House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) gave a celebratory speech to Congress on Wednesday, the same week as the two-year anniversary of the Affordable Health Care Act, evoking the core principles of the Declaration of Independence— life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She could hardly contain her glee:
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is exactly what the Affordable Health Care Act helps to guarantee. A healthier life, the liberty to pursue happiness, free of the constraints that a lack of health care might provide to a family. If you want to be a photographer, a writer, an artist, a musician, you can do so. If you want to start a business, if you want to change jobs, under the Affordable Care Act, you have that liberty to pursue your happiness. And that is why I am so pleased that this week we can celebrate the two year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.
Time to start the party.
If you want to pursue your dream career, change your job, or start your own business, the government is here to say you can do so! (Imagine the commemoratory events planned in offices around the country this week: colorful streamers falling from drop ceiling tiles, balloons strung from fire sprinkler heads and Obama’s glowing smile supplanted on “Happy Birthday” sheet cakes.)
I have another idea of what could help those Americans trapped in dead-end jobs, shackled with their inevitable pursuit of depression: capital. Anyone who wants to start their own business needs capital. Why not create a law that anyone who writes a persuasive letter to the federal government, expressing their heartfelt plea for the funds needed to cover start-up costs such as three years of salary, equipment costs and legal fees, will receive a check in the mail? Mrs. Pelosi certainly would support that idea. After all, having sufficient capital to start your own business is the very definition of pursuing happiness.
Although we have many Americans who do not want to be small business owners, their letter would look slightly different. “I have not been on a family vacation in two years, and my kids really want to meet Goofy at Disney World. Can you send a check for $3,000?”
Critics quickly poke holes in my suggestions: but we’re not talking about free vacations; we are talking about providing health care. Health care saves lives. And that provides all Americans life, liberty and the ability to pursue happiness.
Is that so? To what end?
Daniel Webster (1782-1852), a leading American statesman and senator from Massachusetts, as well as a U.S. Congressman and U.S. Secretary of State, presented a testimony before the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in 1840, persuasively arguing for the people’s rights to establish qualifications for their elected officials. Early in his testimony Webster said, “No man can be said to have a right to that which others may withhold from him at pleasure.”
That statement, another harbinger for our times, like so many of our Founding Fathers’ words, rebukes our modern-day governmental philosophy that more is better and much more is best. The temptation of holding office coincides with the temptation to trade handouts for reelection. Webster continued:
There may be among legislators strong passions and bad passions. There may be party heats and personal bitterness. But legislation is in its nature general: laws usually affect the whole society; and if mischievous or unjust, the whole society is alarmed and seeks their repeal. The judiciary power, on the other hand, acts directly on individuals. The injured may suffer without sympathy or the hope of redress.
Nancy Pelosi and her counterparts grossly augment their realm of legislative authority by extending “the pursuit of happiness” to include health care coverage. Again, no citizen is denied health care when needed. But that same citizen is required, by law, to pay for services rendered. But the damaging ramifications of the Affordable Health Care Act “benefit” only a portion of the public, rather than protect the general welfare of the whole.
(What better protects the general welfare of the whole than removing government from health insurance? Just look to the housing market as our “lesson learned.”)
Additionally, handing out checks to entrepreneurs does not benefit the whole. The same can be said for food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment insurance, child tax credits, Earned Income Tax Credit, student loans and government-subsidized housing.
No limits exist on the government’s ability to grant a benefit, cloaked in the right to pursue happiness, so long as the government denies the spirit of the Constitution and their limited legislative powers. And no elected official can pervert their legislative ability amongst a society that seeks their repeal.
Like Webster asserted to his Convention, “If he dislikes the condition, he may decline the office in like manner as if he dislikes the salary, the rank, or any thing else which the law attaches to it.” And if he chooses not to decline, we the people can remove. Because we are the government.
Happy Anniversary.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Earlier this week, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, penned a letter in response to recent visits by White House officials to the group of Catholic Bishops. In an effort to soothe the fiery debate ignited in recent weeks due to the Obama Administration’s mandate on private insurers providing its customers contraception coverage, the church leaders and White House staff discussed “the options.” Dolan’s letter, addressed to his Conference of Catholic Bishops, reaffirms the unapologetic position by the White House:
How fortunate that we as a body have had opportunities during our past plenary assemblies to manifest our strong unity in defense of religious freedom. We rely on that unity now more than ever as HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] seeks to define what constitutes church ministry and how it can be exercised.
The HHS seeks to constitute church ministry and how it can be exercised? This untoward conversation greatly concerned Dolan when White House officials further clarified their position:
At a recent meeting between staff of the bishops’ conference and the White House staff, our staff members asked directly whether the broader concerns of religious freedom—that is,revisiting the straight-jacketing mandates, or broadening the maligned exemption—are all off the table. They were informed that they are. So much for 'working out the wrinkles.' Instead, they advised the bishops’ conference that we should listen to the 'enlightened' voices of accommodation, such as the recent, hardly surprising yet terribly unfortunate editorial in America. The White House seems to think we bishops simply do not know or understand Catholic teaching and so, taking a cue from its own definition of religious freedom, now has nominated its own handpicked official Catholic teachers.
