[Editor’s Note: This is a preview of The Public Square column from the May issue of First Things, which will be on newstands in the next few weeks.]
A kind of exhaustion always settles in, murky and miasmatic, after battle. The nation’s conservatives foresaw the apocalypse if the Democrats’ plan for health-care reform passed, and on Sunday—yesterday, as I write—it did pass. The world didn’t end. The people didn’t rise up in rage. Furious lightning didn’t descend from the heavens to smash the apostate Capitol into rubble.
Of course, watching the ring of applause and self-congratulation around the podium in the House of Representatives, one could see that the nation’s Democrats were also thinking of the apocalypse—albeit, in happier terms. But, on Monday morning, the Rapture didn’t come, either, and the stony places of the earth didn’t blossom with sudden flowers. Despite the left’s predictions, the rise of the oceans didn’t slow, and the planet didn’t heal, and the lame didn’t walk, and the blind didn’t see.
Instead of falling—or rising, if the left proves correct—on the great wave of Armageddon, we must wait, in this trough of exhaustion, to learn what happens next. Our apocalypse is a slow one; it smothers us in whimpers. And here on Monday morning, all that remains is a sense of the impending. Something is slowly coming, something is slouching toward us.
I don’t know exactly what that something is. Neither do you. Neither does the president or the Congress or the Senate, or anyone else who forced this change upon us. Change they wanted, and change they got—but change to what? The actual text of the bill makes little sense, as nearly everyone admits, but, then, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explained, the point wasn’t really to get an intelligible bill. The point was to get any bill. To get the nationalization of health care rolling. To start the socialization process. To turn the corner. The point was to change the American system—in the belief that, once changed, the system can never change back.
Perhaps the courts will stop this. Certainly much of the bill will end up in lawsuits. The requirement that people buy insurance—and wasn’t that the strangest thing in the bill? I know, Judy! We can punish those hated insurance companies by forcing everyone to use them!—has an unconstitutional feel to it, and it is, in any case, directly outlawed by such states as Virginia and Idaho. To court we must go, and in court we’ll find out . . . whatever it is that we’ll find out. I don’t know what the courts will end up saying. Neither do you, and neither does anyone else.
Meanwhile, the November congressional elections are coming, and the health-care bill is already the major issue on which conservative candidates are running. That the Republicans will gain some midterm seats is predicted by all political pollsters. That they will win enormously, picking up the ten seats they need to control the Senate and the forty they need to control the House, is predicted by some. That they will find the twenty-five votes in the Senate and the 112 in the House they need to override a presidential veto is predicted by no one—although such gains are necessary for undoing this bill, through normal political channels, before the 2012 presidential election.
Politicizing Politics
But, then, normal political channels are exactly what seem to have disappeared in the process by which the health-care bill came into being. “All this talk about rules. We make them up as we go along,” said Congressman Alcee Hastings during the health-care debates, and right he was.
Commentator after commentator has insisted that America has grown highly politicized over the last decade. Maybe even over the last half century, since calmness hasn’t really existed in the public square since Eisenhower was president. And even then, the bitterness of Adlai Stevenson’s defeated supporters was palpable, and the civil-rights battles were beginning to rage, and the hipster and the organization man were emerging, and the playboy was being born, and the communists threatened the nation, and the Cold War fed the apocalyptic imagination . . .
I’ve always been dubious about claims of a great calm consensus, a golden age, that once existed in any stretch of American time. Politics is political, by its very nature. It’s where people of ambition meet and push on one another their ambitions—a process that cannot ever be calm.
The American Founders understood this, and they set up a system where the ambitious could stage their fights, without doing too much collateral damage to the rest of us. And any investigation into history will reveal that the nation has been politicized, in the sense of having a highly charged political atmosphere, from its founding.
Still, the commentators who feel the nation is caught up in a new kind of politicizing—a new type of rage and a new style of activism—are not wrong, exactly. One clear change in recent years is the emergence of a factionalism that we’ve never quite known before in American history.
