OPINION:
Once upon a time, Founding Fathers gathered and penned one of history’s greatest documents, the Declaration of Independence, including a little line item that went like this: that all are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Now, thanks to a dude named Barack Obama — a dude who fancied himself a constitutional scholar, possessed of a real law degree, no less — we’ve got health care tacked on to that list.
Or, more specifically, government-provided, taxpayer-paid health care.
Now, thanks to Obama and his hard left supporters, tax-paid medical coverage has become a right — like breathing. Like life itself. It’s no longer an individual responsibility, a familial obligation, a personal choice.
It’s no longer something that ought to be part of the adult planning process.
Take a read at this, a little line Obama slipped into the middle of his acceptance speech of his 2017 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award this past Sunday. Why’d he win? For exhibiting “the qualities of politically courageous leadership,” Time reported.
Gag. He got it for shoving through socialized health care onto a free market-minded America.
But here’s his bigger grand achievement — his crowning historical moment, as stated in his own words.
“I’ve been thinking on this notion of political courage this weekend, in particular about some of the men and women who were elected to Congress the same year I was elected to the White House,” he said, Time reported. “And they found themselves in the midst of a great debate, a debate that had been going on for decades … a debate about whether a nation as wealthy as the United States of America would finally make healthcare not a privilege but a right for all Americans.”
Hear the thud?
That’s the sound of a republic crashing.
It’s not just Obama and his fan club. Even Republicans on Capitol Hill — Republicans who used to talk about the free market, the power of the individual over collective, the Founding Father intent for constitutional interpretation, the need for a moral and virtuous public to preserve the republic — are now talking about how best to fix Obamacare.
Not repeal.
Not trash.
But fix.
How is that now-Republican argument any different from the one made by Democrats? At root, the logic from both parties now goes like this: We’re here from the government, and we’re here to fix the problem.
Ronald Reagan had an assessment of that line of thinking. He called it terrifying — and how true. Sadly, he’s the last president to think that way. And sadder still, he represents a dying breed of Republican.
Republicans — Republicans who have a clean sweep of the House, the Senate and the White House — somehow still feel the need to step into Democratic territory to make their arguments. They apparently don’t think having a voter-stamped majority is enough legislative firepower to rip out one of the most constitutionally unsound laws to come across Capitol Hill desks in decades.
So what the Supreme Court ruled it OK? Big whoop. The justices, thanks to squishy John Roberts and his bag of magic beans called “It’s a Tax,” created the constitutional where none existed. Justices can be wrong; note to Republicans: they were.
So why aren’t Republicans, in the majority, tossing this offensiveness to the Constitution called Obamacare?
Why are they chatting up the Democratic game and bragging how they’re going to fix it?
Here’s why, short and simple: They believe in it now.
Republicans, after battling for years — nay, decades — for a return to constitutional, limited government, the kind where accountability, rule of law and individual responsibility is key, have finally given up the ghost. They’ve turned the corner and ceded the point of all points.
They no longer fight for what made our nation so great, so tremendous and so admirable at its founding — the fact that in our country, individual rights come from God, not government. That’s how Founding Fathers saw it. That’s the root of all our freedoms.
But Republicans have finally, stealthily, joined in with the left, the Democrats, the socialists, the progressives, and quietly, very quietly, admitted among themselves: Yes, health care is a right.
And now it’s up to the government to make sure each and every American man, woman and child will see that right upheld.
This is an earth-shattering shift in thinking, one that goes beyond boding darkly for the taxpayer.
Once again, in the clearest language possible: This nation was built on the concept that rights come from God, not government.
One may make the argument that health falls under the pursuit of happiness clause of the Declaration of Independence. One may make the argument that God would want His people healthy. But one cannot make the argument that taking money from Peter to pay Paul’s medical bills is constitutionally sound or morally proper.
Once more, for the people in the back of the room: Health care is an individual responsibility, a personal choice — something that, in this nation, should be seen in the same light as choosing which food to buy, which home to purchase. And any politico on Capitol Hill who isn’t making that argument is not only enabling the left, but also destroying the last vestiges of our country’s greatness — the concept of God first, the individual, second, and the collective, a dim third.
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