Even though these conversations existed within the walls of the Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Washington D.C. offices, Dolan makes it clear why the contraception mandate should concern all of us:
They know that this is not just about sterilization, abortifacients, and chemical contraception. It’s about religious freedom, the sacred right of any Church to define its own teaching and ministry.
With a President and his Administration who are not concerned with the fundamental rights granted to our religious organizations— because to do so would require a pause, for a few moments, ruminating the original intent of the U.S. Government, which we can all agree is not going to happen— the argument must come to fruition from citizens leading laborious debates rooted in limited government and individual freedom.
It is no surprise that the White House believes themselves to be more enlightened than this 46-year old institution that has driven humanitarian efforts alongside past and the present Popes. An institution as grandiose as the government, capable of altering school lunches while juggling CEO compensation plans, vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards and plastic bag usage, surely can deliver the exceptional alternative to the Catholic Church.
It is the very fact that we have allowed our government to take on the role of god that it believes it is god.
In his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.” The distorted control we have granted to our elected officials has existed for some time, peaking in our present scenario of an entitlement, welfare-laden state, leading directly to the throne of federally-funded morality (or immorality).
But what we also have today is an opportunity to reshape the debate. The fact that Americans are debating whether the federal government should require private, non-profit and religious organizations to provide contraception to individuals is both good and bad. The argument is good because people who question the acts of their government are people who have the potential to react to unjust laws. The argument is bad because we must entertain the argument at all. King wrote:
[T]here is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
Tension exists today— from Sandra Fluke’s passionate testimony pleading for financial provision from the government to support the co-ed lifestyle, to the Susan G. Komen Foundation entering the stage of public disapproval for its decision to cut its voluntary donations to Planned Parenthood (only to reverse course), to the Obama Administration defunding the Embryo Adoption Awareness Campaign in lieu of a “lack of interest” from the public— and we are talking.
Every enactment of an Obama Administration law and regulation supplies the Conservative aggregation a fresh opportunity to create tension, but we should approach the theatre of thought with the simplicity of the facts, rather than the subjectivity of public opinion.
After all, opinions change. Truth does not. King reminds us that “human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”
How fortunate that we as a body have had opportunities during our past plenary assemblies to manifest our strong unity in defense of religious freedom. We rely on that unity now more than ever as HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] seeks to define what constitutes church ministry and how it can be exercised.
The HHS seeks to constitute church ministry and how it can be exercised? This untoward conversation greatly concerned Dolan when White House officials further clarified their position:
At a recent meeting between staff of the bishops’ conference and the White House staff, our staff members asked directly whether the broader concerns of religious freedom—that is,revisiting the straight-jacketing mandates, or broadening the maligned exemption—are all off the table. They were informed that they are. So much for 'working out the wrinkles.' Instead, they advised the bishops’ conference that we should listen to the 'enlightened' voices of accommodation, such as the recent, hardly surprising yet terribly unfortunate editorial in America. The White House seems to think we bishops simply do not know or understand Catholic teaching and so, taking a cue from its own definition of religious freedom, now has nominated its own handpicked official Catholic teachers.
Even though these conversations existed within the walls of the Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Washington D.C. offices, Dolan makes it clear why the contraception mandate should concern all of us:
They know that this is not just about sterilization, abortifacients, and chemical contraception. It’s about religious freedom, the sacred right of any Church to define its own teaching and ministry.
With a President and his Administration who are not concerned with the fundamental rights granted to our religious organizations— because to do so would require a pause, for a few moments, ruminating the original intent of the U.S. Government, which we can all agree is not going to happen— the argument must come to fruition from citizens leading laborious debates rooted in limited government and individual freedom.
It is no surprise that the White House believes themselves to be more enlightened than this 46-year old institution that has driven humanitarian efforts alongside past and the present Popes. An institution as grandiose as the government, capable of altering school lunches while juggling CEO compensation plans, vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards and plastic bag usage, surely can deliver the exceptional alternative to the Catholic Church.
It is the very fact that we have allowed our government to take on the role of god that it believes it is god.
In his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.” The distorted control we have granted to our elected officials has existed for some time, peaking in our present scenario of an entitlement, welfare-laden state, leading directly to the throne of federally-funded morality (or immorality).
But what we also have today is an opportunity to reshape the debate. The fact that Americans are debating whether the federal government should require private, non-profit and religious organizations to provide contraception to individuals is both good and bad. The argument is good because people who question the acts of their government are people who have the potential to react to unjust laws. The argument is bad because we must entertain the argument at all. King wrote:
[T]here is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
Tension exists today— from Sandra Fluke’s passionate testimony pleading for financial provision from the government to support the co-ed lifestyle, to the Susan G. Komen Foundation entering the stage of public disapproval for its decision to cut its voluntary donations to Planned Parenthood (only to reverse course), to the Obama Administration defunding the Embryo Adoption Awareness Campaign in lieu of a “lack of interest” from the public— and we are talking.
Every enactment of an Obama Administration law and regulation supplies the Conservative aggregation a fresh opportunity to create tension, but we should approach the theatre of thought with the simplicity of the facts, rather than the subjectivity of public opinion.
After all, opinions change. Truth does not. King reminds us that “human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”
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