Thursday, March 29, 2012

Wow

So the SCOTUS heard arguments about whether the individual mandate could be struck down but the rest of Obamacare left standing.  I'm not a lawyer*, so I don't know how the court will rule: leave the entirety standing, strike down the whole statute, or strike down some but leave some.

The idea that the whole thing should be struck down seems reasonable to me (again, IANAL), because nobody knows what's in the bill, and nobody knows how the bill would be different from what Congress voted for.  And this seems rich irony:
Are we supposed to go through the whole 2700 pages? Ha ha. Why should they? The members of Congress didn't. Obama didn't. (Signing the bill, he said: "... you know the feeling of signing your name to pages of barely understandable fine print").

And who can ever forget: "We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it"? If the Court drags the whole thing down, no one will ever know what the hell was in it. And I mean no one. Absolutely no one on the face of the earth knows the entire text, and no one will ever know.
Philosopher Kings, right there.  This is probably a good time to say to everyone who ever said that Progressives are smarter than anyone else that the need to shut up and sit down in the back of the room.  Grown ups are talking.

But it's not quite true to say that no one knows what was in it. Perhaps no common man, but a Czar is another breed entirely.

* IANAL, but I know guys who are.  He has an informed opinion that's pretty interesting.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually my wife read it the whole 2700 pages and be afraid be very afraid it contained some very interesting things such as the power to terminate anyones life up until they are 18 under some very specious eugenics grounds, denial of care to the under 12's and over 70's to thin the herd, were two such nicety's. All this buried in the text.

Borepatch said...

Knottedprop, do you have a page number/link? This strikes me as big news, that nobody's talking about.

Anonymous said...

Borepatch sorry I don't but the missus was jumping up and down when she found that it was buried in some sub paragraph section whatever. I shall ask her if it survived the final bill and if I have it correct. The upshot is it bypassed a lot of the constitution when relating to children. It could be read that if you have a very unruly child/criminal the state could declare them as having a congenital illness and remove them from the gene pool by euthanasia.
Obviously this is totally unconstitutional as killing people is murder but they tried to get around this by making it law because they were minors. If you have been following the news they have been pushing the idea of terminating babies born with congenital defects after birth and up to age 2 or 3. They are trying to get people used to the idea before they start.
The whole denial of care is more complicated as it was referred to as "death panels" what it really means is that some bureaucrats in Washington DC have to be consulted before major car/surgery can go ahead even if you have insurance or the means to pay out of your own pocket. The bad thing is this applies in emergency situations of life and death so if you need to be resuscitated quickly you might be out of luck if the phone is busy. Hip replacements and pace makers and joint replacements may also be denied as too costly even though it's not their money or insurance.
I think this is being done now to thin the ranks of the baby boomers quicker than would be normal to reduce the pensions and other burdens to the state.
Some doctors have already complained that they are already being restricted from providing certain care for the elderly.

SiGraybeard said...

Borepatch, what knottedprop is saying is in keeping with the "Whole Lives System" that Rahm Emmanuel's brother (Dr.) Ezekiel Emmanuel based much of the Obamacare law on.

Summary here. PDF of the paper here and NB the graph on page 6 that gives a heuristic summary of the probability of being treated vs. age. Very young and over 60 need not apply. There's probably an exception for those over 60 who are still working and contributing to the collective. I mean society.

Anonymous said...

Borepatch the missus thinks it's page 924 but she said they were downright sneaky and the that section cross references another and another then another then another. She said it's age 14 not 18, with particular reference to children that believe they are of the wrong gender, the parents are given 6 months to fix the problem or the state takes the child and they get "rid" of the problem, it also applies to other issues.
She has one of those minds that can read all 2700 pages, remember it and then reassemble all the pieces.
She aced her USA military entrance exams and basically ended up in a job where if she told me what she did she would literally have to kill me.
She also said they shoehorned a number of other bills into it that have nothing to do with healthcare reform, detention without trial, seizure of property etc.

Jake (formerly Riposte3) said...

"She said it's age 14 not 18, with particular reference to children that believe they are of the wrong gender, the parents are given 6 months to fix the problem or the state takes the child and they get "rid" of the problem, it also applies to other issues."

I'd really, really like to see a good specific reference for that (with appropriate annotations to help people follow along) - that sounds particularly heinous, and needs to be publicized ASAP if it can be verified.

TOTWTYTR said...

It's interesting that when Kennedy votes with the liberal justices, he's a "moderate", but when he votes with the conservative justices, he's a "conservative".

I think after this decision, he'll be firmly in the "conservative" camp.

It will be nice to see this piece of crap legislation overturned.