John Adams comparing Boston and Philadelphia:
“Phyladelphia, with all its trade and wealth and regularity, is not Boston. The morals of our people are much better; their manners are more polite and agreeable… Our language is better, our taste is better, our persons are handsomer; our spirit is greater, our laws are wiser, our religion is better, our education is better. We exceed them in every thing, but in a market.”
Peggy Noonan’s latest column — “Obama Has a Good Day (But liberty has a bad one)” — complains that “The ruling strikes me as very bad for the atmosphere of freedom in our country.”
You know, that wonderful freedom to choose not to have health insurance, crash your motorcycle into a truck, and stick your fellow Americans with hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills for your care. I’m sure that’s what the Founding Fathers saw as the essence of freedom, a God-given right to be a burden and a free-loader.
The GOP’s betrayal of the individual mandate they loved for two decades is worthy of John Edwards.
If the individual mandate had become law under President Bush or a President McCain, we all know Noonan would have been cheer-leading in a column that read “The ruling strikes me as very good for the atmosphere of personal responsibility in our country.”
However you feel about Obamacare, today was an excellent day for our system of government.
John Roberts did his job. The question before him was not whether or not he liked Obamacare, whether this was the law he would have written, but whether this law that Congress passed and the President signed is constitutional.
He found that it is, under Congress’ power to tax.
Back on March 26, I wrote that this might be the outcome, based on Roberts’ stance during oral arguments. Opponents of the individual mandate had sought to distinguish the mandate itself from the fine (or tax) that would be assessed, and Roberts rejected that distinction as ridiculous.
Roberts is getting a ton of grief from his fellow conservatives, but our Founding Fathers would be proud. He did the right thing for the Court and the country. I’ll be mad at him again, I’m sure, but today he has my respect and admiration.
Those of you who read my pieces know that I would have taken a different approach to health care reform from Obamacare, but I have never doubted that it is constitutional. So I celebrate this result.
A new book about the British royal family, Not in Front of the Corgis, by Brian Hoey, reveals that one of Prince Charles’ valets (he has three, out of a staff of 133) irons his shoelaces whenever the Prince takes off his shoes.
All these years I’ve been going around with un-ironed shoelaces! I hope you have too. Otherwise, you are crazy.
And our Founding Fathers thought George III was insane.
Embattled Farmers 