Recent Articles

“While the Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, Congress is holding hearings on the federal regulatory process. The two topics are more closely related than you might think. The healthcare law required many regulations, and thus far, the major regulations issued to implement the Affordable Care Act serve as ugly poster children for the regulatory reform movement.”

“Now that the Supreme Court has concluded hearings on the president’s health law, many states find themselves in a holding pattern, postponing major decisions about the law until they get some constitutional clarity.
But states shouldn’t wait on the Supreme Court to oppose implementation of this harmful law.”

“The great irony is that, for all the talk of Obamacare’s death panels—bodies of unelected government officials that would ration care for the elderly—it’s another unelected panel, the Supreme Court, that may end up delivering the kiss of death to the ACA.”

“For along with the dollars-and-cents issues, ObamaCare nationalizes a number of big moral and philosophical questions, some of the same ones Madison was sure would stay at the states’ level. The most obvious of these concern our concepts of justice, charity, liberty, and even more profoundly, questions of when life begins and how it should end.”

“Republican lawmakers leaving oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed that the government will have a tough time finding a fifth justice to uphold the health law’s individual mandate. Democrats for their part found solace in pointed questioning of lawyers on both sides of the argument by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts. Their outlook coming out of the court, however, was visibly less sunny than the Republicans’.”

“Could gay conservatives have the answer to ObamaCare? Gay Americans understandably chafe at the way the tax code discriminates against them with regard to health insurance. If you are heterosexual, the insurance provided your spouse by your company is treated as a benefit—which means it is untaxed. If, by contrast, you are gay, the insurance provided your spouse or partner by your company can be treated as income—which means taxed.”

“In time, high taxes, large subsidies, and extensive mandatory contractual terms in tandem could well drive most private plans out of business… Where and when the tipping point comes, no one can say in advance, and perhaps some tenacious and well-run private plans may ultimately survive. But in the end, our gloomy prediction is that in the absence of a major change in course, a regulatory cascade will first force some plans to fail, after which other private plans will topple like tenpins.”

“The Constitution is an ‘evolving’ document, we’re told by those on the left, conforming to ‘standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.’ But who gets to decide which direction the evolution goes? Who is the arbiter of enlightenment, the adjudicator of decent standards, the fount of all human wisdom? Give yourself a gold star if you answered ‘a Supreme Court Justice.’ Because surely Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer know more about standards of decency than — well, than whom exactly?”

“It’s hard to sustain the level of indignant shock that the law rightly calls for. In just the past few weeks—looking over a couple of the statute’s provisions in relation to various writing projects on the HHS mandate and on Medicare—I have found myself shocked anew at the breadth and depth of Obamacare’s recklessness and folly, not because I didn’t know what it said before but because the passage of time inevitably dissipates the intensity of astonishment. It sometimes takes a renewed exposure to the thing itself, to the fact that it is really there in the U.S. Code, to be knocked back into the proper frame of mind.”

“The Supreme Court will not be ruling about matters of partisan conviction, or the President’s re-election campaign, or even about health care at all. The lawsuit filed by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business is about the outer boundaries of federal power and the architecture of the U.S. political system.”