Archive for the ‘health care’ Category

This is a post I originally wrote for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Ltd. I believe that this issue has a lot more depth to it, so this represents my initial thoughts on the issue, a kind of preliminary outline, if you will.

From March 31, 2010:

Introduction

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffrey-dickens/2010/03/29/chris-matthews-gets-schooled-tea-partier

As I mentioned in the previous post, this exchange on Chris Matthews’s Hardball raised two important issues.  The first is the Left’s obsession with race, gender, and sexual orientation.  The second, and I believe more important issue, is the place of the 10th Amendment in our federal system, and why it’s important in all issues of federal power.

In the exchange, Melissa Harris Lacewell, a professor at Princeton, says:

Well, well let me just suggest this. That the tea partiers by using the language of tea party have asked us to draw a parallel between their movement and the Revolutionary War movement. But I think if we look more carefully we’ll see that in many ways the tea party movement resembles more closely the kind of secessionist feelings that were both part of the Confederacy before the Civil War and then also remained in the post-civil war Reconstruction era. So in other words-

At which point she is cut off by Dana Loesch (a conservative radio talk-show host) with”

It’s about state sovereignty not secessionism. It’s about 10th Amendment principles.

This is a great exchange, and demonstrates why the 10th Amendment has been so much maligned.  First, we’ll look at the text of the amendment, and then we’ll take a brief look at the history of state sovereignty.

The Constitution

The 10th Amendment states:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

We can divide this into two key sections.  The first is “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution…”  What are the delegated powers?  For the most part, these are contained in Article One, Section 8 of the Constitution in the Enumerated Powers (so called because they are numbered).  I won’t list all of them, but you can read them here.  InMcCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice Marshall wrote:

This government is acknowledged by all, to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it, would seem too apparent, to have required to be enforced by all those arguments, which its enlightened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted. [emphasis mine]

So the point of enumerating powers in the Constitution, indeed of having a constitution at all, is to limit the power of the federal government.  These limits are placed upon the federal government because government power is, by its very nature, coercive.  As George Washington said, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”  Thus, the Founders created through the Constitution a limited government.

Now, in the debates to ratify the Constitution, many worried that, while (as Marshall points out above) the presence of a constitution by nature limits the government, there needed to be specific protections for the people and the States; thus, the Bill of Rights was adopted as the first ten amendments to the Constitution.  The last two of these protect the people and the States from both too strict and too liberal a reading the Constitution.  On the one hand, the fact that rights are mentioned does not mean these are all the rights (cf. the 9th Amendment); on the other, powers not mentioned specifically delegated to the federal government are retained by the States and the people.

All of this seems relatively clear-cut, but of course, it can’t be that simple.  First, interpretations by the Supreme Court establish precedents which are binding unless overturned by the Supreme Court itself.  Second, the 10th Amendment, and the issue of State Sovereignty, got historically caught up in the struggle over slavery.

Slavery and States’ Rights

All nations have their national shame, and slavery is the United States’ greatest shame.  In preserving the institution, the Southern states used many different tactics and arguments.  One of those was the 10th Amendment.  The Constitution, as it was drafted, did not give Congress any power over the presence of slavery in the United States.  It did include a stipulation about the importation of slaves (which didn’t go into effect immediately), but other than that, slavery was not mentioned.  As a failure of many of the Founders’ resolve, this has been much lamented, but it was seen as a necessary evil for the greater good of creating the union.

Thus, from a strictly constitutional perspective, the defenders of slavery were right in this respect: neither Congress nor the president could outlaw slavery, and any direct attempt to do so outside of constitutional amendment would be unconstitutional.  Now, it should be noted that it was the (over)reaction of the soon-to-be Confederate States to the election 0f Lincoln that led to the Civil War, but the end result of the conflict as far as slavery was concerned was the passage of the so-called Civil War amendments: 13th, 14th, and 15th.  It was acknowledge that constitutional amendment was the only solution, and the rebel states were required to accept these amendments as part of being readmitted to the Union.

In the post-Reconstruction era (after 1877), the States’ Rights argument (with the 10th Amendment as part of it) continued to be used to suppress the civil rights of African Americans, and for the most part the Supreme Court upheld this (cf. Plessy v. Ferguson).  This fact has been touted by detractors of States’ Rights as an example of why the federal government should act unconstitutionally at times.  But this argument is completely wrong.

Civil Rights and the Constitution

The reason this is wrong is quite simple: sometimes (maybe more often at times) the Supreme Court is just wrong.  You see, the Civil War Amendments contain what has become one of the most important amendments in the Constitution: the 14th Amendment.  This amendment gave the federal government the responsibility for protecting “due process” and “equal protection.”  This amendment did not apply just to the federal government (for example, the 5th Amendment already contains a “due process” clause), but for the first time applied directly to the States.  Thus, federal intervention in segregation and other civil rights issues was constitutional.

The problem before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was with the Supreme Court’s failure of interpretation.  The 1890s court failed to uphold the Constitution against segregation’s assault upon it.

