As the end of another day has arrived without being able to complete all of the writing that I am undertaking at this time, something that is the consequence mostly of having to deal yesterday with the aftermath of the flat tire that occurred on Wednesday, June 24, 2015, the Feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, I am taking a few moments to remind this website's few remaining readers of an article that was published on June 29, 2012, the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, the day after the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. The so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is Here To Stay. The Court's decision in the case of King v. Burwell, which was rendered yesterday, June 25, 2015, the Feast of Saint William the Abbot within the Octave of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist makes it eminently clear that ObamaDeathCare is here to stay no matter what the hapless naturalists of the false opposite of the "right" say or do.
I will elaborate on these points in a fuller commentary to be posted by Sunday (we have much driving to do today, Friday, June 26, 2015, the Feast of Saints John and Paul within the Octave of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist). For the time being, though, I believe that the following passags from Here To Stay are as relevant now as they were when written almost exactly three years ago now:
Although I had thought that the "swing" vote in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. yesterday would be the Supreme Court's senior Associate Justice, Anthony Kennedy, an appointee of President Ronald Wilson Reagan who had voted in the plurality in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, June 29, 1992 (that's right, twenty years ago today), to uphold the essence of the Court's decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973, while also upholding key provisions g a Pennsylvania law requiring "informed consent" and "parental notification" as not to place a "restriction" or "undue burden" on "access" to surgical baby-killing, the actual "swing" vote was that of Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of President George Walker Bush.
Roberts essentially rewrote ObamaCare to make it constitutional, doing so in the name of "due deference" to the "will" of the legislative branch while finding that the "individual mandate" is a valid exercise of Congressional taxing power and not as, United States Solicitor General Donald Verrilli claimed in oral argumentation on Monday, March 26, 2012. an exercise of the commerce power as found in Subsection Eight of Section 8 of Article I of the United States Constitution, even though, as noted before, Congress itself referred to the fine imposed upon those of us who do not have an will not purchase health insurance as being a "penalty" and not a tax. Concurring justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan agreed with the outcome but said that they did find justification for the "individual mandate" in in the commerce clause.
This is what Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, wrote by way of a concluding evisceration of the totality of Roberts's sixty-five page Court opinion (see Text of Full Opinion):
The Court today decides to save a statute Congress did not write. It rules that what the statute declares to be a requirement with a penalty is instead an option subject to a tax. And it changes the intentionally coercive sanction of a total cut-off of Medicaid funds to a supposedly noncoercive cut-off of only the incremental funds that the Act makes available.
The Court regards its strained statutory interpretationas judicial modesty. It is not. It amounts instead to a vast judicial overreaching. It creates a debilitated, inoperable version of health-care regulation that Congress did not enact and the public does not expect. It makes enactment of sensible health-care regulation more difficult, since Congress cannot start afresh but must take as its point of departure a jumble of now senseless provisions, provisions that certain interests favored under the Court’s new design will struggle to retain. And it leaves the public and the States to expend vast sums of money on requirements that may or may not survive the necessary congressional revision.
The Court’s disposition, invented and atextual as it is,does not even have the merit of avoiding constitutional difficulties. It creates them. The holding that the Individual Mandate is a tax raises a difficult constitutional question (what is a direct tax?) that the Court resolves with inadequate deliberation. And the judgment on the Medicaid Expansion issue ushers in new federalism concerns and places an unaccustomed strain upon the Union. Those States that decline the Medicaid Expansion must subsidize, by the federal tax dollars taken from their citizens, vast grants to the States that accept the Medicaid Expansion. If that destabilizing political dynamic, so antagonistic to a harmonious Union, is to be introduced at all, it should be by Congress, not by the Judiciary.
The values that should have determined our course today are caution, minimalism, and the understanding that the Federal Government is one of limited powers. But the Court’s ruling undermines those values at every turn. In the name of restraint, it overreaches. In the name of constitutional avoidance, it creates new constitutional questions. In the name of cooperative federalism, it undermines state sovereignty.
The Constitution, though it dates from the founding oft he Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court tote a ch otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.
