There is no bottom to President Obama’s political deception and class warfare pit.

If you followed this week’s drama in Washington you know the House passed a bill that would extend the temporary payroll tax reduction for another year.  The Senate responded with a bill that would extend it for only two months.  Republicans finally rolled over and passed the Senate bill ensuring that we’ll endure another two months of controversy over the same issue.

Two months is better for Obama and the Democrats because the issue serves as a pretext for them to renew demands for  a permanent tax hike on “the rich,” mostly small business employers, to “pay for” the temporary payroll tax reduction.  Obama wants to divert blame for America’s continuing economic crisis from his massive deficits and bureaucratic interference in the private economy to “the rich.”

A year ago this month was the “Lame Duck Session” of Congress.  Outraged voters had just swept out the House Democrats’ 98 seat majority, replacing it with a new 43 seat Republican majority.   But last December Democrats were still in control until the new Congress began in January.  One of their final acts was a reduction in the Social Security payroll tax paid by employees from 6.2% to 4.2% temporarily, for one year.

A month ago Obama began howling that the expiration of the payroll tax discount – as required by the legislation he and the Democrats enacted when they still held commanding majorities – would be “a tax increase on hard working middle class Americans,” to be blamed on heartless Republicans. 

On Thursday Obama ramped up the theatrics and gave us a preview of his New Year strategy for diverting attention away from his manifest failures.  He stepped to the microphones to prove he identifies with the struggles of the helpless against those cruel Republican Scrooges (transcript).  His tone dripping with pious solicitude, he began:

We’ve been doing everything we can to make sure that 160 million working Americans aren’t hit with a Holiday tax increase on January First…If you’re a family making about $50,000 a year this is a tax cut that  amounts to about a thousand dollars a year.  That’s about forty bucks out of every paycheck.

So far the President’s math is correct, since most employees are paid either bi-weekly or semi-monthly.

It may be that there are some folks in the House who refuse to vote for this compromise because they don’t think forty bucks is a lot of money.  But anyone who knows what it’s like to stretch a budget knows that at the end of the week or the end of the month forty dollars can make all the difference in the world…

So on Tuesday we asked folks to tell us what it would be like to lose forty bucks every week.

Wait a minute! “Every week?”  He just changed it from $40 out of every paycheck to $40 every week! But the temporary tax cut is worth only $19 every week to his hypothetical $50,000 per year family.

You’d have to earn $104,000 a year for Obama’s Social Security tax markdown to be worth $40 every week.

Obama then quoted some of the emails from his “folks” about how they would deal with the loss of $40 per week.

Joseph from New Jersey would have to sacrifice the occasional pizza night with his daughters.  My 16 year old twins will be out of the house soon – I’ll miss this.

Richard from Rhode Island wrote to tell us that having an extra $40 in his check buys enough heating oil to keep his family warm for three nights. In his words, and I’m quoting, If someone doesn’t think that 12 gallons of heating oil is important invite them to spend three nights in an unheated home.

Pete from Wisconsin told us about driving more than 200 miles each week to keep his father in law company in a nursing home.  $40  out of his paycheck would mean that he could only make three trips instead of four.

Dinner out for  child who’s home for Christmas, a pair of shoes – these are the things that are at stake for millions of Americans.  They matter a lot.

Obviously these emails are absurd.  If you earn $104,000 and have to give up $40 per week, are you really going to have to deny your kids a pizza or a pair of shoes?  Will you shiver for three nights without heating oil?

Of course, there are some folks to whom $40 every week would be make a real difference:

• A hotel maid who works full time for $8.50 per hour
• A construction worker who has been cut back to half time work at $17 per hour
• A self employed business owner whose customers were hammered by the recession and now barely survives by depleting his savings.  He generated only $17,700 profit this year after paying his employees and the employer’s half of the payroll tax which was not reduced by the Obama payroll tax markdown.

To each of these people Obama’s temporary payroll tax cut is worth not $40 but $6.80 per week.

But much of the media have already begun to help Obama plant a false perception in the minds of uninformed voters that Republicans would deny everyone $40 per week.  (For example, see the headline here.)

Obama knows that informed voters will figure out the deception.  But he doesn’t care about informed voters.  They won’t vote for him anyway.

Mitt Romney’s criteria, for deciding which government programs to eliminate is a meaningless sham.

