Since the passage of the health care law on Sunday, a lot of us have challenged its constitutionality. Even before it was passed we suggested that it would violate the constitution. But since it’s passage I have seen a lot of friends and family who support the law say they don’t understand why we think it is unconstitutional. They often cite the “general welfare clause” of the constitution and laws that require automobile insurance to justify the law under the constitution.
Up front let me say, as I have before, that the current health care system is the pits, unsustainable, and that insurance companies are corrupt. That insurance coverage is intertwined with your specific employer, that it is so much more expensive for individuals, that people are denied coverage because of preexisting conditions, and that we pay for routine care through insurance claims (which is like paying for gas for your car through auto insurance claims), are all terrible, illogical aspects of what we currently have. It needs to be overhauled.
I’m afraid that whomever wins the day in the California Proposition 8 legal battle, we all lose in the long run. I’ve been trying to follow the arguments presented by both sides to the California Supreme Court and while I support Proposition 8, I think the arguments being made by both sides are pretty dangerous. A lot of the argument goes back to the fundamental arguments made during the formation of the U. S. Constitution and then solidified during the Civil War.
On the one had we have democracy which is the rule of the majority. The government derives its just powers from the people. So a government has to be fundamentally democratic to wield any power justly. A government that foists the desires of a minority over the majority would be an unjust oligarchy, and tyranny of the minority.
However, the founders were also very suspicious of pure democracy because more often than not it devolved into a tyranny of the majority, where the majority unjustly tramples the rights of the minority.
So while keeping the government fundamentally democratic, they structured the government with a series of checks and balances based on distributing democracy to competing scopes that would prevent the states with large populations from tyrannical rule over the states with small populations, while still allowing government action to be derived justly from the people. They called this a Democratic Republic.
In the case of Prop 8 the majority has ruled to uphold traditional marriage norms through democratic vote.
Those who favor same-sex marriage lost at the ballot box and view this as an act of tyranny of the majority, so they have turned to the courts to try to overthrow it.
Those who favor traditional marriage view the court case as an act of oligarchy, a usurpation of the democracy from which the government derives its powers.
Now we come to the arguments made by the lawyers before the California Supreme Court.
President Bush announced today that because Congress failed to authorize a bailout of the U.S. auto industry, by executive order the National Government will be bailing out automobile companies using funds from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) , which was established earlier this year by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 to bail out failing financial institutions.
This is a unbelievably devastating blow to our constitutional government.