For the reasons here stated, we would find the Act invalid in its entirety. We respectfully dissent. (Minority Opinion, at pages 64-65 of opinion, page 190-191 of the full .pdf.)
Even though dissenting justices "got it right" insofar as constitutional interpretation is concerned, they do not realize that a written document that admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words, which are as easily susceptible to deconstructionism (that is, being emptied of their true meaning and filled with false meanings to suit various perceived utilitarian"needs) in the hands of judicial positivists (those who believe the law is what they say it is regardless of moral truth and/or the plain meaning of words) as Sacred Scripture is in the hands of Protestants of any variety and of Modernist Catholics, many of whom, such as Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, make advertence to philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned propositions claiming that dogmatic pronouncements are conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they were formulated. Nothing based upon these slender threads can hold up over the weight of time. Fabric sewn together with slender threads must come apart and disintegrate into bits of useless rags.
I have made this point repeatedly on this site. Repeatedly. I have made it in a sustained manner in Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics (Volume 1). Principles of right, limited governance can be maintained only when supported by the truths of the Holy Faith. Absent that, of course, documents such as the Constitution of the United States of America are utterly defenseless against their own deconstruction and thus degeneration into meaninglessness over time. Yesterday's decision is not unsurprising. Anything is possible in a world that is founded on false anti-Incarnational principles. Do not be surprised if the Supreme Court of the United States of America decides ultimately to uphold "gay marriage" as a matter of "states' rights" and/or "personal privacy."
National security? Protecting the borders? The same man who wrote the principal dissenting opinion in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. yesterday, Anthony Kennedy, wrote the opinion of the Court in the case of Arizona, et al. v. United States on Monday, June 26, 2012, that upheld one key provision of the Arizona immigration law while declaring other parts as being a usurpation of the authority of the Federal government. Kennedy was joined with three of consistently "liberal" justices (Sonya Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) by none other than Chief Justice John Roberts.
It is no wonder, therefore, that Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a scathing dissent of Kennedy's opinion. Here is a brief excerpt:
As is often the case, discussion of the dry legalities that are the proper object of our attention suppresses the very human realities that gave rise to the suit. Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem. Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are unwilling to do so. Thousands of Arizona’s estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants—including not just children but men and women under 30—are now assured immunity from enforcement, and will be able to compete openly with Arizona citizens for employment.
Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty—not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State. I dissent. (Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Dissenting Opinion, at page 22 of opinion. page 51 of the document.)
It is rare for a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America to take extra-judicial notice of events that are not brought forth in the briefs submitted to the Court and during oral arguments. That Scalia did so was an indication of his frustration about the decision in the Arizona case as well as the then forthcoming decision in the ObamaCare case that was announced yesterday.
Alas, Scalia is himself a legal positivist who does not believe that the Natural Law has any application in American judicial decision-making. That he has found his revered constitution in such disrepair is the direct result of what must happen in nations that do not subordinate themselves in all things that pertain to the good of souls to the authority of the Catholic Church in her exercise, only as a last resort after exhausting all efforts of exhortation and admonition, of the Social Reign of Christ the King. (From Here To Stay.)
What I wrote about National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. is as applicable now in the aftermath of King v. Burwell, something that I will elaborate on by Sunday if, as I anticipate, most of the day Saturday, June 27, 2015, Our Lady's Saturday and the Commemoration of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and the transferred Vigil of the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, can be spent in writing. And, yes, I am still working on the next part of the series on Laudato Si, facing also a new "working document" to provide the roadmap charted by Antichrist Himself in advance of Jorge Mario Bergoglio's upcoming synod of apostates, heretics, fools, scoundrels, and miscerants.
Thanks for your patience. My time is simply not my own, and I am still facing some limitations of physical strength that manifest themselves more often than I would like. Such limitations are frustrating. However, each is tremendous gift from the good God by which I can seek to give Him honor and glory as the consecrated slave of His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, keeping ever close to Our Lady through her Most Holy Rosary.
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Our Lady of the Rosary, us.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saints John and Paul, pray for us.
