Are You Serious? The Federal Government Can Do Most Anything!

Liberals are just now waking up to the reality that Obamacare is hard to defend, because they haven't deigned to defend it until now.  The liberal argument for Obamacare has been based in "bandwagon/argumentum ad populum" and "appeal to authority," both logical fallacies.

Here's a common illogical example addressing government's power to regulate non-activity and make us eat broccoli:

Until this week, most scholars seemed to think this would be treated by the justices as a distinction without any special significance. “It’s a silly distinction,” Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia law professor, told me this week. Opponents of the law “have gotten an enormous amount of mileage out of ‘inactivity,’ but that really has nothing to do with the regulation of commerce,” he said.

One hundred professors from many of the country’s major law schools signed a statement arguing that those seeking to overturn the law “seek to jettison nearly two centuries of settled constitutional law” and “there can be no serious doubt about the constitutionality” of the insurance mandate. 

One hundred professors! No serious doubt!  Imagine that! This is the kind of argumentation the left's advocacy is shot through with. No reasoning, just intellectually-flaccid statements that include such phrases as "everybody knows" and "experts agree." They won't even rebut serious challenges, imperiously discounting them out of hand.

Yes We Can!  ...Make them eat their broccoli...

When Justice Scalia asked the broccoli question, White House Solicitor Verrilli stumbled and fumbled, disappointing tearful progressives everywhere. Here's what a New York Times writer thought he should have said, and it sums up progressive thought in a nutshell:

But it seems to me that a succinct answer to Justice Scalia’s question is that the commerce clause would not limit Congress’s ability to regulate broccoli — if members of the House and Senate were crazy enough to pass legislation requiring all of us to eat green vegetables and if that were deemed a rational way to regulate commerce. The same could be said of health clubs.  (NY Times)

Progressivism is Fundamentally Un-American

There you go, folks. This is why progressives should never be trusted with power, and their century-old strongman ideology is fundamentally un-American.  In their world, unlike the founding fathers', a crazy congress could force us to eat our arugula, or march the fatties off to government boot camps, and that is the fatal flaw of progressivism: Trusting our overlords to not be crazy, stupid or greedy as they wield absolute power.  Yeah, that's a great plan!  Sarcasm aside, it is antithetical to the bedrock foundation of this republic, it ignores the entire arc of human history, and flies in the face of our understanding of human nature.

Note how the progressive author blithely dismisses individual liberty:

"To Depression-era farmers, it was no doubt an affront to individual freedom that the federal government had the power to tell them what crops not to plant." (NY Times)

Not buying insurance, or Filburn growing wheat for his own consumption in defiance of government quotas, is fair game for progressives because it affects overall commerce. But everything is connected, so what on earth does not affect overall commerce? That is how markets work. Under the progressives' capacious understanding of the commerce clause, there is no human activity under the sun that the federal government could not regulate.

An old or severely disabled person deciding to not die and instead electing an expensive medical procedure would fit into the same category. A progressive government, using its own twisted logic, would regulate that too, regulating the person right out of existence.  I'll spare you the historical precedents...

"the federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country." -- Democrat Congressman Pete Stark

Please go read Ilya Shapiro's excellent article slicing and dicing the hapless left, We were Serious the whole Time