His editorial in USA Today says a lot that should please liberty loving people who long to diminish the power and cost of the federal government.  He is appropriately critical of President Obama for “one of the most dramatic expansions in Washinton’s power in our nation”s history.”  He reminds us that the 2012 election will be “of great moment.”  Voters will decide if America is to be “an Entitlement Society” or an Opportunity Society.”

In an Entitlement Society, government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk. In an Opportunity Society, free people living under a limited government choose whether or not to pursue education, engage in hard work, and pursue the passion of their ideas and dreams. If they succeed, they merit the rewards they are able to enjoy.

So far, so good. Obama’s drive to implement the progressive movement’s dream if an Entitlement Society has culminated in the current, intractable economic crisis.  The 2012 election may indeed be our last chance to reverse the trend.  But in what is perhaps the most important paragraph, Romney’s action plan is a deep disappointment.

The first step in returning to an Opportunity Society is scaling back our vast federal government. I will put every single government program to a simple test: Is this program so critical to our nation’s future that we should borrow money from China to pay for it?

Romney hopes to appeal to the reader’s emotions with what seems like bold and decisive criteria for sorting unworthy from “critical” programs.   Unfortunately it’s a trick.  It’s the same trick Barack Obama used to win the support of millions of voters who are now appalled by his Presidency.

In the prologue to his second book Barack Obama wrote what would become the conceptual foundation of his Presidential campaign:

“…I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Candidate Obama went on to exploit his blank screen concept with promises of undefined “change.”  Thus, Millions ended up projecting their own views upon his blank screen and then voting for those views without realizing Obama had not disclosed his views or plans for controlling our lives from Washington.

If the Romney version of the trick succeeds he’ll pick up primary votes from people who don’t realize their list of non-critical programs to defund comes not from Romney, but from inside their own heads.

Romney’s critical-for-our-nation’s-future criteria is meaningless because Each one of hundreds of federal programs has a lobbyist, a constituency of dependents, and friends in Congress who will summon up compelling, emotion-driven reasons why it’s critical to our nation’s future.  Thus, Romney’s criteria will not shrink government, and will not result in any significant change from Obama’s policies.

The Founders vision, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is that The People, not the government or its bureaucrats, are “the nation.”  The People decide for themselves, as individuals, what is critical to their future.  This is how liberty works!

The founders gave these matters a lot of thought and wrote a Constitution limiting the powers of government to a very few that were “enumerated” in Article I, Section 8.  After the Constitution was ratified by the states and became the law of the land many citizens expressed fear that the government would overreach and take on powers not enumerated.  So the founders followed up two years later with the Tenth Amendment to make sure there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that…

“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.”

The problem today is that over the past century the government has assumed upon itself myriad powers and functions not authorized by the Constitution.

The best campaign promise Romney or any candidate could make would be to start phasing out or canceling  Unconstitutional programs in an orderly fashion, shrinking government back to it’s core Constitutional functions within a specified number of years.  Of course we won’t hear that promise because each candidate is afraid of the inevitable blow-back from the media and his adversaries as soon as he mentions any specific program by name.

Even Ron Paul, who tries to sound like a true believer seems to favor hanging on to some of the largest programs that are clearly Unconstitutional.  For example, instead of offering a plan to wind down and phase out Medicaid and Medicare over time, Paul promises that taxes collected for those programs won’t be spent elsewhere.  This promise is utterly meaningless because no tax is collected specifically for Medicaid, and Medicare already spends every dollar of its dedicated tax plus billions more from the general fund.

If Romney or any other candidate were serious about liberty and smaller government he/she would hold up the Constitution as the criteria for deciding which programs to eliminate.

Once again President Obama and the Democrats seek to stimulate the base human emotions of envy and resentment by demanding a surtax on “millionaires,” this time to “pay for” another year of temporary reduction in the Social Security payroll tax.  But it doesn’t really matter what they say the tax will “pay for.”  They always demand higher taxes on the rich, to pay for every idea they come up with.

Encouraging voters to blame their anxieties, fears and financial stress on the rich is one of progressive movement’s oldest and crudest campaign themes.

Obama can probably count on more enthusiasm from his emotion-driven base if he succeeds with millionaire tax increases.  But a review of history does not lead to the conclusion that government would collect more tax revenue or that non-millionaires who need jobs would be better off.  In fact, the opposite is more likely.

