The Center for Disease Control and Prevention states that 2.4 million people die each year in the United States. Medicare insures 75% of those who die. Is Medicare responsible for killing 1.8 million Americans each year? Using the same logic employed by the Democrats that not having health insurance is a cause of death would dictate that Medicare is responsible for 75% of all deaths each year. This would make Medicare the number one killer in the United States.

Dick Durbin has the number of people dying from no health insurance at 25,000 per year. His math: “Today, 70 Americans will die for lack of health insurance, 70. And when the Republicans tell us, ‘Go slow, start over, take your time,’ we’ve got to add it up. It’s 70 a day. How much time can we take?”

Harry Reid has the number at 105,000 per year. His math: “Two Americans die every ten minutes because they do not have health insurance.”

I would challenge anyone to produce a death certificate stating that the cause of death was “uninsured.” This health care bill is not about health insurance or health care, as neither were improved, but, two weeks after the bill was signed into law, the more defective aspects of each industry have been amplified. If this bill was a legitimate fix for health care via insurance, then the ensuing macabre conclusions hold true about the Democratic Party.

Assuming logic and commonsense are disregarded so the Harvard study that professes having no health insurance means an early death to almost 45,000 people is an absolute, then the Democratic Party plans to eradicate 45,000 Americans per year until the year 2019. These 45,000 unfortunate victims dying each year from lack of health insurance are now going to be rescued by the Democrats with the passage of the health care bill, but with a minor caveat: they will need to hang-on for another 4 to 9 years before the omnipresent panacea of government insurance can rescue them from the clutches of the Grim Reaper. Not medical science, not world-class doctors, not state of the art hospitals, but this behemothic gaggle of imbeciles, the current United States federal government, is going to save these lives by mandating the purchasing of health insurance for coverage in a medical industry, that when the Democrats are finished correcting, physicians will be letting blood, pulling teeth, and giving haircuts in their short robes. But as an obvious altruism by the Democrats, the Medicare cuts in the bill will decimate that little niche so badly that the elderly will be forced from the program, thus saving those abandoned by their government from a 75% chance of death by Medicare.

To sell their plan, the Democrats and Obama paraded victim after victim in front of anyone who would listen, telling their stories of having no health insurance and its effect on their lives. It was one sob story after another. But, when dealing with Democrats, the stories are not always as they seem. With just a perfunctory investigation, most of the victims had access to insurance and chose not to capitalize on it, or were dropped from their insurance for reasons they caused, but all had access to medical care regardless of their standing with their insurance companies. There are legitimate cases, but not one was presented by the Democrats.

The urgency of this health care bill was unprecedented, and the Democrats’ concern and passion was so deep for these victims that the bill had to be passed posthaste, at the expense of the Constitution, which after short dialogues defending their authority, the Democrats do not understand the document anyway. However, as intentionally designed, this bill will not save even one victim on parade, at the minimum, for four years, and will not save their other uninsured brethren until 2019. Beginning in 2014, those who don’t have health insurance now because they cannot afford it will be forced to purchase the insurance they cannot afford now, at a much higher premium, to save them from the certain death of being uninsured, or go to jail.

The facts:

2014

• Requires individual mandate to obtain health care coverage
• Provides subsidies for families earning up to 400% of the poverty level or, under current guidelines, about $88,000 a year, to purchase health insurance
• Establishes state health insurance exchanges
• Employers with more than 50 employees must offer coverage
• Employers with more than 200 employees would be required to auto-enroll all new employees in health care plans
• Employers permitted to offer employees rewards of up to 30% of the cost of wellness programs
• State pilot program for wellness programs

By 2019

• Expands health insurance coverage to 32 million people. But still leaves 24 million uninsured, according to the CBO

