By Daniel Downs
The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments about the constitutionality of Obamacare. In many ways, the Court will decide the future of American liberty. The Justices will determine whether federal bureaucrats can dictate the purchase of consumer services and goods. The Court will also determine whether Congress and the President can continue increasing government programs and ever-increasing debt burden on American workers, business, investors, and families. In a recent program, Glen Beck compared the number of new agencies created by FDR’s New Deal to the astronomical increase of federal agencies created under Obamacare (see Beck’s video). Liberty Legal Foundation is challenging this issue and related tax code and debt escalation that will incur to the American people. More importantly, the Foundation will attempt to convince the Supreme Court to overturn the source of the problem. That problem is Wickard v Filburn that essentially handed Congress unfettered powers to enlarge federal authority over all aspects of our individual and corporate lives under the Commerce Clause as well as to ever increase the national debt.
As you can see in the chart below, the Wickard ruling opened the floodgates to federal regulations, new federal agencies, astronomical increases of new federal tax codes, federal spending, and federal debt.
The options to force Congress to limit its continued bureaucratic growth are few. One is get Congress to pass law regulating its own creation of debt producing regulations. However, the long debated balance budget legislation and tax reform along the lines of the Fair Tax or flat tax proposal have consistently been voted down. Even if Congress forced itself to balance the budget, its unaccountable growth of power and spending would merely be slowed. Congress still would not have to seek the approval of the citizens its members supposedly represent, which leads to the unlikely passage of an amendment to the Constitution to make Congress seek voter approval for debt increasing legislation. The best solution to reigning in Congress’s seemingly uncontrollable efforts to regulate our daily lives and spending too much of our money is to change how the Congress, the Executive branch and the Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause.
Let’s hope and pray that the argument to be presented by Liberty Legal Foundation lawyers convince the Supreme Court to overturn Wickard.
To learn more about Liberty Legal Foundation’s suit against Obamacare, go to http://libertylegalfoundation.org.