The chart above tracks both the effective tax rate and total tax revenue from millionaires who, like most of us pay taxes at different rates, for different categories of income.  One’s effective tax rate is the total dollar amount of tax paid (at various rates) divided by adjusted gross income.

The chart shows that tax revenue was falling before, and then increased dramatically after the Bush tax rates were enacted in 2003.   As the red line shows, the average, effective tax rate paid by all millionaires went down because the Bush tax cuts of 2003:

• lowered the top tax bracket rate for “ordinary income” (salaries and business profits) from 39.6% to 35%
• Lowered the top rate for capital gains from 20% to 15%
• Lowered the top rate for stock dividends from 39.6 to 15%.

But the rest of the story, as the above chart shows, is that the government collected more, not less tax revenue from taxpayers with million-dollar-plus incomes.

The “Bush tax cuts” were enacted in 2003 and are still in effect.  Revenue from millionaires grew an astonishing 128% from 2002 to 2007.  In 2007 more tax revenue was collected from millionaires than any previous year ever.

Then the recession hit and from 2007 to 2009 the number of taxpayers with incomes over $1 million dropped by 40%.   Revenue from millionaires fell by 43% but was still more than had been collected in 2002, the year before the current tax rates were enacted.

So what do Obama and his progressive friends want?  Shouldn’t they want to maximize tax revenue to the government to pay for all their various programs?  Shouldn’t they embrace the current tax rates as – to use one of their favorite words for government policy – “smart”?

Revenue from millionaires went up rather than down after the tax rates were lowered because:

• The capital gains tax is voluntary.  It comes due only when an asset that has appreciated in value is sold.  Obviously, people are more likely to sell when the tax is lower.
• Stock dividends are the investors’ share of corporate profits remaining after payment of corporate income tax which is usually 35%.  The investor’s individual tax is in addition to the 35%.  When the individual tax rate on dividends was higher companies paid smaller dividends or no dividend at all because investors wanted to avoid taxation and preferred that profits to be deployed in ways that might enhance the market value of the stock.  After the individual rate was reduced investors wanted stocks that paid dividends and companies responded by paying more to attract those investors.  Thus, the government is now collecting taxes on dividend income that did not exist when tax rates were higher and would disappear if the rates went back up.

In addition to generating more revenue to the government, lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains also benefit the economy in general and those who seek jobs in particular:

• When people sell an asset they look for new investments for the funds they receive, including business start-ups and business expansions that generate jobs.  If the capital gains tax rate is higher they are less likely to sell and those new start-ups are less likely to come into existence.
• When investors receive dividends they seek new investment opportunities for those funds, including job creating business start-ups and expansions.

By the way, taxpayers in all brackets pay lower rates on capital gains and dividends than they do on ordinary income.  In fact capital gains are tax free for taxpayers whose ordinary income rate is 15%, which would include most families who earn less than about $80,000, and some who earn even more.

Finally, the chart below tracks jobs and millionaire tax rates.  In 2007 there were more jobs than ever before at the same time millionaire tax rates reached their lowest.

As we disclosed in our previous post, fully 76% of millionaires are owners of small businesses. Increasing their taxes leaves them with less to invest in job creation.  History shows the most likely results of a surtax on millionaires will be less tax revenue and fewer jobs.  So why would Obama and the Democrats bet their futures on campaigning for such increases? We can only assume their pollsters tell him they’ll will win more votes by appealing to envy and resentment than by revealing the truth.

Speaking from the floor of the United States Senate yesterday, Majority Leader Harry Reid resorted to an outright lie to sell his plan to increase tax rates on high income business owners and investors:

Senate Republicans…oppose our plan [for] a tiny sur-tax on on a tiny fraction of America’s highet earners…Republicans call our plan a tax on job creators, but I say so-called job creators…Millionaire Job creators are like Unicorns – they don’t exist.  That’s because only a tiny fraction of people who make over a million dollars, probably less than one percent, are actually business owners.

The pie chart displays data available to anyone who takes the time to look on the IRS website.  Seventy six percent of taxpayers who reported more than $1 million in adjusted gross income were owners of small businesses that must report income and expenses on the owners’ personal tax return.