So, what have we learned in the two weeks since the passage of the bill? By the year 2019, the Democrats will have squandered trillions of dollars, done irreparable damage to the economy, perpetuated job losses, decimated the health insurance industry, decimated the health care system, jailed thousands for not buying mandated insurance, ripped the Constitution asunder, still only cover only half of those without health insurance, and the Democrats, according to their math, will have euthanized approximately 405,000 Americans because of the mathematical trickery they used to pass the bill. According to the CBO, 42% of the estimated total of uninsured in 2019 will still be uninsured, or 24 million people walking about with a death sentence for lack of insurance. A number that, after it is all said and done, is equal to the number of uninsured now. Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have set in motion a spending spree that will, by the year 2019, leave this country with a debt of 82% of GDP. Barack Obama and his Democratic lap dogs’ legacy will continue to spend 1.72 million dollars per minute for the next ten years with no effective difference in the number of uninsured. Again, this is not about health care. Hope and Change.

Most could not answer correctly why the founders even created a Constitution, much less the mechanisms that make it the nonpareil document that it is. Commerce was the primary catalyst for creating our Constitution.

After the Revolutionary War, the states operated as independent nation-states under the Articles of Confederation, created in 1781. The prosperity, cohesion, and unity of the newly unencumbered states was in jeopardy due to their inability to negotiate trade amongst one another, a function previously overseen by Britain. The primary issues that were the catalyst for calling the Constitutional Convention of 1787 included laws passed by some states that interfered with the flow of commerce between the states, the onerous tariffs between states on the transportation and import and export of goods, and that some states had the advantage of ports or being in strategic positions along river trade routes. The states without ports or river trade routes were harshly penalized for importing, exporting, and transporting their goods. Some states that owed debts to other states elected to cancel their debts, leaving no recourse for the state holding the canceled debt. For the fledgling 13 states to survive, there was a critical need for continuity of trade. The Constitutional Convention was originally called to amend the Articles of Confederation, with the alleviation of trade disputes in mind, but ended with the creation of one of the greatest governing documents ever created, the United States Constitution.

The despotic audacity of the House’s health care bill has its Leftist defenders of statism anemically countering the bill’s antagonists with the Welfare Clause and Commerce Clause as their portals into the world of unlimited federal power. The most obscene of the defenses of the health care bill written by the House, and dealing directly with the Stupak Amendment that stripped abortion funding from the bill, came from Marci Hamilton, the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, who absurdly and inadequately argued that stripping the bill of the ability to fund abortions was a violation of church and state simply because the Catholic Church was a proponent of the anti-abortion amendment. Now along comes Ruth Marcus, a columnist for the Washington Post, arguing that the health care reform bill in the House is constitutional by virtue of the Commerce Clause. After reading her article, quite frankly, Google and Wikipedia are not Ruth’s friends in this arena. Her literary journey into the merits of the Constitution is analogous to a heart transplant patient who has the unfortunate luxury of being operated on by the recipient of a Google and Wikipedia medical education– the prospect of either is bereaving. Incidentally, yet not surprising, Ruth Marcus possesses a law degree from Harvard.

In her substance-craving article, Marcus sets the tone of her argument with the most banal of Leftist arguments:

But it’s being taken seriously in some quarters, so it’s worth explaining where the Constitution grants Congress the authority to impose an individual mandate. There are two short answers: the power to regulate interstate commerce and the power to tax.

First, she wields the Commerce Clause:

First, the Commerce Clause. Spending on health care consumes 16 percent — and growing — of gross domestic product. There is hardly an individual activity with greater effect on commerce than the consumption of health care.

Marcus illiterately declares that the breadth of an industry in relation to the gross domestic product of the U.S. is a constitutional reason to be regulated by the federal government alone. Since 1932, the Left, when in control, have emphatically demonstrated that if the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government felt too constrained by the limitations of their enumerated powers, then the invoking of the Commerce Clause to pass, approve, or rule on whatever bill they chose is the sub-rosa that the Founding Fathers secreted away to use at their discretion. Marcus then relates the usual defective argument for using the Commerce Clause to expand the government: FDR era Supreme Court rulings. To further mock the erudite reader’s intelligence, she uses the most absurd case law of FDR’s reign to manifest the plausibility of her argument: the 1942 Wickard v. Filburn Supreme Court case. The following is the most enlightening of the self-inflicted arguments for how ludicrous the Left can be when in control of all three branches of government:

Before possessing a malleable Supreme Court, FDR’s New Deal suffered a successive string of defeats by the Supreme Court. In 1937, FDR devised the Judiciary Reorganization Bill to pack the Supreme Court with justices sympathetic to his New Deal. This annexing of the Supreme Court failed miserably as it was even too brazen for the FDR acolytes in Congress. But between 1937 and the Filburn case in 1942, by virtue of replacing retiring Supreme Court justices and a couple of justices who cherished their careers over their principles by switching to FDR’s side, FDR had control of the Supreme Court and Congress, and the caustic impact of his controlling all three branches of the government is felt to this day.

Roscoe Filburn was a small farmer during the time that FDR’s Department of Agriculture set production quotas for wheat. Filburn’s farm was allowed to grow 11.1 acres of wheat; he planted an additional 12 acres of wheat. The additional 12 acres of wheat were for his personal consumption and feeding his livestock. Once cognizant of his transgression, FDR’s government summarily assailed Filburn, even though the excess wheat would never leave the boundaries of his farm, and thus could not, under any conceivable rationale, affect commerce. Filburn was ordered to destroy his wheat (bear in mind that during the Filburn affair, there were soup lines in every city because people did not have enough to eat— the genius of liberals), and pay a fine for being a self-sustaining American, while the majority of citizens were experiencing a dystopian existence as a result of FDR’s policies.

Roscoe Filburn, incidentally, lost his case. The Left, once a fallacious law has been upheld by the Supreme Court (Wickard v Filburn, Roe v Wade, Kelo v City of New London, Katzenbach v McClung, etc.), will clutch that court case and bellow stare decisis when challenged. But the Wickard v Filburn decision usurped 150 years of Supreme Court precedence of limiting the federal government’s regulation to only the transportation of goods across state lines, roads, ports, and rivers.

Ruth Marcus argues as only a Harvard educated liberal attorney could. If she believes that health care should be regulated by the federal government because it consumes 16 percent of GDP based on Roscoe Wickard’s 12 acres of wheat, which were .000012 of the approximate 1,000,000 acres of farmland in the United States, then it is no wonder she is a columnist rather than a practicing attorney.

What is the relevance of his case today? Using the logic of FDR’s Wickard v Filburn case, if the House’s health care bill passes, a physician could be prosecuted and jailed for either treating himself or a family member, as that would have the same affect on commerce as the Wickard case.

It would serve gazetteers such as Ruth Marcus and her ilk well to be armed with at least a rudimentary knowledge of the original intent and meaning of the Commerce Clause, the Federalist Papers’ explanation regarding the Commerce Clause, and the arguments and debates of the authors of the Constitution regarding the Commerce Clause, rather than searching Google until she finds some silly explanation that befits her Leftist agenda, then incorporating that explanation in an article to justify the House’s health care bill.

By appraising the word “commerce” in the chronicles of the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debates, the writings of the Framers, and the Federalist Papers, the scope of the word “commerce” and the Commerce Clause is very limited indeed. With every usage of the word “commerce,” the narrowest meaning was used. The understanding at the time of the ratification of the Constitution was that “commerce” was never used to identify any industrial related activity preceding the act of trade, as it only pertained to the trade and transportation of said industrial related products between states. By being constrained within the boundaries of the narrow scope of the word “commerce,” the regulating of commerce did not include any act of industry or production and transportation intrastate, and it certainly did not grant the federal government the power to impose criminal penalties in the course of regulating commerce.

The Commerce Clause is one of the simplest clauses to understand in the Constitution, yet has been the most abused clause by agenda-driven politicians and courts.

The thought that the newly created federal government could possess the power to impose mandates (especially mandates on individuals, criminal penalties, and mandates creating prohibited laws outside the bounds of the enumerated powers), all under the guise of the Commerce Clause, would have been an abomination to the Framers, and the Constitution would never have been ratified.

