President Obama released his much-hyped executive gun control orders today, and they were a big anti-climax: piddling initiatives like “Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers” and “Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.” The president will have to wait on Congress for the big stuff like banning “assault weapons” (good luck with that, Barry).
Well, piddling is what Obama does best. No doubt he’ll do more of it. Here then are my predictions for Top Ten Additional Obama Executive Orders:
#10 Income tax audit for that guy that was mean to him in 10th grade.
#9 Michelle Obama fat jokes now punishable by six years in Leavenworth.
#8 New Obamacare mandate: extra-large suppositories
#7 White House staff to be issued those cool Che Guevara hats.
#6 Raise the ethical standards of the administration by appointing new cabinet secretary Lance Armstrong.
#5 In order to receive federal education funds, school districts must replace Pledge of Allegiance with Obama National Anthem
#4 If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, no dessert.
#3 In honor of Elizabeth Warren, September is now National Fake Indian History Month.
#2 Twenty percent increase in Snausages for Piers Morgan.
And the #1 Additional Obama Executive Order…
Special 150% tax bracket for all citizens named “Rush.”
Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a novel about politics, freedom, and hospital gowns. Check it out on Amazon.com.
One of my Facebook friends asked me today what I thought about Florida Governor Rick Scott’s decision to opt out of certain provisions of ObamaTax (formerly Obamacare). Of course other governors have made similar decisions – notably Bobby Jindal of Louisiana – but Gov. Scott did get a great deal of publicity. Perhaps his resemblance to Voldemort makes him a more effective bogeyman for the MSM than the Jimmy Stewartish Jindal. In any case, my friend was curious whether I “would applaud this as appropriate civil disobedience or a somewhat futile attention grab.”
I did a little research and here’s what I found out:
There are two provisions from which Florida will opt out.
The first is of little consequence: setting up a state health insurance exchange. The federal government will set up exchanges for states that decline to do so.
The second is where the controversy lies: Florida will opt out of an expansion of the state Medicaid program. Most of the criticism of Gov. Scott has centered on this because it also means passing up new Federal funding that goes with it. The governor’s news release explains that “even though the federal government has promised to initially pay 100% of the increase in Medicaid payments for the first three years of ObamaCare, the burden increasingly shifts to Florida taxpayers in future years.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that in the out years, the state’s share is 10%. That seems small, but 10% of a big number is still a big number; it will cost Florida taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Although ObamaTax authorized HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to levy heavy penalties on states that declined to participate in the Medicaid expansion, that part of the bill was thrown out by last week’s Supreme Court decision. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that it represented too “dramatic” a change to fall within the federal government’s authority to unilaterally amend the program. Participating in the Medicaid expansion is, therefore, entirely voluntary on the part of the states. In deference to this sensible bit of federalism, I’ve refrained from using the #JohnRobertsIsSoDumb hashtag on Twitter all day.
Anyway, it seems to me then that Gov. Scott’s decision is neither civil disobedience – since the law allows him to do this – nor grandstanding. The chief executive of the Sunshine State is simply trying to keep the budget under control.
This is the entry I posted the day after Obamacare passed the House. Unfortunately, it is still appropriate today:
In 1938, Neville Chamberlain, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, betrayed the Czechs to Hitler at Munich, and thereby passed up the best opportunity of stopping the Nazi war machine without a war. When the news reached England, an aging and washed up politician named Winston Churchill talked about getting a group of friends together and throwing a brick through the Prime Minister’s window.
Churchill has been much on my mind since the House of Representatives passed the Health Insurance Takeover last night, and not just because I have an urge to chuck construction materials at certain D.C. residences.
There’s no point in sugar coating. Last night was a disaster. It was the worst defeat for freedom in three decades. But we can draw inspiration from the example of Mr. Churchill when facing a disaster and a threat to freedom that was far worse.
