The Struggle Has Not Changed

After much consideration and further reading I think it important to put the SCOTUS decision in some perspective. Contributing to my further assessment were Kerodin's Post and the one over at Zion's Trumpet.

Something of which I was aware, but did not illuminate in the first post on the subject, was the good done by the Roberts opinion. Yes, good. The reason I did not reflect it was to avoid the overall contradiction between the way the decision will be understood by the masses and the way it will be understood by constitutional scholars. These are two very different cats. The scholar looks at the Constitution as devined by the brilliance of previous jurists and their rulings become a composite of situational rights, often called judicial review.

So, there are two ways to look at the SCOTUS decision: one from a layman's point of view focusing on what has been done to their rights and what further limitations and penalties they face as a result of the ruling; the other is from a Constitutional scholar's point of view which looks at each ruling as another layer of definition of those rights and when they might be exercised or dismissed.

I did not go into the minute detail of the ruling because it simply does not matter. A tyrannical force bent on submission of the people uses the Constitution where it greases the skids and ignores it where does not. I have not seen in either Republican or Democratic administrations any difference on that plane. The Patriot Act hated and reviled by the leftists was no less a burden and intrusion into the rights of the citizen than the Affordable Care Act that they applaud. Vice versa the Republicans. Each will, or have, come to hate each ruling when it is turned against them.

The Roberts opinion does a few good things from a scholar's point of view, it rejects the Constitutionality of the mandate as a penalty, but upholds it as a tax. That is important for purely political reasons that will become clear as time goes on, i.e. repeal. It strengthens the 10th Amendment from the position that while a state might refuse to apply the law, only the funds to enact the law can be withheld from that state, all current funding must stay in place.

From a layman's point of view the ruling is disasterous as it puts in play all of the restrictions, demands and taxes that were inherent in the law to begin with. The people don't care if the penalty is a tax or not. They should, but they don't. Businesses have to now pare down their workforce to fall under the restrictions, because these businesses do not have the capital to pay for the healthcare, or to fight for waivers. Larger corporations will be able to fight for the waivers, or threaten to end their purchases of healthcare for its employees, who will be able to get their own healthcare via the government, or private providers. Look for healthcare supplements to incomes, but for much fewer jobs.

There are still many ways to fight Obamacare and win, but that is lost on a people who suddenly have their lives and understanding of the laws thrown into chaos.

I did not go into this detail before, because I hold that it simply doesn't matter. We are not at a place in this nation where everything stops due to any ruling by the Supreme Court. The tyranny pushes forward regardless of ruling, of rights or of reason. When "Congress shall make no law" means there are exceptions to that vague terminology and where "must not be infringed" means mostly not, but sometimes, where we agree that it should, all is lost to begin with.

We still have no friend on the Supreme Court. They do not work for us. There is no reliable champion to our rights, but us and the lengths to which we will go to secure them.

The second post I cited above is the one that led me to this revision of my previous post at TL In Exile. This is not a fight between Republican and Democrat. This is not a fight between Conservative and Liberal. The only fight taking place is between those who believe that our rights are given to us by God and those who believe they are given to us as priviledges from government.

The atheist can recognize common law and natural law if it makes them feel better about avoiding the religious connotations of God, but it does not change their side in the struggle. The Constitution is an expression of our rights as given to us by a creator. What is unconstitutional is that which takes the view that these rights are given to us by a benevolent government. One is absolute and the other is conditional upon obedience, but make no mistake, both are conditional upon behavior.