There are only two possibilities:

• The most likely possibility is that Reid is fully aware of this IRS data and simply lied through his teeth.
• The other possibility is that Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the Senate, arguably the second or  third most powerful position in Washington really is ignorant of the truth and repeated something he heard from an unreliable source (MSNBC?).

Either way, he is wrong.  Surprisingly he did not repeat the economic theory of the political-media establishment, that a tax hike on small business owners would have no effect on job creation.  Apparently, the Democrats have polling data that tells them what is only logical, that a tax increase transfers resources from the business owner to the government, making her less able to add new employees to her payroll.

The latest propaganda from the political-media establishment is the assertion that the Grand Congressional Super Committee failed to agree on deficit reduction, and the government’s debt problems can’t be resolved because Republicans, driven by tea party activists “refuse to compromise.” Retired General and Former Secretary of State Colin Powell echoed the establishment view in a CNN interview.

The Tea Party point of view of no compromise whatsoever is not a point of view that will eventually produce a presidential candidate who will win.

So, if there were to be a compromise between Democrats representing the progressive political movement and Republicans representing those of us in the tea party, small government movement what would it look like?

First consider the data in this chart: [continued below chart]

Spending increased continuously under both parties, for a decade.  Indeed, the GOP lost the 2006 and 2008 elections in part because conservative voters were disillusioned and stayed home.  President Obama and the Democrat majorities in the House and Senate dramatically increased spending in 2009, and have managed to maintain the elevated level.  A genuine compromise – for the sake of deficit reduction – would have to deal with spending, starting in 2012.

Tea party activists represent the voters who have been alarmed by continuous spending increases.  They aren’t a monolithic group with a single vision but most of them would, if given their way, cut spending back at least to 2008 levels.  Some would  cut back more than that.

The chart to the left illustrates a hypothetical compromise between tea party activists and progressive Democrats in Congress.  Under this compromise the Democrats would get to keep half of the huge increase they scored in 2009 and the tea party activists would get half way back to 2008.

The next chart illustrates a compromise that would, by any standard, be very generous to the Democrats.  They would get to keep almost all the increase they scored in 2009.  Spending would be cut below the 2011 level by only 5%.

It turns out that nothing even close to either of these hypothetical compromises was presented by Super Committee Republicans to the Democrats, who made very clear from the beginning that they would absolutely not discuss any spending reductions for 2012.

What did the GOP members of the Super Committee propose?  In spite of the tea party activists who helped elect their majority they were willing to allow 2012 spending to increase!  In fact, the Republicans were willing to allow Democrats to permanently bank the massive increase of 2009 AND allow spending to increase every year from now on, as far as the eye can see!

All the Super Committee Republicans asked was that from 2013 to 2022 spending would increase at an incrementally lower rate than the Democrats planned.

This last chart shows the “compromise” the Democrats in the Super Committee proposed and Obama still demands in his speeches out on the campaign trail.  Not only did they refuse to consider any decrease in 2012 spending, they demanded another massive increase, almost equal to the historic surge in spending they achieved in 2009!

They refused to consider any of the GOP’s proposed reductions in the rate of spending growth.  Instead they proposed to lie to voters, claiming that spending increases in 2012 would be offset by fictitious “cuts” supposedly achieved by not continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until 2022!  And, of course they demanded massive tax increases.  Yet, the establishment media are united in blaming tea party supported Republicans for refusing to “compromise.”

The compromise between the Conservative/GOP position of no more government power and the progressive/Democrat position of a lot more government power is always the same: more government power.

Today’s crisis is the consequence of hundreds of compromises, over 80 years leaving us with an economy that can not recover from recession and a massive, unmanageable government debt. When Democrats demanded a foot, Republicans compromised, granting them 8 – 10 inches.

The GOP Presidential candidates have all been challenged to compromise by reporters and debate moderators in an effort to portray them as obstinate and unreasonable.  Liberty Works humbly offers this advice:

Republicans scored historic gains in the 2010 election largely because they refused to compromise with Democrats on either the ruinous 2009 stimulus or the Unconstitutional ObamaCare legislation.  Both are now unpopular with voters.

Because of entrenched political resistance it’s probably not possible to shrink government as quickly as we would like.  Thus, Republicans can and should be open to a compromise, but only if it moves the needle in the smaller government direction.  They must maintain principled, non-negotiable opposition to compromises that result in more government power, higher taxes, larger deficits, or less economic liberty.

