Bidens: Compassionate for "the Little People"!

Hunter Biden claimed he had 'no recollection' of the Arkansas woman who bore his child - but texts reveal that she worked for him…just three months after Lunden Roberts gave birth to their baby girl, Navy Joan Roberts, Hunter asked his assistant to make sure that the new mother had been kicked off his company's health insurance plan.

(Emphasis mine)
"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor! If you like your plan, you can keep your plan!

If you have an illegitimate child with us, don't let the door hit your fanny on the way out!

The Gift of the Magi 2014 (or Adventures in ER Land) Revisited

Editor's Note: Not sure why, but I was thinking of this guy in the early hours the other morning. Although it's been over three years now, it reminded of this verse:

Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

- Matthew 25: 40


For anyone not acquainted with O. Henry's short story, "The Gift of the Magi", stop what you are doing and go straight here, and do not come back until you have finished it. You will not regret it. If are you familiar with it, but haven't read it in a long time, same goes for you. This will still be here when you get back.

I had a precious little gift of my own last week: an all expense paid visit to the ER! I was going to write about it last Friday and then the horrific murder of two policeman changed the focus of what I wanted to say. But, the players remain the same: two of Stockton's finest in blue, ER docs, representative of the evil, non government hospital, in white, a homeless man, and a keen observer of the human condition. (Okay, he was kicked out of the ER for loitering and then it was just up to me to take notes.)

It was the first time I'd been to an ER during the week, when things are relatively quiet. Typically, I'd be there on a weekend, like everybody else, because I didn't have access to my regular physician, and, well, it was an emergency. In fact, I had a great deal of déjà vu in driving myself there. Just before I moved to Ohio, I had driven myself to the very same ER, with a rapidly beating heart and pains in my left arm. The pain in my arm, it turned out, was coincidental to all the packing and moving I was doing, but, because that and my first ever bout with A-fib, I got moved to the front of a very long line of folk in the ER that weekend.

This time, there were may be a dozen people there, and a lot of them were friends and families of those actually needing medical treatment, still, there was a lot of "hurry up and wait". I didn't mind, since I was familiar with how the triage system works and my injuries were far from life threatening this time, so I waited. And waited. USW*

After waiting in one place, they invited me to wait in another, this time on a gurney in the hallway. So, I waited a little more. They had some of those portable curtain screens around, but there wasn't much call for them. Then, a couple of Stockton's finest and a couple of docs escorted this guy with no pants to sit on the gurney closest to mine. I tried not to eavesdrop, but by this time I was ready to read soup labels for entertainment.

It was apparently a homeless guy. Straight out of Central Casting, he had long scraggly hair and a long unkempt beard...and no pants. From what I was able to piece together his story, he'd been brought to the hospital four days before with some kind of seizure. His clothing and meager possessions had been stuffed into a plastic bag, per hospital policy. And now, he wanted to leave. Apparently in no uncertain terms he wanted to leave. My guess is, that he raised some kind of ruckus with the nurses, which explained the presence of the two police officers, who did not bring him in but were called because of the nature and volume of his impending departure.

The police officers both drew their night sticks and beat him mercilessly, shouting racial epithets in rhythm with the blows. Of course not. BTW, I haven't mentioned anyone's race or gender here (besides the homeless guy), and won't. It's irrelevant. The police and the doctors both explained that they could not keep him here against his will, but they were concerned for his well being after he leaves the hospital. It was remarked that he was weak, and could hardly walk, had no residence to return to, but he insisted he wanted to go to a "friend's house".

The police were there to ensure the safety of the staff, in case this gentleman went beyond violent outbursts to violent action. There were also there to see to his well being, and convince him, if they could, to stay under the hospital's care until he was better equipped to handle things on his own.

Let me remind you at this point, that the man was homeless. He had no insurance. He had no money to pay, yet here this money grubbing, non-government hospital who might charge you $20 for a pack of Pampers was offering to let this man, who had been with them for four days, without paying a cent, to stay for an indefinite time longer.

No one has to go without health care in America.

