The Senate Healthcare Bill Is Strikingly Unconstitutional.
Sometime before Christmas, the United States Senate will vote on a 2,000 page bill to give the federal government the power to micromanage the health care of every single American. The bill will no doubt pass. It will raise your taxes, steal your freedom, invade your privacy, and ration your health care. Even the Republicans have introduced their version of Obamacare Lite. It, too, if passed, will compel employers to provide coverage, bribe the states to change their court rules, and tell insurance companies whom to insure.
We do not have two political parties in this country. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms. Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience and enjoy the use of your own property as you see fit. The government wants you to follow the will of some compromising power-hungry politician or some faceless bureaucrat with the mentality of those who run the Post Office.
When I recently asked Congressman James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, to tell me where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to regulate everyone’s healthcare, he replied that most of what Congress does is not authorized by the Constitution, but they do it anyway. There you have it. Congress recognizes no limits on its power.
This is the world turned upside down. Everyone in Congress takes an oath in which they swear “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” The essence of the constitutional impediment in the healthcare bill that the Senate will probably pass is the theft of freedom of choice and the theft of property. Here’s an example of government theft. If you are 20 years old, and have $4,000 in the bank, how would you spend it? Might you take a course at a community college to learn a vocational skill? Might you buy an old pick-up truck and some lawn mowers and start a landscaping business? Whatever you would do with your $4000, the choice should be yours. You have a natural right and a constitutional right to use and enjoy your own property as you see fit.
Instead, if the Senate bill becomes law, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and President Obama will force you under threat of incarceration to use that money to buy health insurance; something you don’t want and probably don’t need at age 20. Thus, the government is stealing your freedom to spend your money. Under the Constitution, your money is your property; and the Fifth Amendment requires that if the government wants to separate you from your property, it cannot do so by legislation or decree, it can only do so by suing you in front of a jury. We call this Due Process.
But the Congress is afraid of Due Process because no jury would send someone to jail for not buying health insurance. So the law will evade Due Process and evade the Constitution. That should not come as a surprise. Congress doesn’t care about the Constitution, it doesn’t care about your inalienable rights, it doesn’t care about the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, it doesn’t even read the laws it writes.
This is not an academic issue. If this health care bill becomes law, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, privacy as you have enjoyed it, will cease to be.
When Congress takes away our freedoms, they will be gone forever. What will you do to prevent this from happening?
Judge Andrew P. Napolitano is Fox News Channel’s senior judicial analyst.