PrintJanuary 6, 2010
Repeal the Health Bill
Sooner or later, the American people must rise up and do more than complain about the latest wizard wheeze of the progressive educated class. We must take one of their gigantic government takeover bills and flat-out repeal it.
Otherwise, they will return every generation and lay another unjust burden upon us.
Why don't we do it to the Frankenstein's monster of a health bill now in final delivery, courtesy of the Obama administration and the Reid/Pelosi Congress? The Obama-Reid-Pelosi bill takes one-sixth of the economy and puts it under the power of the administrative state.
The issue is clear. The administrative state, championed over the centuries by imperial dynasties, absolute monarchs, revolutionary cadres, and in our own time, by the progressive educated class popularly known as liberals, is unjust. It really is that simple.
The administrative state was unjust when it was the means by which the mandarins ruled China. It was unjust when the European absolute monarchs used it to finance their palaces and their standing armies. It was unjust in the hands of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Nazis. It remains unjust in the hands of the Castro brothers, the Chavistas, the Putins, and the Ahmadinejads.
Why wouldn't the administrative state be unjust in the hands of the American liberal elite?
Over the last century, our liberal friends had one great advantage: Their naked power plays were written up by liberal journalists and historians as the very essence of progress and justice. Woe betide the dissident conservative who attempted to tell a different story.
But then, in the fall of 2008, a political blessing came. The Democrats won the presidency, and eventually a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. They had the opportunity to ram through legislation that their liberal base wanted and that the American people hated, and they took it. They rammed their corrupt and unjust health bill down the throats of the American people. And the American people saw their liberal masters as they really are.
Last week, Michael Barone recalled a similar moment in American history. It was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, championed by Sen. Stephen Douglas (D-IL), that repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The act said, "Hey, fellas out there in the newly-settled territories! You can vote slavery in or out for your state, as the mood takes you."
Sen. Douglas thought that he had resolved the slavery issue once for all. But he was wrong. Instead, he set off a political earthquake. The Democrats lost seventy seats in the House of Representatives in the elections of 1854 and two new parties, the American Party and the Republican Party, arose to oppose their unjust and immoral Kansas-Nebraska Act. If seventy seats doesn't seem all that much to you, don't forget that the House had 252 seats in 1854. In today's House with 435 seats, the equivalent would be 121 seats changing hands next November.
The Politico's Lisa Lerer and Chris Frates cast a jaundiced eye upon the tactics of the health bill repeal idea as a cheap political trick.
The repeal-or-bust strategy is designed to give Republican candidates a powerful talking point for the midterms - a way to tap into deep anxiety about the health care plan among the GOP base and independent voters.
Some Republicans say they don't see what all the fuss is about.
"They can push for repeal; they're just not going to get it," said Tom Davis, former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "I think there are probably better targets for Republicans."
We will see a lot more of this from experts and pundits still mired in the old politics.
That was then. This is now. In 2009, we conservatives had the blinders pulled off our eyes. We thought that the Reagan-Bush years had established a rough national consensus that one-size-fits-all government centralism is a failure. National politics would now follow the example of the successful welfare reform. The era of big government is over, President Clinton told us.
Now we know that we were wrong. The Obama Democrats are like the French Bourbon kings after the fall of Napoleon. After thirty years of Reagan and Bush, they have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing. Given a brief opening, they have stampeded back to the big-spending liberalism they love -- only this time, it's on steroids.
So the question before the American people is simple and straightforward. Shall we allow this injustice to stand, or shall we band together and work and fight in 2010, and every year thereafter, until the stain upon our national honor is expunged and the present generation of liberal leaders is banished to political oblivion?
Let every American know that Reid plus Pelosi plus Obama equals injustice.
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
