Drinking the “tea” in Michigan
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has an op-ed in today’s Detroit News regarding the Supreme Court case involving the Affordable Care Act that reads like a tea party manifesto. He appears to representing the small number of Michiganders that call themselves tea partiers while the rest of us have our views disregarded.
As Michigan’s attorney general, I have joined with the National Federation of Independent Business and a majority of attorneys general in the United States to oppose Obamacare.This unprecedented case, called States of Florida, et al., vs. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, et al., will test the outer limits of the Constitution.It will examine the intention of the founders of our country and analyze their design of limited government, which if not restrained, would present a danger to the core American values of freedom, enterprise and liberty.
He describes it as “an unprecedented power grab” and says it “ends limitations on federal powers”. Neither of these things are true and, as LOLGOP said earlier today, the vast majority of SCOTUS watchers believe they will uphold the ACA as constitutional. The fact that President Obama is a constitutional scholar appears to have escaped those who believe the ACA is unconstitutional.
Schuette’s argument that this “ends limitations on federal powers” is particularly absurd. He says:
If this huge overreachis allowed to stand, it would place virtually unlimited power in the hands of any president and Congress to controlevery personal decision in the lives of American citizens. While we might wish Washington would require every American to purchase a Michigan-made car to boost our economy, that would simply be wrong.
On his show this morning, radio talk show host Tony Trupiano hit the nail on the head when he said that, if this were something in a long string of federal mandates for people to buy things, this argument might carry some weight. But the fact is, this is a unique situation. Schuette’s extrapolation of it to everything and interpretation of it as ending “limitations on federal powers” just proves how weak his argument is, in fact.
It was this bit, however, that really belies Schuette’s tea party mentality:
It is a danger to liberty: In 1776, the heavy hand of a king posed a danger to the basic freedoms of colonial Americans.Today, a no less imposing but more modern obstacle lies in wait:the heavy hand of Obamacare, including more mandates, bureaucratic health care exchanges, more taxes, more spending and less personal decision making.
All he needs now is a three-corned hat.
[Image credit: Aaron J. Baylis | Wikimedia Commons]