The Founders understood the dangers of faction, of course. Alexander Hamilton famously issued a warning against it in the ninth of the Federalist Papers, and James Madison worked on the answer in the tenth, where he defined faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
The solution, Madison thought, is representative democracy. Direct democracy, all the people voting on all the issues, is too likely to be swayed by the passions of the moment and the interests of small crowds: “A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
Madison won that argument; representative democracy he wanted, and representative democracy he got. The dangers of factionalism didn’t thereby go away, however. A representative system, the interposition of elected officials and procedural rules between the people and the law, only dams up factional dangers—to the enormous frustration of those who gain what they believe to be popular mandates and then discover that they cannot simply do whatever they want. (Remember the angry columns this year by several liberal commentators, which said that the Senate’s filibuster rules are an unconstitutional outrage, when the election of Massachusetts senator Scott Brown cost the Democrats their sixtieth Senate vote and looked as though it might derail the health-care bill?) And when a great surge washes over the dam, factionalism is translated from a danger of the populace to a danger of the representatives.
Whatever its rightness or wrongness, the national anger at George Bush over the ongoing wars pushed up to the top of the dam in 2006 and brought the Democrats control of both the Senate and the House. And there it might have stayed, or even receded, had the financial crisis of 2008 not come along. Add that flood on top of the earlier ones, and there was swept into office a supermajority of highly charged, highly motivated, and highly factionalized individuals.
Am I alone in thinking that things like the health-care bill are not what voters thought they were getting? In the passion of the moment, they wanted Bush’s supporters chased out. And the voters got what they wanted—along with something they didn’t want: the election of a class of officials comparable to the Republican radicals of 1866 and the Democratic extremists of the 1974 post-Watergate tide. The flood carried faction into the Congress.
Consider our current situation with this fact in mind: Not a single Republican, in either house, voted for the Senate’s version of the bill, which is now the law of the land. Logically speaking, there is a faint possibility that this is because the current crop of Republicans are themselves too factionalized to join in a great national project (one of the curious effects of a flood election is that moderates on the losing side are among the most likely to be defeated, since the hardliners had already managed to face down ideological opposition in previous elections).
But the polls, which show a majority of the public opposed to the bill—59 percent, according to a CNN poll published this morning—suggest the opposite: The Democrats who forced through this incoherent bill are acting as a faction. The dangers that Hamilton and Madison struggled to control in the populace are beyond control when they wash into the Capitol.
“Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority?” asks the serious economics blogger for the Atlantic, Megan McArdle. The opponents of the health-care bill did what the old system suggested they do: They went out and convinced the public that now was not the time for such a major change in a country that is already financially strapped. In January 1993, when the Clinton health-care task force was created, nearly 60 percent of the American people supported reform. In July 1994, when the effort was declared dead, almost 60 percent of the people opposed it. Responsiveness to public feeling—remember Clinton’s “permanent campaign”?—meant the defeat of the bill.
By some polls, less than 20 percent of Americans opposed the Democrats’ health-care proposals in January 2009. Over 50 percent did by January 2010—but unlike the process in 1994, popular feeling made no difference this time around. “If you don’t find that terrifying,” McArdle notes, “let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances. Farewell, Social Security! Au revoir, Medicare! The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected. If they didn’t—if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission—then the legislative lock-in you’re counting on wouldn’t exist.”
The Republicans will surely be back in power at some point. Maybe after the 2010 congressional and 2012 presidential elections, although I’m somewhat convinced that a major Republican victory this November is Obama’s best chance for reelection in 2012, for it would give him something to run against, and a kind of pure running againstness—Hope! (in what?) Change! (to what?) Not Bush!—has always been his best form of action.
Regardless, when the day comes that Republicans rule again, why shouldn’t they do what the Democrats have now done? How can they not do what the Democrats have now done, ignoring the voters who put them in office and pushing through a radical agenda?
