Neither is there a freedom issue with regard to the Catholic Church and the recent controversy over contraception. First of all, no church has to change a single thing about the way it operates. And Catholic hospitals will not, under the new rule, have to provide contraceptive coverage—they will just be required, if they refuse to provide such coverage, to tell enrollees how they can acquire it through other means. In fact, now that I think about it, the only people who can make any claims that their freedoms are being impinged by the Obama administration are the non-Catholic women hired by Catholic hospitals who might now have trouble getting free contraceptive coverage. Them, plus the women inquiring about abortion in the states where they will now be made to listen to fetal heartbeats and so on, laws that very clearly are attempts to coerce women into not availing themselves of an existing legal right. But that isn’t being done by Obama.

The silliness of the freedom argument against Obama really comes down to this: The ACA was a law, made within our political processes, according to the rules and norms of same. Obama isn’t the king. He didn’t decree this law. Congress negotiated it and passed it. If people don’t want such laws, they need to elect Congresspeople that won’t make them. This, incidentally, is the answer to an oft-bruited rhetorical question, “What’s to prevent the government from making a law requiring that everyone eat broccoli?” One answer is: nothing, at least in theory. If a future Congress wants to make such a law, it can do so and see what happens in the courts. Which means that the real answer is—politics. If you don’t want a law mandating the eating of broccoli, work to elect people to Congress who won’t pass such laws. The folks on the pro-broccoli side will work to do the opposite, and the side that does a better job will win. That’s the democratic process. Majority rule. “Freedom” has nothing to do with it.