(Addendum below)

The health care ruling has just come down (in case no one noticed). ObamaCare has been upheld. My first impression is this: that the Supreme Court has basically bailed out cowardly politicians, which is a curious role for the court to play. The individual mandate is upheld, but not in terms of a penalty—which is how it was meant to be understood—but as a tax.

As close as this thing was in 2010, it would NOT have passed were it explicitly loaded with such a new “tax.” (Even written the way it was, Democrats faced carnage at the next election.) So the court has retroactively corrected a mistake put in the bill by craven and cowardly politicians.

Is this what we pay them for?

…

Addendum: It goes back to this: If the federal government can compel someone—merely by reason of being born—to buy a product, by means of a mandate/penalty/tax or whatever you want to call it, what can that federal government not do to the individual citizen? What does being American mean now, exactly? Where does “land of the free” come in anymore?

Americans have grown accustomed to having freedoms whittled away incrementally; there is hardly any one—on either side of the political aisle—who would not agree with that statement. What came down today, however, has delivered a stark picture of just how far whittled even the very concept of freedom is now in the United States.

And it will take far more than merely the Republican candidate for president being able to assume office next January to significantly claw back in law the freedoms that the Declaration of Independence rightly asserts are endowed to us by our Creator.

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