Category Archives: rights

Rule By Law vs Rule Of Law

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The Justice Department said Thursday that it will sue Texas over its voter ID law and, separately, look for ways to intervene in a lawsuit over the state’s redistricting policies

It’s just one harassment of a State after another by a Federal government disgruntled that it can’t get its way just for the demanding.  Attorney General Eric Holder justified the attack, saying this is just part of DoJ’s

continuing effort to protect the voting rights of all eligible Americans.  We will not allow the Supreme Court’s recent decision [that Congress must update its Voting Rights Act pre-clearance criteria] to be interpreted as open season for states to pursue measures that suppress voting rights.

Emphasis on that “We will not allow.”  Holder will not allow the Supreme Court decision to have effect; the United States’ chief lawyer will simply ignore it.  Never mind that his actions are designed to attack the voting rights of all eligible Americans by preventing states from ensuring that only eligible Americans vote.  Indeed,

[f]ollowing the [Supreme Court] ruling, Holder called the court’s decision and its reasoning behind it “flawed,” and vowed to find other ways within the law to challenge the ruling.

This is rank rule by law—cynically using law (or creating it, which is not, strictly speaking, the case here) to achieve government ends, rather than living within law the We the People have made through our elected representatives in order to protect us…from government, among others.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that the center of other criticisms of states’ voter ID laws is a claim like Colin Powell’s: “there is no voter fraud.”  Even if this were true, there’d be no harm in taking steps to keep it that way.  As the objectors know; hence their objection plainly centers on their need for the ineligible to be able to vote early and often.

Republican Non-Ideas for Health Insurance

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Here are some of those ideas put forward by Evil Republicans that President Barack Obama insists don’t exist.

  • Senators Tom Coburn (R, OK) and Mike Enzi (R, WY) have long advocated making health insurance completely portable so workers can take their plans with them from job to job.  Enzi first introduced a comprehensive bill including GOP reform proposals in 2007 and has updated it regularly.
  • Congressmen Sam Johnson (R, TX) and Charles Boustany (R, LA, and a cardiovascular surgeon) want to allow smaller companies to pool their risk to get the same discounts from insurance carriers that bigger companies do.
  • Congressmen Marsha Blackburn (R, TN) and Paul Ryan (R, WI) want to spark increased competition by allowing health-insurance policies to be sold across state lines, as are auto insurance policies.
  • Congressman Lamar Smith (R, TX) has championed medical liability reform at the federal level to rein in junk lawsuits, despite qualms that the issue should be left to the states.
  • Congressmen Mike Burgess (who practiced obstetrics and gynecology) and Joe Barton (both R, TX) have introduced bills to establish transparency in pricing and medical outcomes so patients can compare the costs for procedures at area hospitals and their relative success in performing them.
  • Congressman Bill Cassidy (R, LA), also a physician, has introduced a bill that would allow Medicaid patients to convert the value of their government benefit to pay for private coverage.
  • Congressman Tom Price (R, GA), an orthopedic surgeon, has introduced a comprehensive alternative to ObamaCare that includes many of the GOP’s reforms.
  • Congressman Phil Roe, (R, TN), a retired OB/GYN, will introduce a new ObamaCare replacement package next month when Congress returns.
  • The House Republican Study Committee wants to restore (even increase) amount families can save tax free for medical expenses; ObamaCare reduces that amount. Paired with health-savings accounts, such a move can put quality health care within the reach of many more families.  At competitive (read: lower) rates.

Notice all the actual doctors in that mix.  Possibly, they’re more worth listening to than a bunch of politicians whose only imperative is their personal political gain.

What are Republicans doing about these ideas?  Introducing, as noted above—and when they’ve controlled the House, passing—legislation.  But the obstructionist, Democrat “Just say no” Senate won’t even allow debate, much less voting on the bills.

Instead, these worthies, and President Barack Obama, oppose any reform that’s patient/doctor-centric, that omits government involvement, and that has actual competitive market forces—competition that strengthens the markets for health insurance and for health services—in play.  Indeed,

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) recently called ObamaCare “a step in the right direction,” but noted that his goal is “absolutely” a single-payer system in which government delivers all health care.  When he was running for president in 2008, Mr. Obama admitted he “would probably go ahead with a single-payer system” if he was “designing a system from scratch.”

Truly, a paucity of ideas.  However, it’s the Democrats who are lacking.  All they’ve got is the crashing train of Obamacare—as Obama himself has admitted with his extra-constitutional decision not to enforce critical components of that law, and thereby cutting those cars loose, only to crash into the wreckage after a short delay.

He Doesn’t Get It

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Baptist Minister Bruce Prescott, with the aid of the ACLU, is suing Oklahoma (specifically, the Oklahoma Capitol Preservation Commission) in a state court over the presence of a monument representing the Ten Commandments on the state’s Capitol grounds.

Prescott told Oklahoma City’s News9

It’s inappropriate, it’s not the right place.  Put it on the doorpost, that’s what the Bible says; it doesn’t say to put it at the State Capitol.

Here’s what he doesn’t get: the State Capital is the doorpost for all the citizens of Oklahoma.

Too, his ACLU representatives are ignoring the facts that this is a privately funded and erected monument and that the Supreme Court already has ruled that such monuments in the public square—or on government grounds—are entirely appropriate so long as displays representing other religions or atheism are not barred.  Of course, the ACLU is not alleging such a barring.

A Victory for Labor

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…if not necessarily for organized labor or, more particularly, for organized labor leaders.

Michigan’s right-to-work law applies to 35,000 state employees, a divided state appeals court ruled Thursday in the first major legal decision on the much-debated measure eight months after it passed.

Judges voted 2-1 to reject a lawsuit filed by unionized workers who make up more than two-thirds of all state employees.

In ruling that unions cannot force workers to pay union dues, when they’re not union members as a condition of employment, the majority ruled, in part:

In light of the First Amendment rights at stake, the Michigan Legislature has made the policy decision to settle the matter by giving all employees the right to choose…[and to] remove politics from public employment and to end all inquiry or debate about how public sector union fees are spent.

It’s in fits and starts, but individual liberty is beginning to survive.

Closing a Business is a Felony

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Justice James Clark McReynolds wrote 75 years ago, in a dissent from a Commerce Clause-impacting labor case, this in part:

We are told that Congress may protect the “stream of commerce….”  Therefore it is said he may be prevented from doing anything which may interfere with its flow.
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May a mill owner be prohibited from closing his factory or discontinuing his business because so to do would stop the flow of products to and from his plant in interstate commerce?

Apparently he can, when the stream of commerce’s products include government’s ability to spy on its citizen employers.