By Steve Rhodes
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling on Obamacare on Thursday. I’m for a mandate, but I think the mandate as constructed in Obamacare is unconstitutional. Here’s why: I believe the argument that the federal government cannot compel individuals to buy a private product. The important part here is buying a private product.
The federal government compels the purchase of many things. Our taxes buy airplanes and highways and medical research and food inspections. On the local level, property taxes pay for schools regardless of whether you have children enrolled in them; you are forced to pony up either way.
Perhaps more to the point, you have no choice but to be automatically enrolled in Social Security, whose constitutionality was challenged long ago and upheld because of the way it is constructed: your taxes pay for it. You aren’t required to go purchase it in some separate transaction. So in that way it becomes just another government program in which you have no choice but to participate.
And that’s the problem with Obamacare. To construct it in the way of, say, Social Security, it would have to be a program in which you are automatically enrolled, like a single-payer system such as Medicare For All, or at least offered a public option that you could opt out of to participate in the private market.
Forcing citizens to buy a private product from the very profiteers who are in large part responsible for the problem is the worst of all worlds.
Staples vs. Residency
But if Rahm Emanuel’s petition sheets used paper clips instead of staples, the media would have rallied around him and the Illinois Supreme Court would have pissed all over his challengers.
See:
* Rahm’s Rules: Part 1
* Rahm’s Rules: Part 2
Rahm’s Restaurants
Let food trucks park wherever they damn well want, please. If brick-and-mortar crybabies don’t like it, they should get in the game themselves.
*
Ald. Tom Tunney is co-sponsoring the ordinance, WBEZ reports.
Tunney, of course, owns the immobile Ann Sather’s. In his first campaign he promised to divest himself of his interest in the restaurant but later reneged.
Maybe put those cinnamon buns on the road, dude, and you’ll change your mind.
Where’s Junior?
“A Jackson spokesman refused to say whether the congressman was in Illinois or was even in a medical facility, but he did beat back a rumor that Jackson was staying at a hotel in Puerto Rico. ‘That would be absurd,’ said the spokesman, Frank Watkins,” the Tribune reports.
No, Frank, what’s absurd is that a United States congressman is being kept in an undisclosed location.
We already have a United States senator whose health status has been shrouded in secrecy and we lived through the hidden medical mysteries of the Stroger family. It’s not acceptable and it’s going to come out anyway. Fill us in; Jackson works for us and you can’t just disappear from your job without telling your boss where you are.
Regional Bias
Avoiding the obvious: Rich white kids smoking pot are viewed differently by society than poor black kids smoking pot.
What’s Your Policy?
There’s no money except for when there is.
Tweeting Rizzo
The antidote to the hype.
And Stay Out
“An ‘enraged’ employee of a [Chicago] Chinese restaurant threw a customer through a glass door, shattering it and injuring her, because she ‘politely requested more sauce packets’ for her takeout order, the woman claims in court,” Courthouse News Service reports.
Doesn’t mean it’s true, but either way it sounds like there’s a good (terrible) story here.
Collaborative Brewing
It’s very crafty.
Spare Part Or New Start?
Youk.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Crafty.
Posted on June 27, 2012