The conservatives aren’t stupid. They’ll surely see that if only the liberals get to use these changes in the American political system, then politics has become a ratchet that bites in only one direction: Push back in the other direction, and all you get is running room to tighten the nut some more. No conservative leader could allow that to happen. If these are the new rules of the game, then the Republicans have to play along. And when politicians cease to care what their constituents believe, we no longer have a representative democracy. We have, instead, a democratically elected tyranny—changing sides from time to time, but still disconnected from the people. Is it too much to think, with Madison, that such things are likely to be “as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”?
Turning on Abortion
On March 14, my friend Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, took to the pages of the Washington Post to argue that “if Republicans keep ignoring abortion, they’ll lose in the midterm elections.” At that date, the House’s version of the health-care bill contained an amendment—sponsored by the Democratic congressman from Michigan, Bart Stupak—that explicitly banned federal funding of abortions. The Senate version of the bill contained no such guarantee, and Stupak’s coalition of pro-life Democrats looked like the best chance for the House to defeat the Senate’s version.
And so Marjorie wrote, “Republicans oppose President Obama’s health-care reform effort for many reasons: It will cost too much, it’s ‘socialist,’ it’s big government at its worst. But they are letting Stupak and his fellow anti-abortion Democrats lead on that issue. And the more the GOP ignores abortion and focuses on economic populism—taking up the ‘tea party’ cause—the more the party risks leaving crucial votes behind in November.”
I criticized her a little at the time, on the First Things website, by arguing that we should not encourage the emergence of a politics in which the Republican party contains all the pro-lifers and the Democratic party all those who support legalized abortion. Yes, it’s true that all of American politics has been corrupted by this murderous procedure, and, at present, the party platforms are clear enough on the topic. But pro-life forces should not want an America in which the great pro-life message is shoved off into one party—just as we shouldn’t want an America that squanders its religious exceptionalism by having a political party of believers and a political party of non-believers, a European-style division between Christian Democrats and Socialists. Abortion is everyone’s issue, we pro-lifers must believe, I wrote, and when Democrats such as Bart Stupak arrive, they ought to be celebrated.
This morning—on the Monday after Stupak’s bloc collapsed and Stupak himself voted for the Senate bill on the vague promise that President Obama would issue a certainly dismissible and probably unconstitutional executive order on the topic after the bill had passed—Majorie’s worries seem to have been overstated. The Tea Partiers are strongly libertarian, but their rage against this health-care bill matches the feelings of the pro-life community, and the Republicans aren’t about to ignore that combination.
But, if Marjorie Dannenfelser was a little wrong, I was utterly mistaken. I did warn that Stupak and his fellow pro-life Democrats in the House are, after all, people who have always favored health-care reform—and they were going to vote for the Democratic program if they possibly could. But after Stupak stood firm during the debates over the House version of the bill, forcing his amendment through even while enduring the fury of what seemed like every mainstream editorial page in the nation, I thought he would not desert the pro-life organizations when it came down to a vote on the Senate’s version. But desert he did. Praise Bart Stupak now, I demanded—and, like many other pro-lifers, I was left with nothing to show for it.
Three main species of argument were floated during the debate to give cover to the Democrats who call themselves pro-life, from Harry Reid and Bob Casey in the Senate to Bart Stupak in the House. The first was the claim that, through its complicated payment procedures, the Senate bill ensured that the government portion of the new insurance program wouldn’t actually fund abortions. The second was that nationalizing the health-care system would result in a net drop in the number of abortions performed. And the third was that an executive order from the president would ensure that abortion funding would not follow from the new bill.
The fact that the first and third contain at least some elements of contradiction didn’t seem to stop the bill’s proponents from urging them both—nor did the fact that they are both, on their face, risible, and they were both emphatically rejected by every major pro-life group. If you can’t get a single serious organization devoted to the topic to agree with you, isn’t that a sign you’re probably wrong?