As a result of Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich, most of Europe lost its freedom during the next two years. On May 10, 1940, the German armies poured into the Netherlands, the collapse of France was imminent, and the Nazis were weeks away from driving British forces off the continent. In Churchill’s words, “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.” Under those horrific circumstances, compared to which Obamacare is, like a dripping faucet, merely a minor annoyance, Neville Chamberlain resigned and King George asked Winston Churchill to become his new Prime Minister.
And then Churchill rallied his country. In the next several weeks, he gave two of the most famous speeches in the English language.
On June 4 he told the House of Commons, “I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.
"Even though large parts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
And then, on June 18, “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.’”
Churchill’s oratory was remarkably effective. In the following months, under sometimes nightly bombings, there are stories of the British singing “Roll out the Barrel” and “White Cliffs of Dover” in their air raid shelters. Hitler did not break them in their island, and he lost the war.
Without losing sight of the gravity of the situation and the cost in lives, Churchill not only led his people during dark times, but he had fun doing it. If you go to London today, you can visit Churchill’s own air raid shelter, the underground war rooms built to protect the Cabinet during the Blitz. But it turns out he was rarely there. More likely he was up on the roof, watching the bombs fall. On a visit to America, he recited poetry to Franklin Roosevelt and told jokes to a joint session of Congress ("If my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way 'round, I might have got here on my own.")
So yes, last night was disaster. But if we harness the power of oratory and if we never surrender, we will have our finest hour. And let’s have fun doing it. Because you know, those angry people, who never mix humor and politics, tend to be on the other side.
I wrote previously, with respect to the Obamacare contraception mandate, that it is a violation of religious freedom to require someone who objects to contraception on religious grounds to pay for other people to use it (Liberty and the Pill, March 3, 2012). On Friday I attended Stand Up for Religious Freedom and got to spend a beautiful afternoon in Boston with some folks who agree.
Mother Olga is the founder of the Daughters of Mary of Nazareth. According to their website, she “was born and raised in Iraq,” where she “lived through four wars.” She “served the prisoners, homeless, elderly, and handicapped of war for many years.” Presumably, this experience taught her the difference between real victims and those who are merely victims in their own mind because they have to pay for their own birth control pills. Here Mother Olga leads the crowd in “Come, Holy Ghost.”
Raymond Flynn – mayor of Boston (1984-1993) and ambassador to the Vatican (1993-1997): “I’ve been in politics now a little bit more than 50 years and I can’t imagine that in the year 2012 we’d be once again gathered here fighting for our religious freedom.”
Don Feder, former editorial writer for the Boston Herald: “In the 1920s, Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, who coined the phrase ‘the long march through the culture’, concluded that worldwide revolution would never succeed unless religion and the family were first eliminated. That’s why the radical left wants the public schools to indoctrinate your children in its neo-pagan worldview. That’s why it opposes parental consent and notification laws. That’s why it insists that abortion and contraception be publicly funded.”
Couldn’t help wondering why a guy in some sort of police uniform was photographing us from the State House balcony:
I also had a chance to politely engage the handful of counter-demonstrators across the street. They claimed to represent freedom of religion, but they had a very strange idea of freedom: you’re not free to do something – in this case use contraception – if you have to pay for it. I already refuted that argument when Giuliani used it five years ago (The Giuliani School of Constitutional Law, April 8, 2007).
As I wrote previously (Liberty and the Pill, March 3, 2012), it is a violation of religious freedom to require someone who objects to contraception on religious grounds to pay for other people to use it. To protest the Obama Administration’s attempt to do just that, on Friday I attended the Rally for Religious Freedom on the Boston Common.
Here’s a gallery:
A beautiful day in Boston...
Great turnout...
The Santorum people tried to trick me into making an anti-Romney video, but I caught on...
Edward Wagner, Carolyn Crilly, & Christine Morabito. Carolyn told me, “This contraception mandate is actually anti-woman because it is saying that our fertility is like a blob of malignant cells that needs to be taken care of.” Edward thinks the Democrats are overreaching on this issue. “The Democrats are going to cease to be a viable party,” he said. “In the long run, the Democrats are digging their own grave.”...
Father Jeremy Paulin OMV from the Oblates at St. Clement's Eucharistic shrine on Boylston Street in Boston...
