supreme Court, in clear contempt of the Separation of Powers, during an ongoing hearing. It may be a sign of supreme confidence in his own choices, it may be desperation to sustain the cornerstone of his legislative achievements as President, it may even be a true belief in the righteousness of his ways. It may well be historic, it also seems wrong. For a Constitutional lawyer, this is surprising. For an elitist, narcissistic, tone deaf politician – not so much.
It will be unprecedented if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Obamacare. Should they do so it may well be indicative of the activist, partisan levels to which the entire government has sunk, for they too will be ignoring the Will of the People, as patently expressed at the ballot box, in order to sustain their own personal values. Such a decision would raise the oppressive specter of unlimited government.
Now that would indeed be “Judicial Activism.”
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Tim Wilson is a retired British Army officer who now works as an independent consultant. He worked for 2 years for USAID in Iraq post-retirement and spends much time traveling.
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