So… What Next?

posted at 8:50 pm on March 18, 2010 by J.E. Dyer
[ Healthcare ]   

A few days will tell the tale. The crisis of the Republic that looms this weekend became all but inevitable with the November 2008 election, but as a major battle reaches its climax this week, there is an odd-hued surreality about it, a sense that this can’t be what it has to be.

It’s hard to know what to prefer.  If the House endorses reconciliation with the Senate bill through an actual vote, that will at least be an action founded in constitutional tradition.  It would be “clean” in the sense of not immediately setting us on a course of unchecked illegitimacy.  Invoking the “Slaughter Rule,” on the other hand, would do exactly that.  If the people simply allowed that outcome to stand, what else would this Congress do between now and next January?  What recourse would we, the people, have for stopping it?  How would we rescue our Republic from a descent into illegitimacy, untethered to the constraints of the Constitution?

With the Slaughter Rule, the Democratic Congress proposes to impose dramatic changes on our lives through a parliamentary maneuver.  This proposition bears no resemblance to merely avoiding a vote on raising the national debt ceiling by using a parliamentary maneuver.  The stakes, in terms of the clash of political wills and of differing views of the Constitution’s meaning and the role of government, are much higher with the health care reform bill.  Our Constitution’s design was intended to force a showdown – and even gridlock – when such fundamental differences were at issue.  With the Slaughter Rule, the Democrats are proposing to declare victory for their vision of government without having the showdown.

What faces us come Monday is the question of what to do about the historic decision that, to all appearances, will go the wrong way this weekend.

If Pelosi holds a floor vote and gets the 1-vote margin she needs, the next steps are pretty clear.  At the top of the list is changing the face of Congress in November.  I am much more optimistic about that now than I was a year ago.  I don’t even think a veto-override majority is too much to hope for at this point.

I also see reasons to be optimistic about the prospect of rolling back Obamacare, gutting it in implementation between now and 2013, and eventually getting rid of it altogether.  The Democrats have made repeated comments about assuming the people will come to embrace the new mandates and taxes, as the left perceives Americans to have done regarding Social Security and Medicare.  But there are some key differences between Obamacare, today, and the adoption of the Big Two entitlement programs.

One is simply that neither SocSec nor Medicare was implemented with an enormously costly individual mandate as the first thing that would hit citizens in the face.  They were implemented instead with comparatively small payroll contributions.  Nothing about our pay, consumption, savings, or prospects for the future had to change dramatically with the implementation of the Big Two entitlements.

The provisions of the health care reform bills, however, portend huge changes that will significantly, and immediately, affect millions of people.  And in 2010, unlike the 1930s or the 1960s, we have two particular benefits in approaching this prospect:  a broad range of information media – and hindsight.

The media connecting those who oppose the collectivization of health care are varied and robust today in a way they were not, 50 and 75 years ago.  The word gets out now, via radio, cable TV, and the internet, and millions of people know millions of others think the same way they do.  And in 2010, we already know what happens when these major entitlements are instituted.  It’s no longer a matter of speculation or prediction.  Even Americans who don’t pay much attention to politics know the national debt is colossal and getting worse, they know it’s largely because of entitlement programs, and they know we’ve tried to reform these programs in the past and been politically unable to take any genuinely effective measures.

I think the Democrats are wrong about the people:  about the submission they expect from us to the future of their health care collectivization scheme.  We’ve reached the tipping point at which enough Americans understand the fiscal insanity of it, regardless of where their other sentiments land them on the political spectrum.  Of course, we have the example of nationalized health care in other countries to reinforce that and other lessons about its ill effects as well.

We can also expect the states to resist the provisions of the reconciliation package.  They’ve already started, as some of us have been predicting for months.  A move is afoot, moreover, to legally challenge the individual insurance-purchase mandate as unconstitutional.  The challenges our Constitution authorizes to this federal action have not even begun yet, and they will matter.  If there is a legitimate vote in the House this weekend, what to do next doesn’t have to be unclear at all.  We can defeat this thing even if it’s passed.

The more difficult question, the question that frames the crisis, is what to do if the “reform” package is adopted by a parliamentary maneuver.  The perception of this as government behaving illegitimately is well founded.  If it happens, we will know it’s because Pelosi couldn’t get the votes for legitimate Yea-Nay passage.

Frankly, Obama should refuse to sign it and should require Congress to go back and pass it properly.  We know he won’t.  This will mean that, in effect, two branches of government are colluding to force something on the people by acting outside the – to date – unvarying understanding of our Constitution’s requirements.  What are the people’s obligations in that case?

Congress and the president would, in that circumstance, have broken the bond of faith that cements the mutual obligations of the people and their government.  If we do nothing, what is to stop them from doing it again?  But what, in fact, can we do?

Public protest is one obvious measure.  I imagine it’s the main one that comes to mind for most of us.  No one who opposes the Obamacare legislation wants to go further than that, except through orderly and legal means.  One thing we should all concentrate on is impressing our state governments with our seriousness.  The states are a constitutional, procedural line of defense against a power grab by the federal government.  All Democrats, and many Republicans, should be scared to death about their statehouse seats come November if they fail to listen to the people.

We can contribute to legal (constitutional) challenges mounted to the Obamacare package.  If challenges – presumably in Congress – are mounted against use of the Slaughter Rule for this kind of legislation, we should be attuned to their development, get the word out, contribute to organizations providing research and legal support, and keep the pressure on.

We can campaign as never before for opposition candidates in the fall.  Get to Republican Party meetings.  Go meet candidates.  Run for office yourself.  Make your presence felt:  make it clear we’re not interested in GOP business as usual.  Meet Tea Partiers.  Network.  Know the people in our communities who are already involved, and who already have ideas about legal challenges to what Congress is doing – and, for that matter, to what many of our states are doing.

It’s essential to be disciplined and non-violent, but I’m not really worried about that.  The people who are galvanized now are America’s already-disciplined core:  the hardworking people who spend no time complaining about what’s not being done for them, because they spend most of their time making America go.  I have no fear that we are an unruly mob.

If we’re praying men and women, we can pray – for many of us, the measure above all others.  Our freedoms of thought and religion ultimately hinge on whether health care reform in 2010 changes the relation of government to the people forever.

What we must impress Obama and the Democrats in Congress with is the fact that we will change everything this fall, when our next chance to vote comes.  Apathy is our worst enemy.  The truth about us is that we will not shrug and stand by, inert, as our freedom of choice is snatched from us in a power move of seriously questionable legitimacy.  We will remove the perpetrators from office by the constitutional means available to us.

We’re not the kind of whining, dependent constituency Obama and his supporters are accustomed to.  We love our country, our families, and the lives we live because of our constitutional liberties.  I’m not sure most of the people in Obama’s or Pelosi’s orbit really understand this.  We don’t hate our lives.  We aren’t looking for someone in government to change our lives for us.  We don’t think America sucks.  We don’t think life sucks.  We don’t think we suck.

We think our life in freedom is worth preserving.  We know that we the people are the authority that confers legitimacy on the Constitution, the presidency, the Congress, and the courts.  We remember that our very Constitution was adopted through a voting process in the states, and that no union would exist today if it had not been established originally by electoral consent.  We who proclaim the benefits of elections and referenda to others – how could we sit still for government upending our lives without a vote?

Don’t throw down gauntlets to us, Obama.  Don’t issue challenges to us, Pelosi.  We are not a people who will start something we don’t intend to finish.

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