For 80 years compromises in Washington have been somewhere between the status quo and the Progressive/Democratic vision of larger government.  From now on compromises in Washington must be between the status quo and a smaller, less intrusive, less expensive government.

Newt Gingrich is under attack by some of his GOP rivals for his opinion that some illegal immigrants, those who have been here for decades and put down roots should be allowed to remain.  This, they charge, is  amnesty, a four letter word in their world.  The establishment media have hypocritically piled on, even though they usually favor amnesty for virtually all illegal immigrants.

Unlike amnesty advocates on the Left, Gingrich argues forcefully for border security as the first step.  He has promised that as President he will do what Obama and Bush before him wouldn’t do, close the border.  Period.  He would then develop a guest worker program to meet legitimate needs for cheap menial labor in some sectors of the economy.  With the border sealed so they couldn’t come back, he would send most of those who have entered illegally home.  His proposed exceptions would be people who have been here for  a long time and have put down roots.

Gingrich is right on all counts.  That the border has been unsecured for decades, through Democrat and Republican Administrations, is a national scandal.  The door should be closed, once and for all, to illegal immigration.

But for the illegals who are already here mass deportation is not as morally pure as it may seem.

Full disclosure: Personal experience influences my position.  I am not Hispanic.  Like Gingrich, I’m an old white guy.  But back in the 1970s I hired dozens of illegal aliens to work in restaurants in Los Angeles.  Like Americans, people who immigrated from Mexico and Central America were not all the same.  Some were bad apples.  But most were “good people” whose friendship I came to cherish.

Today there are illegal immigrants who have lived here for ten or twenty or thirty years.   They have learned to speak English, worked hard, bought homes, paid taxes, obeyed the law and contributed to charities.

Perhaps what is most relevant is that like the rest of us they have friends and family who are citizens.  They have married, raised children who are citizens by birth, and may have grandchildren who are citizens and who love them.  They have friends, neighbors, and co-workers who are all citizen-voters who would be outraged if the government forced them to leave.

If they belong to a church there could be hundreds more with personal interests in their fate.  If the government were to begin forced deportation of such people the media would grind our emotions with video of wrenching, tearful separation from friends and families.

No doubt there are readers who agree with Liberty Works on most issues but who would insist that all illegals be deported as a matter of justice, no matter what the circumstances.  To them I say the cost would be too high.  Our cause is to increase liberty and prosperity by reducing the power, interference and cost of government.  We face a long, uphill battle because so many millions of our fellow citizens-voters have been indoctrinated in the false beliefs that government is the grantor of rights and the source of prosperity and well-being and that it should tax, regulate and supervise more, not less.

There are some 15 million illegals residing in America.  How would it hurt our cause if, say, the four million who had been here longest, and had become most assimilated, were legalized and allowed to stay, but not necessarily become citizens?

On the other hand, how would it affect the success of our cause – which depends on securing a majority of votes – if those folks were forced to leave by a newly elected Conservative President and Congressional majority, sparking angry backlash from tens of millions of citizen-voters who were friends and family members?  How would that help us in our core mission of downsizing government?

I’ve experienced helpless despair as a trusted employee and/or friend has been detained by federal authorities and deported.  That this person entered the country illegally doesn’t make it any easier to watch them being hauled away.

Progressive ideologues and incompetent government are to blame for millions of illegal immigrants.  America has a long history of sending mixed signals to those who are South of the Border and desperate to find work.  Sure it’s illegal for them to cross the border, but when they get here federal and state governments provide them with free health care and other benefits.  We offer jobs that in more prosperous times Americans won’t take.  We offer business opportunities to illegals who are enterprising enough to acquire a truck and a lawn mower.  The US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS formerly INS) is certainly one of the most dysfunctional bureaucracies in the Western world.  It’s mysterious maze of quotas, exceptions and arcane procedures is an open invitation to try to “beat the system.”

Let’s not let the newly energized small government movement be blamed for using the power of government to impersonally deliver misery to tens of millions of American citizens by deporting their close friends and family members.

…From the captivating Mrs. BoomerJeff:

The so-called Congressional Super Committee failed to reach a deficit reduction agreement even though success was absurdly easy:  simply adjust the “baseline” schedule of future spending by $1.2 trillion over ten years, beginning in 2013.