By constitutional mandate, the federal government was granted its exclusive areas of regulatory powers, and the states were granted their areas of regulatory powers. During the constructing of the Constitution, the two were intended to be mutually exclusive. The states preserved their areas of sovereignty as mandated by the Constitution, especially within their areas of regulation. The Commerce Clause granted Congress the power to regulate trade between and among the states, not the power to directly regulate industry. Congress was not granted the power to regulate individual actions, nor the authority to mandate what an individual must purchase. In the 18th century, “to regulate” meant to “make regular.” Nothing more, nothing less. The Commerce Clause was to make regular the exchange of goods between the states and to bring parity between the states regarding interstate commerce. When a dispute arises concerning overlapping jurisdictions between the federal government and the states regarding commerce, the courts decide, based on the intent of the Constitution, which sovereignty has the authority. All intrastate commerce within the borders of a state would be under the exclusive control of that state without federal governmental interference.

One of the last great Supreme Court cases that championed the true meaning of the Commerce Clause, which preceded America’s first quasi-despotic ruler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and which started systematically dismantling the Constitution, was United States v. E. C. Knight Co. This case involved the ownership of 98% of the sugar refining industry. This was the first case that the Supreme Court heard under the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1894. The court ruled by a majority of 8-1 in favor of E.C. Knight Co. Since the case involved manufacturing rather than transportation or commerce, the Supreme Court determined it was the state’s responsibility to regulate, if they so chose, since the activity was confined within the borders of a state, and outside the designated parameters of the Commerce Clause. Chief Justice Melville Fuller summed up the Framers’ intentions of the Commerce Clause in one sentence: “Commerce succeeds to manufacture, and is not a part of it.” This case has been unceremoniously non grata for the Left. Stare decisis be damned.

Secondly, and for her dénouement, Marcus wields the Sixteenth Amendment as Congress’s authority to mandate the purchase of health care. She states, “Which brings us to the alternative source of congressional authority, the ‘Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.’” This is as absurd as Marci Hamilton’s argument that by not using federal funds for abortion, a violation of the separation of church and state has been committed. Marcus’ sole reason that gives Congress the authority is if the mandate is administered through the tax code. She states, “The individual mandate is to be administered through the tax code: On their forms, taxpayers will have to submit evidence of adequate insurance or, unless they qualify for a hardship exemption, pay a penalty.” Her logic: if a criminal such as Charlie Rangel can write it into the tax code, then print it on a tax form, it must be constitutional.

Liberals equate a justice who rules in a strict constructionist manner, a radical right-winger, and a justice who commits judicial activism to the detriment of the Constitution, as champions of progressivism. The Left wring their hands and gnashes their teeth when a ruling aligns itself with the original intent of the Constitution; a ruling that follows a strict constructionist’s interpretation is rarely sympathetic to the Left’s ideology. But, though the Left bemoans the fact that the current Supreme Court is far too “conservative,” even the most ardent of constructionists on the court are a far cry from being strict constructionists.

No one sitting justice on the Supreme Court could be considered an absolute constructionist. An absolute constructionist would, if presented a case, disassemble FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and eradicate 95% of all federal laws unconstitutionally tied to the Commerce Clause. Only a handful of federal judges would be left in the aftermath, as there would be little for them to do. The entire 95% of the laws, incidentally, could be found between the election of FDR in 1932 and the current Obama administration. This anecdotal analysis does not intend to label Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito as quasi-constructionists; the intent is to merely emphasize the impossible position that justices face when confronting laws of such unconstitutional nature that have nevertheless become so ingrained in American society and jurisprudence that it is an impossibility to untangle and correct from the bench. It is impossible to disencumber America from these laws; how would a sitting justice even begin to untangle an unconstitutional entitlement program, such as Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, etc., into which the entire workforce of the United States has paid by having the premiums involuntarily pilfered from their paychecks the entirety of their working lives, in the stead of investing the funds into personal retirement accounts?