Arguing about contraception and freedom is a little like dating. I have the same conversation over and over and I only occasionally get something out of it.
I thought it would be a great time saver to have all my arguments on this topic (freedom that is, not dating) in one place.
Any discussion of freedom (or any other subject for that matter) requires a solid intellectual foundation. Once the principles are in place, their application becomes obvious.
The right to freedom is a limited license. It is not the right to do anything you want. It is merely the right to do what is consistent with the rights of others. You are free to move your fist – but not if someone else’s face is in its path. This is because no system of rights can be self-contradictory - you cannot have some rights that violate other rights. Rights must be universal.
It follows that even though you have the right to do something, you do not have the right to force others to pay for it: that would violate their freedom to spend their own money. You have the right to travel to Hawaii. You don’t have the right to make someone else buy you a ticket (That's called a "nuance". Remember when Kerry criticized Bush for being impervious to "nuance". We don't hear much about "nuance" anymore). Another way of saying this is that there is no such thing as a “positive right”; there are only “negative rights”. I addressed positive and negative rights in my earlier blog entry, The “Right” to Health Care.
“But wait,” you say. “Doesn’t forcing pacifists, via taxation, to pay for the military violate their freedom?" No. A strong military is a pre-condition for freedom – as the French found out in 1940. It is therefore a contradiction in terms to talk about freedom from the obligation to pay for the military (A similar argument can be made for the police). The history of the world is littered with the corpses of free societies that had weak militaries. I can think of no example of a free society that stopped being a free society because its birth control program was weak.
I didn’t invent these ideas. They are the product of a long intellectual tradition, which starts with Aristotle and the Bible, and runs through the words of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson to Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan. One of the best presentations of them is Ayn Rand’s essay “Man’s Rights” which I highly recommend for a more in-depth treatment than is possible in a blog. It can be found in her collection The Virtue of Selfishness.
These thinkers created arguments that are devastating to the Left. Instead of refuting the arguments, the Left responded with a campaign of character assassination: the great voices of freedom were dead white men, or slaveowners, or fascists, or racists. In logic, this type of “argument” is called the Fallacy of the Abusive Ad Hominem.
It is a bad omen – both for freedom and logic – that this campaign has had remarkable success. These ideas - and why they’re important - are not widely understood. If they were, we would not see so many people lining up to throw away their liberty in exchange for the promise of free contraception - a promise that won’t be kept, by the way. There’s no such thing as a free birth control pill (but that’s an economic discussion, not a philosophical one).
It is clear from the principles I set down how the Obamacare contraception mandate impacts our freedom:
It is a violation of religious freedom to require someone who objects to contraception on religious grounds to pay for it, either directly or through their insurance companies.
If we do not mandate that insurers cover contraception, it does not follow that they won't. It simply means that insurers, employers, and patients will be free to work out among themselves what sort of insurance policy is best for them. There would probably be many choices, rather than the one-size-fits-all policy that the Obama administration is trying to force upon us.
It is not a violation of freedom to expect someone who wants contraception to pay for it - or purchase an insurance policy that does. If it were, that would violate the rights of those who have to do the paying. This does not prevent "access" to contraception. It is still a legal product, widely available at drug stores (that's another "nuance").
It would be a violation of freedom to ban contraception. Having said that, I don’t know anyone who wants to. Although my left-of-center friends accuse Republicans of harboring plans to outlaw the pill, when I ask them to name a major Republican politician (Senator, Governor, or Presidential candidate) who advocated this, they say they can’t, it’s just an “impression” they have. I asked some conservatives I met at CPAC what they thought of banning contraception. They either rolled their eyes or told me they were enthusiastically in favor of contraception - for liberals. The Republican “War on Women” is a myth.
Since it's an issue of universal rights, one of the arguments used by the left to defend the mandate - that few people are affected - is highly irrelevant. There's no quorum required, fortunately, for the exercise of our liberties.
All of the above applies equally to male and female contraceptives.
I think that covers it. I’ll add more from time to time.
