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Joseph Cao and the Social Responsibility of the Omnipotent State
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The House voted to approve the most controversial piece of legislation since the authorization to use force in Iraq when the Health Care Affordability Act was passed 220-215 with one Republican defector, Joseph Cao of Louisiana. Cao, until now never a household name, will now be the subject of much scrutiny. The GOP leadership was embarrassed, as the Huffington Post will indicate (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/08/joseph-cao-health-cares-l_n_349779.html) when Minority Whip Cantor assured Tea Party protestors that there would be no Republican support for the bill whatsoever. And he would have been right. What does this mean for Congressman Cao, who ousted an incumbent Democrat, William J. Jefferson, under investigation for bribery?
Political suicide, say some.
With Cao's support, the bill still would have passed 219-216, even with the support of those defecting Democrats. The result would have been the same and Joseph Cao would still be a name unknown to most Republican rank and file. One can only suspect that since he represents a largely Democratic district, he did it to appease the constituents campaigned against him and affront his supporters who do not accept the federal government coming between them and their healthcare providers. The freshman Congressman, however, in voting to perhaps ensure some points from his leftist opponents may have lost the rightist supporters who installed him in the first place--and for naught as his vote did not decide the outcome of the result anyway.
But what of the state of New Jersey? As Republicans find themselves outraged and horrified that the Pelosi-Obama House package, which includes penalties such as fines or up to jail time for those Americans who do not purchase health insurance--unprecedented in legislative history--they must look to basics. Congress does not have the authority to make a citizen purchase a product. Statists in the legislature have forgotten that they are empowered by the Constitution of the United States and that only those powers granted to the federal government explicitly defined in it are acceptable. All other powers are held by the states or the people as per the 10th Amendment. "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."
Pelosi claims, falsely, that the Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce gives them the authority to pass this bill. States have insurance laws and many states like New Jersey use the power of coercion to support an unbreakable auto insurance industry, riddled with cost-increasing mandates and unfair price controls, by ruling its citizens must buy the product or face consequences. The federal government, however, has no powers other than those defined. As of this writing, a New Jersey resident cannot buy much more affordable Pennsylvania auto insurance or health insurance. Pelosi would be correct in her assertion that Congress could regulate commerce if Congress had instead passed a bill allowing residents in one state to buy more competitive health insurance in other states. But this was not so.
Others who fumble for a source of legitimacy claim the "general welfare clause" of the Preamble gives them the authority. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Socialists see the general welfare clause as the detour around irritating Constitutional hindrances to achieve any kind of social spending spree, to create any kind of programs, and to create a massive European-style dependency state.
One must recall the words of President James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" when he worried that the general welfare clause would, in the future, be the source of the greatest trouble to the American republic.
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare ... they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children ... they may assume the provision of the poor ... in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."
Reaction to bill's passage
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