The Biggest Threat to Obama's Health Care "Reform" - Reality - Page 48

Originally Posted by BR

Our problems derive from a populace who cannot critically think, believes in fairy tales, and acts against their own interest because of certain wedge issues (frequently stemming from intense belief in said fairy tales).

Originally Posted by tonton

Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. One member posts an abusive message, and another one calls him out on it. Yet the one who was the victim of the abuse is at fault? Sounds like Republican ideals to me.

Originally Posted by BR

When "someone" sends an abusive private message?

Don't you mean YOU?

Originally Posted by nvidia2008

You guys are in some serious trouble going into this decade.

As Steve Jobs said, the divide isn't liberal-conservative, it's constructive-destructive.

I have a place in my heart for the USA and things need to get constructive real soon (not pointing the finger at you, just saying in general).

The signs are not promising. Obama was at the G20 in Cannes looking like the Euro crisis was "Europe's problem", not realising the network of US, London and European banks that now have the whole world by the balls, except for China (reading up on their financial system history will tell you why).

“We acknowledge some discomfort with the government’s failure to advance any clear doctrinal principles limiting congressional mandates that any American purchase any product or service in interstate commerce. But to tell the truth, those limits are not apparent to us, either because the power to require the entry into commerce is symmetrical with the power to prohibit or condition commercial behavior, or because we have not yet perceived a qualitative limitation. That difficulty is troubling, but not fatal, not least because we are interpreting the scope of a long-established constitutional power, not recognizing a new constitutional right.”

Some discomfort about saying limited government is essentially a fiction? Silberman’s distinction between interpreting the scope of a government power and recognizing a right is spurious because rights begin where powers end.

So argues Florida International University’s Elizabeth Price Foley, constitutional litigator for the Institute for Justice. She is amazed by Silberman’s disregard of “the inherently symbiotic relationship between the scope of government powers and individual rights.”

She says Silberman has two false assumptions. One is that Congress compelling acts of commerce is “symmetrical” with prohibiting or regulating commerce. The other is that the lack of any principle to limit Congress when purporting to regulate interstate commerce is unimportant because it concerns only government power, not an important liberty interest of individuals.

Silberman’s supposed symmetry between compulsion and regulation ignores the momentous invasion of liberty by the former. If compulsion is authorized whenever Congress touches anything affecting commerce, this Leviathan power dwarfs all other enumerated powers.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, dissenting on the D.C. circuit court, dryly praised Silberman’s “candor” in “admitting that there is no real limiting principle” to the Commerce Clause jurisprudence embraced by the court’s majority. Kavanaugh, like Foley, emphasizes the asymmetry between, on the one hand, regulating or prohibiting commercial activity and, on the other hand, compelling such activity.

There is an abdication of judicial duty in Silberman’s complacent conclusion, which is: We can articulate no limit on Congress’s power flowing from the Commerce Clause; get over it. This might galvanize a Supreme Court majority to say “Enough!” and begin protecting individual liberty from a Commerce Clause that the court itself has transmogrified into an anti-constitutional gift to Congress of a virtually unlimited police power. This case can begin restoring Madison’s constitutional architecture for a government limited by the enumeration of its powers.