The Affordable Care Act, then, owes its existence to political treachery, electoral hijinks, and extreme prosecutorial misconduct, and it ill behooves the Democrats and their incessant hallelujah chorus among both the hacks and the incurably gullible in the media to incant with woeful faces and in mournful inflection any misuse of due legislative process. The fact that the chief justice had to transform himself into an acrobat and claim that Obamacare was constitutional, under the federal government’s right to tax, does not excuse everybody else from seeing this ill-conceived monstrosity of a law for what it is and what its provenance is.

It is scandalous that there remains such a sadistic determination to inflict this measure, unaltered, on the country that does not want it, even though it has been launched and has sunk, without a ripple, as soon as it cleared the slipways, as the entire system of joining up and doing as this insane measure purports to require is impossible. Immediately following the oath of allegiance, in every school and similar ceremony in the entire country, there should be an obligatory pause to consider how it happened that the United States, in its dysfunctionality, is on the verge of default on its debt, its legislators’ hands tied by sequestration. The country is broke, paying its bills through a fraudulent sale of bonds to itself, running a $700 billion annual current-account deficit, and its leaders are in brinkmanship talks over the imposition of a law that no sane person now supports and that is impossible to obey.