Oh, Do Shut Up

Bush the Dumber's Council on Bioethics recommended he approve Federal funding of stem-cell research, over the religious objections of some Christian denomination or other whose name escapes me at the moment.

Charles Merkwürdigeliebe Krauthammer, "Overreach--Obamacare vs. the Constitution". February 16

REALLY, I was just trying to find someone, anyone, objecting to the contraception mandate on grounds it violates the Free Exercise clause who would either 1) acknowledge, clearly, that the law exempted the Catholic Church and/or 2) that similar restrictions on religious liberty are numerous, even commonplace.

Well, Merkwürdigeliebe went the other direction.

Sensing, perhaps--but not admitting, oh no--that the religious objection ship had sailed, and without anything in the manifest the majority of Americans are interested in buying, Krauthammer decides on that favorite of prosecutors everywhere: if you can't make the case, charge 'em with conspiracy:

This constitutional trifecta — the state invading the autonomy of religious institutions, private companies and the individual citizen — should not surprise. It is what happens when the state takes over one-sixth of the economy.

Okay, so 1) nope; that isn't a) what's happening, b) un-Constitutional, nor unprecedented, even if it were; or c) even a particularly imaginative updating of anti-fluoridationism; 2) nope; try the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986, fer instance; it ought to be familiar to anyone pontificating about health care in this country; and 3) I'm guessing that

because never before has the already hypertrophied Commerce Clause been used to compel a citizen to enter into a private contract with a private company by mere fact of his existence.

[emphasis mine] was added to make it sound like you have an argument, and not as a leg-pull, "existence" being the prior condition which predisposes one to require health care. I'm not sure where the Constitutional guarantee of "reasonably-termed mandates" resides. I doubt many Court observers would be astonished if the Roberts Court finds one anyway, but that's another matter.

Every presidential challenger says that he will repeal Obamacare on Day One. Well, yes. But is any of them making the case for why?

You mean as opposed to hurling handfuls of shit at a wall to see what sticks?

Look, Chuckles: it's your end of the spectrum loves it some Imperial Presidency, so long as it's Republican; I don't recall any concern from y'all when George W. Bush asserted his right to go to war based on his facile reading of a post-expiration UN resolution. I didn't hear you screaming when Dick Cheney invented himself a Fourth Branch of government, though it would have been hard to hear over the sniggering. But, really, now, if you wanna lecture us on the Constitution, demonstrate a little competence. Don't trot out "hypertrophied Commerce clause" in defense of a religious exemption that doesn't exist.