The second of these arguments involves an empirical claim that the future will test—but it seems extremely unlikely to prove true. It originated in a March 14 op-ed in the Washington Post, written by T.R. Reid, that claims that “universal health care tends to cut the abortion rate.” As William Saunders, a vice president of Americans United for Life, quickly pointed out, Reid’s argument is unsupported by the evidence he claimed for it. More to the point, it is actively contradicted by studies that have looked at abortion policy in Eastern Europe—where, under communist rule, health care was nationalized and abortion rates were high. As Saunders notes, in the post-communist states, “modest restrictions on abortion were found to reduce abortion rates by around 25 percent.”
All of this ignores what I think ought to be the major reason for pro-life opposition to national health care. The iniquitous distribution of American medicine is a scandal, but even the incomplete moves of the current plan create a system that no future bureaucracy will be able to resist using for social engineering. It puts an enormous section of the American economy and a huge slice of decisions about life and death in the hands of a government-employed elite. And, given the condition of elite opinion today, that will always mean increased government-sponsored abortion and euthanasia. We have seen it at the United Nations, and we have seen it in the European Union, and we will see it in the United States as well: You cannot create a system that allows bureaucrats to undertake major social changes and imagine that they will not use it. You cannot put their hands on the wheel and expect that they won’t start turning.
Meanwhile, the desertions of Harry Reid and Bob Casey and Bart Stupak mean that the pro-life cause must look entirely to the Republicans for leadership. Oh, they may pick up a few Democratic votes along the way for pro-life measures, but we now know that those Democrats will not take the lead in a pro-life fight. This is a bad result for the pro-life movement—in part because the Republican party platform is not a unified whole: People can oppose abortion while rejecting all the rest. But it’s also bad for the pro-lifers because it weakens the leverage they have within the Republican party.
I still remember those weeks in Washington when the major women’s groups came out in support of the embattled Bill Clinton, despite the accusations of women against him. And the reaction among the Democrats in Washington was a general sigh of relief: They no longer had to fear, or act on the agenda of, the National Organization for Women, because it had proved it was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic party. In the same way, the current situation may well prove bad for the pro-life organizations. They have a much greater effect when there exists an even slightly plausible chance they might take their votes, their influence, and their donations elsewhere.
Electing Tyranny?
The process by which this health-care bill came about has baleful effects throughout the American political scene. The banishment of the pro-life movement to one party will produce only ugly results, and although abortion is not, in itself, a religious issue, it parallels a faith divide in this country—a divide no one in their right mind should want echoed in the definitions of our political parties.
Meanwhile, the American populace, which strongly believes we cannot afford this, is angry at being ignored. The civility of the Capitol, such as it was, is further reduced. And representative democracy has taken a beating, perhaps even pushed down toward a system in which we are free only to elect the tyrants who will rule us until the next election. This bill was badly thought-through economics, badly constructed legislation, and badly conceived ideology. All in all, just plain bad medicine. But the worst of it may lie in the process by which it came about. Is this the manner in which we wish to be ruled?
Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things.
Comments:
In a sense the world did come to an end — as you imply, real political tyranny seems more plausible today than it did last week.
My guess (my hope) is that the people will rise up in rage and vote the established politicos on both sides of the aisle out of office. In other words, it seems quite plausible that, metaphorically speaking, furious lightning will descend from the heavens to smash the apostate Capitol into rubble.
I ask Mr. Bottum, why should any right-thinking Catholic WANT to be a part of the Democrats and their evil agenda? This program of outright evil is part of and parcel of the Democrats and has been for many, many years. The problem with American Catholicism has always been the muddled headed "Social Justice" malarkey foisted on the congregation by clerics and laypersons alike that allowed the Church to be hijacked by the dissembling left. Now we see the result of this outragous scandal that the Church itself enabled through its mindless support of Democrats because of some idiotic sense of "even-handedness." The examples of this moral cowardice are too numerous to mention, but we all know them well.