But, he'd made up his mind. In a way, I can't blame him. I'd been there for four hours and pretty much had seen everything I wanted to. He'd been there four days. He determined to go, against doctor's recommendation. His bare feet were stuck in running shoes. "Could we give you a pair of socks?" they asked, and someone went off running to fetch him a pair of socks. This was Winter in California. Maybe forty degrees outside. Not bad by comparison to much of the country, but then, most of the country has some place to go home to.

It was around 11:30 AM. "How about lunch? Can we get you something to eat before you go?" Again,one of the orderlies was dispatched to find the man something to eat, that he could take with him.

So now he had fresh, clean dry socks, lunch, courtesy of the hospital and, did I mention he wasn't wearing pants? In California in the winter time, it doesn't snow through much of the state, but it does rain. We'd been having a number of big rainstorms lately, and when he was brought in, he'd been brought in soaking wet. And his pants? Put into the plastic bag in the condition they were brought in. Wet. They hadn't gotten any drier or cleaner in the last four days. So now, he has clean dry socks, a meal and wet pants to go off walking about in 40 to 50 degree weather.

After a brief discussion of the feasibility of laundering his clothes, it was another command decision: "Can we get him a pair of hospital pants?" And again, someone provided him with, shall we say, less than ideal winter wear...thin and hardly fashionable, but clean and dry. They put the partitions around him to give him a little privacy while he dressed.

"Where does your friend live?" The guy was a little vague. I suspect his elevator doesn't go all the way to the top floor, if you know what I mean. The doctor says, "Let me get you a bus pass. Here's two. I don't want you to have to do a lot of walking."

The elderly gentleman thanked him and they escorted him as far as the parking lot, clutching his meager possessions, his lunch and sporting a snazzy blue pair of pants. A hard life just got a tiny bit easier, for a while, anyway. Thanks in large part to the kind of hospital that Barack Obama would do away with. Thanks in part to a couple of police officers who wanted to make sure that this individual did not harm himself or anyone else.

The next time some hospital bills you $24 for a box of Kleenex you could have picked up at Costco for a buck, just remember that the excess isn't necessarily going towards the head doctor's next Lexus payment. It helps cover the costs of those who pay nothing at all, like our friend here. The gifts of the Magi were clean socks, and a lunch and some crummy blue pants, given in the Spirit of Christmas.

Merry Christmas to all!

Oh, and me? Hurt my arm. Tore something. Very painful, but nothing I can't handle. Will be typing with one hand for the foreseeable future. Thanks for asking! (You know you were!)





* USW: "Um So Weiter", German for "et cetera". See? You didn't think you were going to learn anything today!


Originally published 12/24/14

Some Exasperated Thoughts On The Constitutionality Of The Unconstitutional ObamaCare Monstrosity

Chief Justice John Roberts

by Andrew Roman

____________________________

I’ve spent the better part of twenty-four hours reading endless commentary from thinking, normally-coherent rightists who are trying to convince me, if not themselves, that John Roberts’ fundamental transformation of judicial review is actually a long-term win for conservatives and originalists. And even with my initial fiery emotions tempered a bit (although my outrage has continued to blossom), I just don’t get it.

I truly don’t.

I haven’t stopped shaking my head since 10:15 yesterday morning when the rulings came down.

From the pens and tongues of people I honestly respect, from George Will to Charles Krauthammer, I’m being told I need to step back, relax and try to see the silver linings in all of this madness - that the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ObamaCare individual mandate as a tax, rather than a matter of commerce, is an historical victory – that yesterday’s debacle of a decision will limit future attempts to use the Constitution’s commerce clause as a vehicle for government expansion.

On that point, I concede they’re almost certainly correct.

But that’s where the whole matter should have ended – with five Supreme Court justices suitably upending any federal attempts at imposing a mandate that would compel us under penalty of law to have to purchase anything. At that point, the men in black robes should have closed up shop, congratulated each other for defending the Constitution and individual liberty and gone home to watch reruns of Mad Men.

But they didn’t.

