During one of Sen. Arlen Specter’s (D-PA) early health care townhalls
in Lebanon, Pennsylvania; mother of two Katy Abrams told the audience:
“I don’t believe this is just about health care. It’s not about TARP.
It’s not about left and right. This is about the systematic dismantling
of this country. I’m only 35 years-old. I’ve never been interested in
politics. You have awakened the sleeping giant.” Abrams is dead on. Our
federal government has, unfortunately, long been drifting away from the
limited government principles first envisioned by our founders. But
over the past eleven months, that drift has turned into an all out
sprint towards an undemocratic, technocratic, leviathan state … a type
of government that our Constitution was specifically designed to
prevent.
As Abrams points out, both political parties have been complacent in
the rapid deterioration of our founding principles. It was after all
President Bush who pushed for and signed the Emergency Economic
Stabilization Act of 2008 which created the Troubled Asset Relief
Program (TARP). When the Bush administration submitted their
legislation to Congress we warned: “From a constitutional standpoint,
the current versions of the legislation are different in scope, and
especially in kind, from almost any federal legislation that has come
before.” Specifically we identified: (1) Congress’s enumerated power—or
lack thereof—to intervene with private markets in the manner
contemplated, (2) the lack of meaningful standards to guide the
extremely broad grant of discretion to the Treasury secretary (the
“legislative delegation” problem), (3) limitations on judicial review
over the exercise of that almost limitless discretion, and (4) related
separation of powers concerns.
The only thing that truly surprised us after the legislation’s passage
was just how quickly our worst fears were realized. The TARP plan, as
sold to Congress, was never even implemented and, instead, it quickly
devolved into a political slush fund. Because of the broad delegations
of authority in the bill, the American people were left with no real
avenue to check the federal government’s unprecedented interference in
the U.S. economy. When Members of Congress voted for the bill in
October 2008, could any of them honestly say they thought they had just
voted to bailout General Motors and Chrysler?
The proposed health care legislation is just as bad, if not worse, than
TARP. Sec. 142 of H.R. 3200 grants the new Orwellian titled “Health
Choices Commissioner” broad lawmaking authority including the power to
set standards for every Americans health insurance plan, to determine
which of your current insurance plans do or do not meet that standard,
and then to punish plans that do not meet that standard. Even worse is
what is not yet in the bill, but is desperately wanted by the Obama
administration. A super-empowered Medicare Payment Advisory Commission
that is specifically designed to “save money in an apolitical,
technocratic way.” The entire purpose of this part of Obamacare would
be to take medical decisions away from patients and vest it in a panel
of experts specifically designed to be completely unaccountable to the
American people. Is this what the Framers of the Constitution had in
mind?
When the Constitution was being ratified, James Madison, writing as
Publius, sought to allay fears that the new national government would
turn into a Leviathan. In the 45th Federalist Paper he emphasized that
adoption of the Constitution would create a government of enumerated,
and therefore strictly limited, powers. Madison said: “The powers
delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are
few and defined… [and] will be exercised principally on external
objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce….” Federal
tax collectors, Madison assured everyone, “will be principally on the
seacoast, and not very numerous.” Exactly six months after publication
of this essay, New York became the 11th state to ratify the
Constitution. Is turning over one-sixth of our nation’s economy over to
Obama’s super-MedPAC panel in any way consistent with this vision?