The result of this sickening, ongoing scandal perpetrated by a craven American Catholic Church is that the characters most responsible for giving us government-funded mass abortion through "health care" (Kennedy, Pelosi, Stupak, and others) have been prancing on the national stage as "Catholics in good standing" for many years, unfettered and unchecked by the Church itself!
The fact that the American Catholic Church has always been in the pocket of the Democrats is well known and beyond dispute. It has long been a sick joke that Catholics "Eat fish on Friday, go to Church on Sunday, and vote for Democrats on Tuesday". Now we see the catastrophe of this folly unfolding before our eyes every day!
Over 42 million abortions to date since Roe v. Wade, and still counting...
Today, the American public is like a woodsman who has just cut himself with his axe: he can't feel anything yet, but he suspects, from the amount of blood lapping around his ankles, that his injury may be serious.
Nope, I don't want to be ruled at all. I want to be governed by a government of my own consent (Thomas Hooker and all that)--and with old fashioned things like paper ballots and validated residences and oaths of citizenship. But I have no more confidence that Republicans will resist those sparkly coronets of kingletship than the Democrats. So, Jody, don't we really need a third party? Just maybe?
I think I'll have a cup of tea with lunch.
http://bit.ly/cwpFI8
His description of the Democrat position outlined above as justification for muddle-headed Catholic support of Democrats is disingenuous at the root. The idea that the Democrats were "for the working man" because of the machinations of "evil Republicans" who supported "financial and industrial interests" always was and is nothing more than Marxist class warfare rhetoric dressed up as "social justice" nonsense. This was ALWAYS malarkey and was at odds with American traditions of freedom and liberty. Catholics who complained about the inherent inequalities of free market capitalism had other means to address inevitable disparities, such as charity and volunteerism. Instead, they chose the route of aligning themselves with godless atheists who couched their statist agenda under the guise of "equality".
As I said before, we see the horrible result of their folly each and every day!
The answer is zero tolerance for officials who break their oath to uphold the Constituion. One strike and you are out. The idea that judges have to be convicted of bribes or such to lose their appointments is rediculous. They were hired to uphold the Constitution, hence the oath. IMPEACH, IMPEACH, IMPEACH. Otherwise you're just encouraging the idea expressed by Obama that his supporters should bring a gun to a knife fight.
In retrospect, it seems obvious now that the watershed for the Democratic Party's moral decline was the close election (thanks to ballot-box stuffing in Chicago) of JFK in 1960. The Kennedys turned out to be bad numbers, so to speak, which gives the (fraudulent) election of JFK a particularly fine poetic justice. American Catholics who continue to vote Democratic are not well instructed in their faith, obviously, but also are tied to political habits stretching back to the late 19th century, when rough-neck Catholic immigrants were struggling commonly for a piece of the American pie.
By 1960, American Catholics, for better and for worse, had pretty much entered the American mainstream, thanks much to Catholic education, particularly in the numerous Catholic colleges that concentrated on getting Catholics into the successful mainstream rather more than on deepening Catholics in their understanding of the faith. The not-so-Catholic Kennedys entered the scene at just about the same time that American Catholics in general were starting to become not-so-Catholic but were culturally habituated to supporting a political party on the fast-track to becoming downright anti-Catholic: i.e., the equivalent of the culturally dominant socialists in Europe.
In an eerie sense, then, today's Catholic connection to what has evolved into an anti-Catholic political party is owed to a perspective too long rather than too short. To put is slightly more concretely, my wife and I are both in our sixties, and it was only recently that my wife dropped her membership in the Democratic Party. We are all creatures of habit.
There have been around 20 documented death threats against Sarah Palin.
Virginia Republican Eric Cantor has also received death threats.
You probably won't hear about that "filth" anywhere else; certainly not on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, etc.
