Our Political Spine

As far as I can tell only 10 state attorney generals (from Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington) are joining Virginia’s challenge to Obamacare.  Randy Barnett, a Volokh Conspirator, lists the bases for challenging Obamacare here, which include (a) the individual mandate, (b) state-specific kickbacks, and (c) Tenth Amendment. His prognosis is fairly grim:

Ultimately, there are three ways to think about whether a law is constitutional: Does it conflict with what the Constitution says? Does it conflict with what the Supreme Court has said? Will five justices accept a particular argument? Although the first three of the potential constitutional challenges to health-care reform have a sound basis in the text of the Constitution, and no Supreme Court precedents clearly bar their success, the smart money says there won’t be five votes to thwart the popular will to enact comprehensive health insurance reform.

That’s interesting, and extremely important.  But it obfuscates a more important issue.  Only 11 out of 50 states are joining the suit.  A medical prognosis is appropriate here: America’s political spine has osteoporosis.  The best thing you can say about 11/50 is that it’s a fraction George Washington would have used.  [Ed. note: I once read, although I can't find any support on the Internet tonight, that Washington used uncommon fractions, like 7/11, 23/31, etc.]   Also, like I said before, referring to Obamacare as reform is a leading candidate for misnomer of the still infant decade, “since the bill entrenches the existing health care industries’ oligopolistic relationship with the federal government.”

While there may be much perspective to be had regarding the implications of the bill, and what is the best course of action to take to repeal it, I’m struggling to find any positive perspective about the fact that only 11 states are joining the fight.  It’s an appropriate time for inspiration from greater men than ourselves:

“The utopian schemes of leveling, and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown. They are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.” — Samuel Adams, via.

“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” — Samuel Adams, via Pila.

“The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” – Variously attributed, mostly to Alexis de Tocqueville.

Here’s my new favorite, also by Tocqueville:

“I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.”

Finally, Mark Levin reminded us today that Tocqueville warned us, in the early third of the 19th century:

Tocqueville foresaw a slow death of freedom.  He feared that the power of the central government would gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives, and he was afraid that we would welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we controlled it.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately.  It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.  Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…

The tyranny he foresaw for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century, or with contemporary North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.  “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.”  The vision and even the language anticipated Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World. Tocqueville described the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,” and its task is to regulate every aspect of our lives.

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.

Tocqueville thought we would not be bludgeoned into submission; we would be seduced.  He foresaw the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that would ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state.  His nightmare vision is brilliantly and terrifyingly prescient:

That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.  For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

UPDATE: I found some typos and lousy syntax, and fixed it accordingly.

Health Care, History, Socio-Political