DeMint: Health Care Bill Is 'Unconstitutional' And 'Must Be Repealed'

Yes: that Barak Obama is President while being black.

Executive Summary: I think they're full of sh1t.

Discussion:

The one I hear trotted out most often (though I can't say this is the core of the Cucenelli argument) is the 10th Amendment, which says,

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

I guess their argument is that the federal government is not given express power in the Constitution to force citizens into "soft" social-contract types of things like health care systems, because the Constitution speaks mainly to things like speech, guns, privacy, yada, yada.

However, though I'm nothing more than a trained analyst of language construction by schooling and work experience, and am neither a lawyer nor one who studied legal ramifications of the Constitution, you can take the following opinion with a grain of salt:

I believe that the Preamble, while not something that spells out specific powers or restrictions on power, does set out the framework by which the entire Constitution can (should?) be interpreted. The entire preamble follows...

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America [empasis added mine, duh].

See, neo thinkers tend to only look at the stuff covered through the preamble and Constitution-proper in all the areas in the preamble surrounding that troubling clause I highlighted. It's troubling for them because they are social Darwinists — survival of the fittest, providing health care to chronically sick people dillutes/pollutes the gene-pool, yada, yada — and that clause in the Preamble just plain makes their heads explode. So they pretend it doesn't exist.

What the clause, "...promote the general Welfare..." means, to me, hinges on the word "welfare," right? Here's what it meant to the people in the late 18th century:

welfare n. 1. health, happiness, or prosperity; well-being. [

So. There it is. The "we the people" government are responsible for promoting either-or-all of "health, happiness or prosperity" of our fellow citizens. Meaning this is a responsibility of the federal government.

Their argument, again, as I understand it, is that they assert the federal government was not given power over, or responsibility for promoting/providing health care. According the the 10th Amendment, if this were true, then the responsibility falls only to the states (none of which are big enough to really compete against multi-national insurance or pharma corporations).

But there it is, right there in the very frame-setting language of the Constitution. It's the responsibility of the US government to promote the health, happiness and prosperity of its citizen-owners-government. We're supposed to take care of each other. In a way that gives equal access and equal protections under the law.

The neos are actually correct in crying "socialism" in some respects, and Texans want to remove Tom Jefferson from history books, because there it is, in the opening words that kick off the whole Constitution (and many suggest TJ, the heathen Deist, may have written that part): The preamble is really a sort-of social contract with the citizens/owners/government. We're supposed to take care of each other in all ways. Kind of what Marx (who was born after this document was written) proposed and gave it a bugga-bugga name.