I do foresee, however, genuine violence when the great masses realize what has happened--anyone work for AT&T?--and want to break out the tar and feathers. For my money, the fools who supported this politically deserve all they get, but it will affect many millions of innocent lives--and cost many innocent lives. Violent? This bill itself is going to kill people, and soon.
And yet none of this matters to the Catholic church. All that matters is the fixation on abortion. None of the social justice that will be accomplished because of this bill matters. Absolutely pathetic. This is why the church's numbers will continue to dwindle in the US. Because the majority of Catholics outright reject the official Catholic doctrine with regard to sexuality, contraception and abortion.
I would call those the acts that were committed against many of us Republicans who did not vote for Obama as President and who had signs in our yard or on our bumpers encouraging support for his opponent. Did someone tell them to do it or were they acting on their own? Prior to his election, this President urged his supporters as follows: "I need you to go out and talk to your neighbors. I want you to argue with them and get in their faces." Since, he'd already specifically mentioned talking with them and arguing with them, just WHAT exactly do you think he meant by "getting in their faces?" Threatening, bullying and intimidation by implied threat of force - these are the shepherding tools of the community organizer.
Your alarm at the uncivil behavior of a few rogue protestors participating in a movement with no formal leadership against the most significant federal intervention in the private affairs of our citizens in 50 years is NOT convincing in light of the words and actions of this President as he verbally urges exactly the same kind of behavior from his own supporters.
Thugs attract thugs and this particular buck stops at the President's own megaphone. Through his words and his actions, he is destroying our civil order. THAT is a profound social issue.
This pretty much sums it up:
“"I was unable to find anything in there that would cause me to have anxiety if I were a shareholder in a pharmaceutical company," said Ira Loss, a senior health-care analyst at the research firm Washington Analysis.” [from the NASDAQ web page]
Will this help the health care of the American people? I don’t know, I’m pretty skeptical, but I do know that it’s been like the ministrations of Florence Nightingale to Wall Street.
Oh, and by the way, aren’t you being a bit ironic talking about taking responsibility with your faceless posting? How concerned can you really be?
And DrCordell: Don't worry about the Catholic church loosing all those members because of Rome's stand on Life--they can all become Episcopalians and Mrs. Schori is getting kinda lonely.
I think Obama and the Congress have saddled this country with a huge future financial liability for decades to come. Obama's assertion of March 22, that “this bill will not add one cent to the federal deficit” is ludicrous to the point of laughable. Unfortunately, my children and grandchildren will be paying the bill for this bill.
This bill creates or adds more government bureaucracy that will suck up and waste dollars and retard efficient delivery of health care.
What this legislation does not do is encourage personal responsibility for management of one’s health or health insurance. With all other insurances (home, auto, etc.) personal responsibility is encouraged, because one’s rates depend on one’s behavior. But when the government takes care of my insurance, what do I care? It’s not my money.
The provision that government funds will not be used to pay for abortions is a sham. It is a piece of legislative trickery and using words to say what you don’t mean to appear not to fund abortions, when in fact it does.
What this legislation does is move us one further step along the road to becoming a totalitarian state. That is: a country in which government controls, directs, influences, or intrudes on every aspect of life. All in the name of “caring.”
"The conservatives aren’t stupid. They’ll surely see that if only the liberals get to use these changes in the American political system, then politics has become a ratchet that bites in only one direction: Push back in the other direction, and all you get is running room to tighten the nut some more. No conservative leader could allow that to happen. If these are the new rules of the game, then the Republicans have to play along"
As a matter of fact, I will now be DEMANDING such action from anyone on the Right who wants my vote. I refuse to get rolled. If the country is going to sink, I want to make sure the ones who lit the scuttling charges get what is coming to them, and get it good and hard
The answer to the final question of the article ("Is this how we wished to be ruled?"), seems to be yes. Opponents of this bill need to switch rhetorical gears and make some persuasive arguments explaining why this bill is worse than having 30+ million Americans uninsured. I get the feeling after reading so many comments that the current plight of those without access to basic medical care isn't really that big of a deal. It's hard for me to even enter into a discussion about the issue when that persistent reality isn't recognized.