This blatantly unconstitutional health care bill and its mandate forcing Americans to purchase health care insurance, either under the guise of the Welfare Clause or the Commerce Clause, would be on par with the perpetually lamentable New Deal fiascoes. The most pathetic aspect of this bill is not the exposed abject ignorance and/or disdain that Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Congress have demonstrated regarding the Constitution, but the overwhelming number of constitutionally illiterate apologists, such as Ruth Marcus, who come skulking about from their burrows when an opportunity arises to abrogate the Constitution, and thus, the American way of life.

Ruth Marcus is guilty of affecting commerce in a negative manner on two occasions about which I am personally aware: 1) the time she spent composing her article deprived the economy of currency she would have spent if she had gone shopping at a local bookstore and purchased The Federalist Papers, a copy of the Constitution, a book on the Constitutional Convention debates, and a couple of non-politically correct history books, which she desperately needs; 2) the five to ten minutes I spent reading her article, when I could have been shopping online at amazon.com searching for the book, Why do Harvard and Yale Law School Graduates Know so Little About Constitutional Law and so Little About the Constitution?

Otto von Bismarck, the Prime Minister of Prussia from 1862-1890, made a remarkable statement regarding the process of making of laws that is oft quoted by contemporary politicians to mask their inadequacies and philistinism: Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made. But Democrats, being what Democrats are, could surmise their methodology of lawmaking with the following updated and apropos quote:  Laws are like excrement, it is better not to see them being made, nor admire the result.

The ensuing are parts of a process that should never have been seen, the process of making dung out of what should be an opportunity for tweaking some misalignments within the healthcare industry to the benefit of all citizens. Since the process was revealed, we can now publicly examine the process of four dung beetles assiduously laboring away.

Scenario: You are 30 years old, perfectly healthy, live a healthy lifestyle, have accumulated in excess of six-figures of investments for your future, a six-figure income, no health insurance since you feel it prudent not to pay for a service rarely needed at this juncture of your life, and see no cost benefit in purchasing insurance, as you would rather invest your money to offset a bankrupting Social Security for your retirement. There is a rapping at the door, you answer, and the scourge of civility, the IRS, charge in, handcuff you, and whisk you away. The result: $25,000 fine (tax), and one year in jail for not purchasing health insurance. Sound fantastical? Not if Thomas Barthold, Democrat, the chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation in Congress, has his way.

Sen. John Ensign, Republican, questioned Barthold’s racketeering approach to mandating the purchase of health insurance, and Barthold replied that the IRS would “take you to court and undertake normal collection proceedings” for not purchasing health insurance. Ensign informed the committee that this is unconstitutional, as the Congress does not have the authority to mandate the purchase of health insurance. Ensign elaborated, “We could be subjecting those very people who conscientiously, because they believe in the U.S. Constitution, we could be subjecting them to fines or the interpretation of a judge, all the way up to imprisonment. That seems to me to be a problem.” The committee considered the fact that it is probably unconstitutional, then summarily rejected an amendment to eliminate the mandate. Thomas Barthold then sent Ensign a personal note detailing the extortion:

Click to enlarge

Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican, in the accustomed and obtuse execution of her job, thought it would be a good idea to vote with the Democrats to imprison American citizens who choose not to purchase health insurance. She, incidentally, was the only Republican to approve and applaud the creating of a criminal class consisting of self-reliant Americans. In addition to the criminal aspect of the Democrat’s bill, if one purchases an expensive insurance policy to protect oneself and one’s family, the Democrats will tax the insurance plan as punishment for being self-reliant, and if one chooses not to purchase a plan, even if it is unaffordable, in addition to being imprisoned and paying a $25,000 tax, a $3,800 fine will be assessed. In essence, the Democrat’s healthcare bill will tax you, fine you, then jail you. This Democratic health care plan, as history dictates, will result in the same consequence as all other Democrat middle-class rescue plans: quality of health care will diminish for most Americans, while the middle-class will not be unscathed by taxes, as they will bear the brunt of the cost, and when the impact has crested, every American will be the worse for wear.

