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View Full Version : MEDIAMATTERS at it again, spreading myths about H/C reform!




johnwk
01-10-2010, 11:22 AM
Well, once again we find MEDIAMATTERS spreading myths and making things up about Congress’ powers to regulate commerce with reference to health care reform, see: Wash. Times revives myth that health reform is unconstitutional (http://mediamatters.org/research/201001070038)


MEDIAMATTERS writes:



Wash. Times claim about individual mandate forwards a conservative myth. Conservative media figures including Fox News' senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano, Fox News hosts Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Mike Huckabee, and serial health care misinformer Betsy McCaughey have claimed that the individual mandate is unconstitutional.



Numerous experts have concluded that individual mandate is, in fact, constitutional.In fact, legal scholars -- including George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, who recently served as a special counsel to Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) during Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation proceedings -- have pointed out the flaws in conservatives' arguments, including that regulation of the health care sector falls under Congress' broad power to regulate interstate commerce and that Congress has repeatedly passed laws regulating health care and health insurance. In a December 2009 paper for the American Constitution Society, National Senior Citizen Law Center public policy counsel Simon Lazarus added that arguments that the individual mandate is unconstitutional "have no basis in law, neither in the grants of authority to Congress in Article I nor in limitations on that authority in the Bill of Rights, nor in the case law interpreting these provisions. Opponents' real grievance is with the law in its current state. Their hope is that a majority of the Supreme Court will seize on a challenge to mandatory health insurance as an occasion to make major changes in current law."



“Numerous experts have concluded that individual mandate is, in fact, constitutional.”?

That happens to be an irrelevant comment which offers nothing from the debates during which time our Constitution was being framed and ratified to substantiate the Delegates to the Convention of 1787, or the various States when ratifying the Constitution, intended to delegate a power to Congress authorizing Congress to compel the people within the various united States to purchase health care insurance. Nor does the above comment substantiate it is constitutional for Congress to exercise regulatory power within the States over those matters which concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State. As a matter of fact, it seems quite clear that MEDIAMATTERS intentionally ignores the clear intentions of our founding fathers stated in Federalist No 45:


“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.


It also seems quite clear that MEDIAMATTERS fails to acknowledge that the above stated intentions were given force and effect when incorporated into our Constitution by the Tenth Amendment which 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.

In addition, MEDIAMATTERS ignores the irrefutable fact that our very own Supreme Court, less than twenty years after our Constitution became the supreme law of our land, articulated the defined and limited powers of our federal government:




“The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken or forgotten, the constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing; if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act.

Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.

If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.

Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature repugnant to the constitution is void“. ___ MARBURY v. MADISON, 5 U.S. 137 (1803)



MEDIAMATTERS writes:


legal scholars . . . have pointed out the flaws in conservatives' arguments, including that regulation of the health care sector falls under Congress' broad power to regulate interstate commerce

Is that so? Then why has MEDIAMATTERS avoided quoting the words of its mentioned “legal scholars” which would substantiate the meaning of “commerce” as used by the founding fathers during the framing and ratification process of our Constitution, and likewise has avoided providing documentation substantiating the intentions for which our founding fathers granted the power in question? Why is it necessary to provide this information? Because failure to provide historical documentation concerning the meaning of “commerce” as used by our founding fathers when framing and ratifying our Constitution, and failure to provide the documented intentions for which the power in question was granted while asserting what our Constitution means, is offering nothing more than a personal opinion of what our Constitution means and ignores the most fundamental rule of constitutional law!

“The fundamental principle of constitutional construction is that effect must be given to the intent of the framers of the organic law and of the people adopting it. This is the polestar in the construction of constitutions, all other principles of construction are only rules or guides to aid in the determination of the intention of the constitution’s framers.”( numerous citations omitted).___ Vol.16 American Jurisprudence, 2d Constitutional law (1992 edition), pages 418-19, Par. 92. Intent of framers and adopters as controlling


Bottom line is, MEDIAMATTERS does not offer a scholarly approach to the constitutional issues involved, and panhandles its own agenda by advancing myths and unsubstantiated assertions.

JWK

Those who reject abiding by the intentions and beliefs under which our Constitution was agree to, as those intentions and beliefs may be documented from historical records, wish to remove the anchor and rudder of our constitutional system so they may then be free to “interpret” the Constitution to mean whatever they wish it to mean.