The 10th Amendment and Federal Health Care

So, what does all this mean for the current debates over state sovereignty, especially as it relates to health care?  We can break this down into a couple points.

First, does health care reform fall under the powers of Congress?  In so far as we are concerned with Interstate Commerce (one of the Enumerated Powers), then yes, I think it does.  In fact, one of the chief reforms I believe should have been enacted is the extension of health care insurance across state lines.  However, federal government-run health care (the “public option”) is another matter entirely.  Nothing in the Constitution suggests that the government should be running an insurance company, and to call such a thing “competition” is preposterous for a number of reasons outside the scope of this article.

Second, if a “public option” is unconstitutional, what other option do we have?  This is the most important bit.  There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that forbids the States from having their own health-care systems.  In fact, it would only fall under federal jurisdiction if it crossed state lines and became Interstate Commerce.  I haven’t researched every state to find out if they have their own public options, but it seems to me that this is the best solution.  The States are closer to the people (and thus more directly responsible to them), and each state would be able to formulate a plan that would work best in that state.

The fact that this is so is shown by the very legislation passed by the Democrats (or at least in the process).  Early on, various states were getting exceptions to the rules, exceptions negotiated by their representatives to 1) get their support and 2) get the best (one hopes) for their constituents back home.  This kind of thing should be shameful in a federal bill, but it shows that each state needs to have its own options outside of a federal mandate.  Also, much of the bill concerns an expansion of Medicaid, which, while federally mandated (ugh!) is largely administered by the States for the very reasons I cited above.

Thus, those states opposed to the recently-passed health-care bill do have an argument, one that has nothing to do with unconstitutional secession.  This conflict has been building for decades, but has now come to a head with this particular expansion of federal power.  The 10th Amendment, though much maligned both by segregationists and nationalists in the past, must be upheld for the Constitution as a whole to stand.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffrey-dickens/2010/03/29/chris-matthews-gets-schooled-tea-partier

The above exchange, from Chris Matthews’s Hardball, has brought two topics to mind, both of which I will cover in different posts. The first is the Left’s use of race and gender as a means to steer debate away from the issues and instead instigate ad hominim attacks on their opponents.  Now, I want to point out from the beginning that this isn’t a case of “this side does this, while the other is blameless.”  We know that there are people on the right who do similar things.  But the abundance of these sort of attacks on the Left, and their spread through the mainstream media, shows that they are systemic on the Left.

The discussion Matthews initiates begins from this very premise.  He states, “Is this fight, from the tea party side, aimed at the, or ignited by the health care defeat last week they suffered, about ethnicity and gender and orientation, sexual orientation or is it about the substance of the issue?”  The very fact that this is the premise of his discussion demonstrates his position.  If Matthews believed that the tea partiers were concerned with the substance of the issue, he wouldn’t even raise this question.  So, from the start we know what Matthews’s biases are.  Of course, by focusing attention on the idea that tea partiers only oppose federally run health-care, bigger government, and higher taxes because they are racist-sexist-homophobes, he can ignore the substantive issues being raised by the tea party movement.

An important question, however, is why leftists are so quick to raise the spector of racism-sexism-homophobia at the drop of a hat?  If we look at the focus of leftist politics, we can easily see the reason.  If you spend all your time focusing on people’s race, gender, and sexual orientation, you will often project the same on to others.  Many leftists just cannot believe that everyone is not obsessed with gender, with race, with sexual orientation.  Furthermore, there is an air of superiority, a “How dare you?!” attitude to any opposition to their policies.  They see themselves as enlightened despots who hold the answers to society’s ills, and if we oppose them, there must be something psychologically wrong with us.

Unfortunately, there’s little we can do to convince hardcore leftists that we conservatives are not the way they see us.  On the other hand, they are far in the minority, and we don’t actually have to convince them at all.  If we focus our message on the majority of Americans (and 40% already self-identify as conservative), we can institute real change in our country.

The current debate over health-care reform has brought out the hypocrisy of the Left in a very visible way. Their response to protests (most of which are focused on the House’s health-care bill, HR 3200) is quite telling. If the protesters were to be anti-war or anti-Bush, they would be praised for their courage and patriotism. In this case, however, protesters are derided and chided for “unruly” behavior. Swastikas and Nazi references directed at the Right have long been used by leftists, but when such tactics are turned around on them, it is offensive and un-American. The Left’s hypocrisy is thus in full display.

What we should remember, however, is that many of our representatives on the Right have little room to talk on the hypocrisy front. Unfortunately, hypocrisy seems to be ingrained in most politicians. Republicans came to the majority in Congress in the 1990s as a specific response to tax-and-spend liberalism, but when they finally had a Republican president and an opportunity to affect real change, they succumbed to the spending bug themselves.

It is often said nowadays that the Right is “in the wilderness.” We should remember that the wilderness is a place of reflection and preparation, and we should learn the lessons not only of last eight years, but also of the last eight months, and not repeat the same mistakes.