So, while the Constitution's commerce clause became that much more difficult for future legislators to use as a mechanism for government growth (we hope), it also became that much easier to levy taxes on both behavior and non-behavior. Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts - the swing vote - has set a new judicial standard. The federal government can now say we must purchase whatever it deems necessary, so long as the penalty for not doing so is called a "tax." The word "commerce" never needs to come into play. And while it's true that the feds have always been able to tax its citizens, no one could have imagined that this flimsiest of justifications would keep the individual mandate living and breathing - for now and for the future. 

As a consequence, the proverbial flood gates are now wide open – and just as we’ve seen here in that bastion of personal liberty, New York City (think cooking oil, cigarettes, 16-ounce cups of soda, etc), once the government reaches in and knocks over one domino, it will not stop until they're all toppled under the guise of doing whats best for us (at the expense of liberty).

Government never knows when to stop.

What that means is that those people who can afford to purchase health insurance, but choose not to, will be taxed. It also means that young people, say in their early twenties, who are healthy and choose not to be insured (as I did when I was that age), will also be taxed. The latter group, incidentally, will be facing increasing fines each year until it becomes less expensive for them to actually purchase the mandatory insurance, at which time the open arms of the government will be there waiting to take care of them.

Clever. yes?

And so it was that the Chief Justice of the United States tore a page from the 2012 edition of the “Activist Judges Handbook” and not only overstepped his bounds, but set a new kind of puzzling precedent.  

A scary one.

John Roberts, in his attempts to keep the court from “legislating from the bench,” did precisely that. He quite literally rewrote the law, miraculously preserving the federal mandate for health insurance by calling it a “tax” – even though no such language existed anywhere in the bill’s 2000-plus pages, nor was it sold that way by any breathing Democrat. Even Ted Kennedy, before he relocated to the Mary Jo Kopechne Hall of Ultimate Justice,  never argued for this legislative depravity as a tax. It would have unquestionably died a quick death had it been presented that way.


(Radio talk-show host Mark Levin points out that in the early days of the ObamaCare debate, there were Dems who actually talked about this legislation being similar to the social security tax. Levin notes, however, that it wasn't too long before they completely backed away from using the "t" word. His Landmark Legal Foundation actually filed briefs with the Supreme Court explaining in detail why ObamaCare was categorically not a tax).

What is most infuriating about all of this is that we (by “we” I mean those of us who revere and respect the Constitution) had this thing defeated. This thing was a dead duck. Justice Anthony Kennedy was with us all the way. 

How often does that happen?

It turns my stomach thinking about how close we were to killing this disaster.

Justice Anthony Kennedy

We actually had Kennedy.

He was one of the four dissenting justices who correctly asserted that the entire ObamaCare bill was unconstitutional. 

It was in the bag. 

Even John Roberts agreed that as a matter of justifying the mandate under the commerce clause, ObamaCare didn’t cut the constitutional mustard.

But then Roberts decided that he’d try his hand at writing law instead of interpreting it. From out of thin air, it occurred to him that the bill’s individual mandate also functioned as a tax – that somehow, the high court was magically obliged to treat it as a tax, although it wasn’t meant as one. All the lefty big guns – Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, et al – never used the word tax in selling this garbage to the American people. The President himself went as far as rejecting the notion on numerous occasions. So, rather than use the Constitution itself in conjunction with the actual text contained in the ObamaCare bill to correctly and completely put the kibosh on this unprecedented overreach of government, Roberts constructed, out of whole cloth, a way to keep the bill alive. He made the rationale used in passing “Roe vs Wade” look like a civil traffic dispute. He went beyond checking the emanations and penumbras cited by the Warren Court way back when for justifications. He literally stuck his hand into a black judicial void and yanked out the word “tax.”

It was as if it was the Chief Justice’s mission to save this wretched piece of legislation any way he could.

The fact that no one along the way – whether it be in state court, circuit court, whatever – ever viewed the ObamaCare penalty as a tax was irrelevant to Chief Justice Roberts. Thus, the constitutionality of the individual mandate as a "tax" is all his doing, effectively rendering him the author of the bill. 

But the fact remains that ObamaCare was not passed as a tax. It would never have become law as a tax. 

No matter how you slice it, ObamaCare is a deception of the highest order, not to mention a tax increase the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that “rationalizing defeats is no way to learn from them.”

He’s right.

