As regular readers are painfully aware, I’ve been opposed to President Obama’s health care reform plan, such as it was, from the beginning. But, apparently, it’s much worse than I thought. Economist Thomas Sowell, one of the more thoughtful columnists in the business, sees it as the banana peel on the slippery slope to doomsday.
If the current legislation does not entail the transmission of all our individual medical records to Washington, it will take only an administrative regulation or, at most, an Executive Order of the President, to do that.
With politicians now having not only access to our most confidential records, and having the power of granting or withholding medical care needed to sustain ourselves or our loved ones, how many people will be bold enough to criticize our public servants, who will in fact have become our public masters?
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The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other “historic” changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid.
What will it matter if Obama’s current approval rating is below 50 percent among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term President, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power.
When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, that may be enough to salvage the Democrats’ control of Congress as well.
The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don’t usually bring out as many voters as Presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.
I’ve been a fan of Sowell’s going back more than a quarter century, although my current disaggregated information consumption habits mean I’m no longer a regular reader of the column. But, geez, all this sounds just a wee bit crazy.
I continue to think that the use of reconciliation to get around the fact that Scott Brown was elected was dirty pool. As recently as last month, a not insignificant number of congressional Democratic leaders thought so, too. But the fact remains that the Democrats control the White House and both Houses of Congress and got there fair and square, give or take Minnesota. So it’s not like the passage of this bill was some sort of midnight putsch.
I do have some concerns about granting citizenship to massive numbers of illegal aliens. Certainly, among other things, it would be politically beneficial to Democrats and could really change the game in the Southwest and elsewhere. But do I think it’s going to happen by November? Or even in time for 2012? It seems a mite far fetched. Instead, we’re likely to eventually see some sort of amnesty program, along the lines that Ronald Reagan signed in 1986, that puts people on a path to apply for citizenship.
Court packing? If Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t pull it off, I don’t see how Obama does it. Hell, I don’t think he’s managed to get his entire subcabinet in place yet.
It does seem that even the normally sane supporters of the out party go into apoplexy on occasion. There were plenty of conspiracy theories during both George W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s presidency. And there’s always some variation of the “he did thing X that I don’t like so what’s to stop him from declaring a national emergency and staying in office beyond his term?” scenario. Strangely, we always seem to return to equilibrium and the system chugs along pretty much as normal.