1. If the American people did not realize they were voting for healthcare reform more or less along these lines then the American people are inattentive fools. Barak Obama campaigned heavily on this issue, and he outlined a reform mostly along these lines. The main departure lies in the stripping of the Public Option from the bill and here we should note that a fair number of those opposing this bill did so precisely because of that. Rightwing opposition alone never constituted a majority, or even a plurality.
2. Elections are the only polls that matter-- there's nothing in the Constitution requiring legislators to vote according to what Mssrs Gallup, Rasmussin et al proclaim to be the popular will. The founders indeed would have been horrified at such a notion, as they quite specifically condemned "mob rule" and allowed the people only a limited and indirect voice in public affairs.
3. It is tenditious to claim that the Senate bill allows federal funding of abortion. it does not. No it doesn't. The language is not as bald as Stupak's language, but it is there. Claims otherwise are simply lies being told by manipulative folk seeking to use the pro-Life movement in an anti-Life cause. And I for one celebrate the fact that Mr Stupak managed to compel a pro-Choice president to issue a pro-Life executive order, even if it is only a symbolic one. To the pro-Life movement will remain impotent-- and abortion shall remain the law of the land-- for as long as the pro-Life movement behaves as if it's one true mission is to serve as the pep rally club for the Republican Party.
4. Along these lines why has no one, and I do mean no one, ever objected to the tax subsidy that abortion coverage currently enjoys and always has? Are tax cuts so sacred that even a tax cut for abortion must not be criticized?
5. And consider this: This bill mandates generous pre- and post-natal benefits. It is not a stretch to see that some women, no longer uninsured and subject to financial ruin, will now carry their babies to term rather seeking the abortionist.
6. How can anyone who purports to be a Christian support a policy of Social Darwinism toward the sick? I would not care to expalin that one on Judgment Day.
Listen, folks: This health care reform is not anything close to being socialism nor is it even especially liberal; keep in mind that a big reason the majority opposed the bill is because they did not believe it went far enough (i.e., toward a single-payer or even a public option). This legislation is more conservative than the one Richard Nixon favored, for goodness sake!
So could we all please just step back and take a breath?
I'll let others trash the lies in the rest of your points.
We cannot afford this bill. When our taxes are much higher, when the rate of inflation skyrockets, when the economy is bankrupt, the consequences of this bill will be apparent to all.
Already companies have laid off workers because of the costs of this bill. Examples include Caterpillar, which said O-care will cost it an additional $100 million in the first year; Medtronic, which warned that the new tax on its products "could force it to lay off a thousand workers;" and Verizon, which has told its employees that it "will likely have to cut healthcare benefits to offset the new costs."
We need to sail through that strait, and the only way we can do that is to start electing leaders who follow the deeply held beliefs of their constituency - the conglomerate, money-fat entities we call political parties in this countries are pigs that need to be slaughtered. Their reform is absolutely necessary to the success of the Republic.
I retain the right to my own charity. We should all do the most we can for the poor and sick out of the goodness of our own hearts and because we have been instructed to love our neighbors.
To suggest that supporting a government policy is an act of true charity is preposterous. Sending tax dollars to Washington is not caritas.
Obamacare and its progeny may increase the number of people being institutionalized (although, if what I have been reading is any guide, institutions will be woefully understaffed and caregivers increasingly underqualified). What Obamacare and its progeny can never do is render our care of the sick more charitable or Christian. Indeed, it will do the opposite because the government can never be charitable; it can only coerce obedience to uniform rules, squeezing everyone into the same Procrustean bed. I don't deny there is a place for government coercion, but not in healthcare, or not on this scale.
Maybe we are to blame for letting it come to this. Nevertheless, on that dark day when Obamacare metastasizes into a single-payer system, with all doctors (or medical officers) pensioners of the government, I for one will be even more scared to set foot in a hospital, or take a loved one to a hospital, than I am now.