Rep. Alan Grayson, Democrat, in raw Jungian type casting, reverted to the Democrat’s weapon of instinct: sophomoric pejoratives. Grayson called the Republicans who disagreed with the wholesale destruction of America’s health care system, “foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.” Grayson, after an unparalleled display of anthropological genius, thought it judicial to compare the U.S. healthcare system to the Holocaust: thus, “I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.” Naturally, this assertion must be buttressed by the assumption that the U.S. healthcare system engages in, as opposed to saving lives, the wanton mass slaughter and reckless destruction of life. Grayson characterized the Republican plan as, “don’t get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.”

Never one to be bested in imbecilic competition, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Democrat, quickly dove into the fracas with her indefensible defense of Grayson. “There is no reason for Alan Grayson to apologize for his die quickly remark,” bleated Pelosi. Pelosi then went further and stated what may well be her magnum opus of prevarication: “We are holding Democrats to a higher standard than their own members.” All this grandstanding by Pelosi as she stops all motions of removing the provost of congressional crime, Charlie Rangel, Democrat, who is in charge of writing tax law, who apparently has broken more tax laws than are written, and has violated almost the entire book of ethics in the Congress.

Pelosi and Grayson, dung beetles numbers two and four, respectively, stated that the Republicans have no health plan. Pelosi said, ”Typically, Republicans would like to use this as distraction because they have no plan.” And Grayson beseeched, “Where is the Republican plan? We’re all waiting to see something that will take care of the pre-existing conditions, to take care of the 40 million Americans who have no coverage at all.”

Yes, where is the Republican plan?

Apparently the three Republican plans, totaling over 400 pages, which have been sitting in Congress since May, don’t count. The Great Uniter, the Breecher of Political Chasms, the Partisan Buster, Barack Obama, has cut off communication with the Republicans regarding healthcare for the past five months. Obama has not invited the GOP leaders to the White House regarding healthcare since April– six months and counting. Where are the plans? In Congress, that’s where the plans are.

The three Republican plans are as follows: 1) A bipartisan coalition produced the “Patients Choice Act of 2009″ in May, of 130 pages. 2) Sen. Jim DeMint, Republican, produced the “Health Care Freedom Plan” of 41 pages. 3) The Republican Study Committee produced the “Empowering Patients First Act” of 130 pages.

The stark difference in the making of the sausage, or in this case, dung, is the size of the bills. The Republican bills each consist of around 130 pages. The Democrats will be in the thousands, with the difference being that the Republican’s plans are about healthcare, the Democrats, not so much, as any bill consisting of several thousand pages is not about healthcare.

Obama has told the GOP leadership that the Democrats and White House have the healthcare reform under control and do not need their help. But when it comes time to vote on it, he sure would appreciate your votes though, that is, if you want to be bi-partisan.

Could there be anything more perverse than to expect a congressman to actually read a bill before voting on it? According to Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the only thing perverse would be to actually read a bill before voting on it.

21-term congressman, John Conyers, while laughing, surmised why the Democrat Party, on its best day, is an ignoble lot. His assurance of continued ignobleness came while addressing the reason lawmakers should not take the time to read the health care bill, or any other bill, for that matter: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

If you never read another printed word or broadcasted opinion defining the morally and intellectually barren Democrat Party, these two sentences uttered by John Conyers embody all you ever need to know about the Democrat Party. It also would not hurt to add a dash of John Conyers history of political corruption and ethics violations, to which he pleaded guilty. Perhaps you could add to the mix his wife Monica Conyers’ recent conviction of taking bribes as a Detroit City Councilwoman. She is free on $250,000 bond and faces 5 years in prison when sentenced.

These Republican form of government apostates who infest the Democrat Party have been labeled anti-American by those who are comfortable with their patriotism, but anti-American is too benign a characterization: they simply lack the aptitude to be Americans.