Put another way, all they had to do was change the currently scheduled $44+ trillion of spending over ten years to $43 Trillion.  Why did they fail?  Because Democrats demanded tax increases and Republicans declined to be bullied.  As expected Obama ran to the cameras to blame Republicans and the rich:

…there are still too many Republicans who have refused to listen to these voices of reason and compromise…They continue to insist on protecting $100 billion of tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans at any cost, even if it means deep cuts…They simply will not budge from that negotiating position.

Compared to Obama’s $44 trillion spending colossus his alleged $100 billion in coveted tax revenue is barely visible.  Thus, it appears that his priorities have little to do with deficits or debt.  His goal is election year appeasement of class warriors in his base, and he’s determined to enact higher tax bracket rates at any cost.   [commentary continues below the chart]

To put the income tax issue in perspective consider the data in the chart and the facts the establishment media never report:

• Income tax revenue declined three years in a row before the current (Bush) tax rates were enacted into law in 2003.
  
• Over the next four years income tax revenue increased an astounding 47% to a all time record high of $1.16 trillion in 2007.
• Income tax revenue fell in 2008 and 2009, primarily because high income business owners and investors – who provide most of the income tax revenue – were hammered by the recession.
• The Treasury Dept. just reported that income tax payers provided a $193 billion or 21% revenue increase in 2011 (fiscal year ended 9/30) over 2010, even though the same, Bush tax rates are still in effect.
  

Some Democrats call for a return to pre-Bush tax rates for all brackets.  Some call for retaining the lower Bush rates for low and middle income taxpayers and increasing the top bracket rates for “the rich,” mostly investors and small businesses whose income appears on the personal tax returns of their owners.

As always, Democrats ignore or deny the side-effects of an income tax increase, reduced investment in job creating enterprises by business owners and investors.  Those reductions result in lower taxable profits and fewer jobs, producing less in taxable wages.  Thus, tax rate increases can actually generate less tax revenue to the government than lower tax rates.

As the chart above shows, the higher, pre-Bush rates did indeed generate less revenue than the current rates generated in 2011, despite the grim, recessionary economy.

Democrats advocate tax increases on gasoline to further their goals of forcing us to drive less.  Yet they never seem to understand the negative results of tax increases on small business owners and investors.

Next: We’ll answer Democrats’ demand for tax hikes on high income Americans.

If the 2011 rate of job growth continues it will take until May, 2013 for the number of jobs to equal the number in January, 2009, the beginning of the Obama Administration.

If the Supreme Court rules that the ObamaCare individual mandate is permitted by the Constitution the consequences for individual liberty and the future of America will be catastrophic.  If the court strikes down the individual mandate future Congresses will be on notice that there are still limits to government’s power over the people.

The Court has announced it will rule and has scheduled oral arguments for next April.

Here’s an excerpt from an editorial in the Los Angeles Times by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law setting forth the liberal/progressive/Obama position:

Under current constitutional law, this should be an easy case to predict — the law is clearly constitutional. But what complicates the decision and makes the result unpredictable is whether the justices will see the issue in terms of precedent or through the partisanship that has so dominated the public debate and most of the court decisions so far.

The key word is current.  The progressive movement’s agenda of government supervision and control over the personal and economic lives of The People is prohibited by the plain language of the Constitution.  To overcome this barrier progressive politicians have argued, and Supreme Court Justices have ruled for about a century, that the Constitution was intended to evolve and thus the original meaning of its words is irrelevant.  Instead the court is to establish “current constitutional law” based on precedent established by previous court decisions and on the latest trends in progressive ideology.  Mr. Chemerinsky defiantly sneers that consideration of the original meaning of the Constitution as “partisanship!”

Chemerinsky continues:

The primary issue before the Supreme Court is whether Congress’ power to regulate commerce among the states gives it the authority to require that individuals either purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that under the commerce clause, Congress may regulate economic activity that, taken cumulatively across the country, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

Yes the court has indeed repeatedly blessed Congress’ expansions of its own power over the lives of the people.  For a century politicians and judges and Supreme Court Justices have brazenly violated the Constitution largely through deliberate misinterpretation of its commerce clause which says:

“The Congress shall have Power To…regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”

The Federalist Papers were written by the authors of the Constitution to explain it to the public.  They make it clear that the progressive interpretation of the commerce clause as expressed above by Chemerinsky is not what the original text meant.