Having worked closely with government agencies for the last six years, I find it hard to believe there are still people ignorant enough to think that government has a nurturing side to it. Haven't they ever been treated to the courtesies of a bureaucrat behind a window? Don't they know this is how Leviathan always behaves?
First, socialized medicine will give the federal government the chairman's seat at every kitchen table in America. By "kitchen table", I mean that place and process whereby American families meet to discuss and decide the course of their lives. With socialized medicine, all solutions to problems of illness and health will go through the federal government, who will provide all of the available options thereby making the final decision.
Three decades ago, getting help from the government during hard times was one option among several, but it was the least favored because it was humiliating and dangerous in the long run - one might end up on the dole for good. Changing this mentality has been the Democrats' burden, and they've carried it far. American attitudes concerning government help and reliance on government have become much more diverse nowadays, with some believing that it's a human right, others believing it's the fulfillment of a sacred communal obligation, and still others believing it to be the fairest way of leveling economic and social outcomes. Whatever one's attitude might be, the social stigma of approaching the state with hat in hand is gone, legitimizing all aspects of the transaction on all sides. Therefore, what's slouching towards us is the likelihood that we'll all end up in the hand-out line at some crucial point in our lives waiting to learn our doom: Will we get what we need to live longer or better, or won't we? Worse, most Americans won't believe that there's anything wrong with this situation, and the exceptional America I grew up in will have moved on.
Second, the nation is dividing up into political factions for two reasons: (1) Many of the conventions that once united our polity on issues of right, obligation, law and justice are unraveling (see above); and (2) the federal government offers each political faction a shortcut to victory. The political factions' agents establish close, permanent relationships with the politicians and bureaucrats who will do their bidding in return for something of value. This group - the professional agents of the political factions on the one side and the politicians and bureaucrats on the other - has been aptly named "The Aristocracy of Pull".
Although the conventions are unraveling, the different threads still remain intact, which is to say that, e.g., the group comprised of those who believe that life is sacred and therefore oppose abortion still coheres, as does the group supporting abortion. Now, when the Aristocracy of Pull does the bidding of either group, the odd group out is then forced to set out on the much longer and difficult road of changing the hearts and minds of the people, particularly when the Aristocracy of Pull has become in heart and mind so dramatically different from the people that all bonds of fellowship between the two are broken.
In my view, this is where America stands at the moment. I offer as my first piece of evidence the Tea Party movement, who coheres around traditional conventions of limited constitutional government, fiscal responsibility, liberty offset by personal responsibility and a sound civil society. Note that their cohesion is organic and driven by both the forces of the attraction of common conventions and the repulsion of the federal government and the Aristocracy of Pull, among which too many Republican politicians number, violating every tenet thereof.
So, where is our polity headed? Interesting times, I think. Looking back at history, politics has not usually been a placid affair, and tumult usually follows when the king forgets that he doesn't make the law but rather is made by it. This past decade the Aristocracy of Pull have been busy violating the democratic processes that our constitution, conventions and traditions provide to legitimize the substance of our politics, and never more busily have they worked in this regard than the past 13 months. Democratic processes honored in letter and spirit unite the polity around process when policy divides them. When these processes are violated wholesale and without regard to future consequences, however, the legitimacy of policies and the machinery of their making is forfeited, and interesting times must follow. In other words, our polity now finds itself on the road to real change.
Try looking a little harder. It took me--oh, 5 seconds to find these examples:
Wall Street Journal article May 20, 2009
YouTube
JustEd: Apparently, you do not know enough about political philosophy to recognize marxism when it is turning you upside down and stealing your personal freedom right out from your pockets. Do not give up your day job.
Morality, and doing the right and just thing will always be there, always has. Political movements and politicians are not about that just as corporations don't exist to do the right thing either, only to make a profit.
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