Andrew McCarthy writes: “ …even if the Court is correct that, under its jurisprudence, the mandate that undergirds Obamacare can be sustained as a tax, it is surely intolerable for the Supreme Court to aid and abet Congress and the president in the commission of a massive fraud: upholding as a tax something they swore up and down was not a tax — allowing them to enact as a tax something that would never have passed if honestly presented as a tax, allowing them to escape accountability for passing a massive tax increase."

He’s right.

Bill Bennet, on his talk show this morning, pointed out that if Barack Obama is re-elected and appoints liberal justices to the court, the entire commerce clause "victory" means absolutely nothing.

He, too, is right.

As expected, the spiking of the White House football was swift .... and flat out nonsensical. Yesterday, the President said: “In doing so, [The Supreme Court] reaffirmed a fundamental principle that here in America – in the wealthiest nation on Earth – no illness or accident should lead to any family’s financial ruin.” 


What on God's green earth is he talking about?

Where exactly is this fundamental principal “affirmed?” In what document? As part of what doctrine?  Taking a page from the “Roberts Handbook of Incoherent Jurisprudence Rationalization,” the President has literally made this up ... and there isn't a mainstream media news person who will call him on it.

In his opinion, Justice Roberts wrote: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

That is true, of course, but it is his job to defend the Constitutions from obvious violations, just as he and four other justices did in shooting down the mandate that compels the people of the United States to engage in commerce under the Constitution's commerce clause. 

It should also be noted, as a matter of Constitutional rights, that the law as it stands now would effectively drown religious institutions – like Catholic or Jewish schools as well as affiliated hospitals - with fines (I should say, taxes) unless they relent to offer insurance and services that violate the teachings and doctrines of their particular faiths.

That's not going to go over too well.

First Amendment anyone?

Incidentally, I’m curious…. What kind of “tax” is the ObamaCare bill exactly? As explained by Mark Levin on his radio program yesterday, this is a very important and relevant question in justifying the bill's constitutionality. Is it a direct tax, as expressed in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of The Constitution? Is it an income tax, as expressed in the 16^th Amendment? Is it an excise tax?

As Levin explains: “It’s not a direct - or capitation - tax. It’s not an excise tax. It’s not an income tax. And you know what John Roberts says in response to all that? ‘Oh, let’s stop fiddling around with labels.’ Excuse me? It’s not fiddling around with labels. We’ve got all kinds of case law on how crucial it is.”

But it gets even more convoluted.

There is a statute called the Tax Anti-Injunction Act. Enacted in 1867, it essentially keeps people from being able to take the federal government to court “for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax.” In other words, we cannot sue the feds simply because we don’t wish to pay taxes. Chief Justice Roberts cited this statute in his opinion yesterday, saying that because the writers of the ObamaCare bill did not call the individual mandate a "tax" (rather a “penalty”), the Tax Anti-Injunction Act is not applicable here, and thus it will not be considered a tax in this context.

Follow me here ..... Chief Justice Roberts initially wrote that the “penalty” for not having health insurance is not a “tax.” It’s merely a good old-fashioned penalty.

Roberts writes: “The Affordable Care Act does not require that the penalty for failing to comply with the individual mandate be treated as a tax for purposes of the Anti-injunction Act. The Anti-Injunction Act therefore does not apply to this suit, and we may proceed to the merits.”

So, it's not a tax.

So far so good?

Got that?

It’s not a tax.

That is, until we get a little further in his opinion.

That’s when it suddenly becomes a tax.

He writes: “It is of course true that the Act describes the payment as a ‘penalty,’ not a ‘tax. But while that label is fatal to the application of the Anti-Injunction Act, it does not determine whether the payment may be viewed as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power.

“While the individual mandate clearly aims to induce the purchase of health insurance, it need not be read to declare that failing to do so is unlawful,. neither the Act nor any other law attaches negative legal consequences to not buying health insur­ance, beyond requiring a payment to the IRS.”

Did I read that correctly? 

"...neither the Act nor any other law attaches negative legal consequences to not buying health insur­ance, beyond requiring a payment to the IRS.”

My Lord, isn’t that enough?  

What???

What planet is this?

Incoherence, thy name is Roberts

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