In the Founders era the term “Commerce” was buying and selling transactions, in this case across state lines.  The purpose of the commerce clause was to prevent unnecessary barriers to transactions across state lines.   James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper #22 of problems caused by state governments that were attempting to interfere with commerce:

The interfering and unneighborly regulations of some States, contrary to the true spirit of the Union, have, in different instances, given just cause of umbrage and complaint to others, and it is to be feared that examples of this nature, if not restrained by a national control, would be multiplied and extended till they became not less serious sources of animosity and discord…

Madison cited as a negative example the German empire that, similar to America was an association of independent states:

The commerce of the German empire is in continual trammels from the multiplicity of the duties which the several princes and states exact upon the merchandises passing through their territories, by means of which the fine streams and navigable rivers with which Germany is so happily watered are rendered almost useless.

Madison was concerned that some states had already tried to restrict interstate transactions with various forms of taxes and regulations and could cripple interstate commerce as had happened in the German empire.

But Progressives don’t care about the original purpose or meaning of the commerce clause.  The landmark precedent for Chemerinsky’s interpretation, is the Supreme Court’s decision in Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942).  During the Great Depression Congress had imposed limits on crop production, in an effort to enrich farming businesses at the expense of everyone else by artificially reducing the food supply, which would cause food prices to rise.

Mr. Filburn was fined by the government for growing “too much” wheat.  He argued that Congress had no Constitutional authority to regulate his wheat production because his entire crop was consumed on his own farm, and was not sold to anyone, and therefore could not possibly be part of interstate commerce. The government agreed that Filburn did not sell any of his wheat but argued that he affected interstate commerce by not buying wheat on the open, interstate market.  The court took the government’s side and the rest is history.

Based on this precedent and ignoring the plain language of the Constitution, Chemerinsky justifies a federal law requiring us all to purchase a health plan designed by bureaucrats in Washington because not buying it has “an effect on interstate commerce.”

The word “effect” is not in the Constitution and the intent was not to grant Congress such power.  But since it could be argued that virtually any human activity could, however remotely, effect interstate commerce, we are now told that The Founders meant for Congress and the federal government to have unlimited power to intervene and control every aspect of our lives.   The obvious question is, if they intended for Congress to have unlimited power why did they include a list of limited, authorized powers in Article I, section 8?  If they wanted to empower Congress to be able to require or regulate anything, without limit, why did they add the tenth 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

—Tenth Amendment

In his editorial Chemerinsky tries to rig the process by asserting there are only two questions for the Supreme court to answer:

First, is Congress regulating economic activity? Second, if so, looked at in the aggregate, is there a substantial effect on interstate commerce?

Chemerinsky does not want the Court to ask the question that should come before those two: Does the commerce clause grant to Congress the power to regulate any activity that may be said to somehow have an economic effect on commerce?  (Chemerinsky and the progressives don’t even bother mentioning the interstate qualifier any more.)  By the way, the Obama Administration has not offered any examples of activities that might not be subject to Congressional control under their interpretation of the commerce clause.

The Obama Administration will argue that an individual decision to not buy government approved health insurance is an “affirmative economic activity” subject to regulation by the government.  By that standard we effect commerce even when we sleep because we’re not doing anything and thus commerce must endure eight hours without our participation.

If the Court rules in favor of ObamaCare the next step will be more federal laws designed to regulate our personal lives in order to “hold down the cost of health care.”  Any activity the bureaucracy may decide adds to the risk that we might become an expense to the health care system will be considered for possible regulation.  We can expect restrictions or bans on activities like

• target practice with guns
• high school sports
• boxing, and marshal arts training
• rock climbing
• surfing and swimming

Since the bureaucrats are already convinced that obesity is the cause of most health problems they’ll contradict themselves by asking Congress to require us all to work out in a gym regularly even though doing so might risk injury that would require medical treatment.

Logically, we should all be required to drive large SUVs to reduce injury from crashes.  but that won’t happen because it would conflict with another progressive priority, coercing us all into tiny, high mileage cars.

We’re swerving toward the very circumstances the founders fought the Revolutionary War to avoid: a system where all the limits are on the liberty of The People, not on the power of government.