Ann Coulter has lost what little was left of her conservative credibility when she started defending Romneycare as constitutional. Then she made this mistake in her last column:
As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws, including laws banning contraception, without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally…
No one is claiming that the Constitution gives each person an unalienable right not to buy insurance.
That last sentence is absurd. Of course the Constitution gives people protection from all forms of government intrusion. The Tenth Amendment reads as follows:
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 other words, the things that aren't the federal government's affirmative responsibility are the states' or the individual's responsibilities. It's particularly bothersome that constitutional scholars have omitted the part about powers being delegated to the people. It's truly disconcerting that constitutional law professors like Hugh Hewitt and Ann Coulter have ignored those 4 words.
It's clear that the Founding Fathers wanted as many decisions made at the family level as possible. That was their first priority. In the Founding Fathers' vision, local governments (cities, counties and townships) would make more decisions than state and federal governments should make.
Why would Ann Coulter argue that a state bureaucrat would make better decisions on a family's needs than that family? Isn't Coulter's logic incomprehensible in that context? Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College clarifies things with this thinking:
Paul A. Rahe holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, where he is Professor of History.
The money left in our possession, however, is our own, to do with as we please. It is in this that our liberty largely lies. Romneycare and Obamacare, with the individual mandate, changes radically our relationship vis-a-vis the government. The former presupposes that state governments have the right to tell us how we are to spend our own money, and the latter presupposes that the federal government has that right as well. Both measures are tyrannical. They blur the distinction between public and private and extend the authority of the public over the disposition of that which is primordially private. Once this principle is accepted as legitimate, there is no limit to the authority of the government over us, and mandates of this sort will multiply, as do-gooders interested in improving our lives by directing them encroach further and further into the one sphere in which we have been left free hitherto.
The initial level of sovereignty is individual sovereignty. It's important to remember the words from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The first principle in the Declaration of Independence is that governments get their rights from people and "Nature's God", not from governments and politicians. Ms. Coulter's argument is based primarily on the principle that states rights trump individual rights.
The Declaration of Independence steadfastly and vehemently refutes Ms. Coulter's premise.
It's time these supposed constitutional scholars took a history course on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. It's painfully obvious that they've forgotten the principles espoused in those documents.
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