Obama Slaps James Madison's Vision of America

Many of the goons inside the beltway still look at the Tea Party movement and the conservative uprising as some sort of an odd phenomenon. What they don’t get is that Americans love freedom, and when either an external or internal source threatens the values we were founded on, they are going to stand up and shout.

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Through the Constitution, America was built on a foundation of liberty and property rights. When bills like Obamacare undermine these fundamental principles, you better believe the American people will respond.

The three-headed Democrat juggernaut of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi decided last week that they were going to “reform” our health care system by using Soviet-style price controls. This idea of supposed cost reduction has led to rationing throughout history, but history doesn’t seem to matter to these politicians.

I was in utter shock last week when the Speaker of the House had the audacity to say the founders would have supported this 2409 page bill because it would honor "our commitment to our nation’s founders for a commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” How can you be committed to liberty by forcibly controling an industry? Control is the antithesis of liberty.

James Madison said, “It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what is will be tomorrow.”

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Sounds like an exact description of the health care bill. This monstrosity of a bill would have shocked even the most federalist of our founders. As Minority Leader John Boehner said, "Hell no!" Congress did not read this bill.

Madison and the Constitutional founders had a much simpler model of government in mind in 1787. To insure maximum liberty, the federal government was to manage only what the states could not handle effectively themselves. In Article 1, Section 8, the founding authors listed what those limited powers would be. Everything else would be done by the states and the people.

These limitations didn’t bode well for politicians who wanted to be able to promise their constituents more and more services from the federal government. Instead of amending the Constitution to include more powers, the Congress began justifying their actions with the Commerce clause.

Ben Franklin warned us that “[w]hen the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” When we create entitlements like Obamacare, we are doing exactly what Franklin describes — except often times the money comes from the next generation. We must stop bargaining away our Constitution for "free" services.

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Anytime the government oversteps its Constitutional bounds, it restricts freedom and mismanages services.

The new health care bill mismanages services by using price controls and mandating that states significantly expand their Medicare programs. I talked about the insanity of price controls last week, but these mandates on the states are almost equally illogical.

Over a dozen states are already preparing to sue the government for mandating an expansion of Medicare and, more importantly, for demanding that their citizens buy health insurance. The government has the power to regulate “commerce between the States,” not  the power to require an individual to engage in commerce.

It is an incredible encroachment on individual freedom to federally mandate that a citizens buy health insurance. States require that we buy car insurance — if we chose to own a car — because of the potential of inflicting damage on other people and their cars. For health care, the only people who can be injured are the same that would be burdened by any personal economic risk.

This law also requires that all youth, Christian Scientists, and people who use natural medicine to be coerced into entering the insurance market. Talk about a giveaway to big business. These people hardly ever use health care, but now they’ll have to spend thousands a year on insurance.

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The government should not ever be able to control the people. The designers of our government said it should be the other way around. While Obamacare isn’t socialism in its purist form, this bill uses the tyranny of the elected majority to control an entire industry’s participants and prices.

Red flags (metaphorical, not communist) should have gone up when Fidel Castro cheered on Obamacare last week. As a nation, we must begin to chose freedom over government control, not only for our sakes, but for the sake of honoring our forefathers. They enabled this nation to become great by relying on liberty, and this November, we can take the first steps in returning to our founding principles.

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