US Chamber Ad against Sen Nelson

Published on May 9, 2012 by USCC

True Meaning of the Commerce Clause

Important information submitted by our member, Sally Hayes:

Since I believe this is such an important part of the puzzle of whether or not the Supreme Court will overturn Obamacare, perhaps you would consider putting it in our Patriot News.

The Obama administration argues that the power to order U.S.citizens to purchase life insurance arises from the Commerce Clause.  Article2, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution reads that Congress is granted the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”

However, former New Jersey Judge Andrew Napolitano believes that we should interpret this clause based on its original intent.  He notes that this section was written “…to protect the freedom to trade.  Madison used the word ‘regulate,’ which to him and his colleagues meant “to keep regular” So, the Constitution delegated to Congress the constitutional power to keep interstate commerce regular by prohibiting state tariffs, and it did so.”

The article goes on to say, “Madison’s own words confirm that point.  In an 1829 letter, the man known as “the Father of the Constitution” wrote that the regulatory power delegated to Congress “grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government, in which alone, however, the remedial power could be lodged.”

Sincerely,

Sally Hayes

(Reference: The New American,, April 23, 2012 edition,  Inside Track article entitled “Broccoli, ObamaCare, and the Commerce Clause”

Page 8,

Sante Fe College Sponsoring Socialized Medicine Forum!

Plan to attend a seminar featuring a union Labor Party co-chair teaching our college students about government healthcare. This is what is wrong with our colleges - a LABOR UNION official is the expert?

SEE THE FOLLOWING NOTICE! TRY TO ATTEND!

Single-Payer Health-Care Forum at Santa Fe College:

When: Friday, April 20th, 2:00 PM

Where: Santa Fe College’s main campus, Building P
Room 160

50 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. HAVE
NO HEALTH INSURANCE. MILLIONS
MORE GO WITHOUT CARE BECAUSE
THEY CAN’T AFFORD IT. INADEQUATE
COVERAGE IS THE #1 CAUSE OF BANKRUPTCY.
The Health Services Administration Student
Association (HSASA) of Santa Fe College is
inviting SF students, faculty, and the public
to attend a special single-payer health-care
forum. Dr. Hood (Labor Party co-chair) will
discuss problems with our current health-care
system, explore why it costs twice as much as
other countries without us being healthier,
and explain how a single-payer national
health-care system would cover all Americans
and still save money.
Please invite your friends on Facebook!

OBAMA SLAMS ‘ACTIVIST’ SUPREME COURT, CALLS THEM ‘AN UNELECTED GROUP OF PEOPLE’

Although the Supreme Court has not yet announced its decision on Obamacare, it has undoubtedly already been made.  President Obama says in the video below that he is “pretty confident” (that the Court will not overturn this blatantly unconstitutional law).  But when you watch it, watch him, and ask yourself if this looks and sounds like a confident man?

Can you imagine how Obama will react when Obamacare, this law that bears his name, is declared  unconstitutional (God willing!).  It is obvious to not only the president, but the whole world, that this will be a rejection or Obama himself.  I think that will be too much for him when this happens.

Here’s a portion of the text from the video:  “… uh ultimately I’m confident that the Supreme Court uh will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning uh a law that was passed by a strong majority of uh a democratically elected congress.  And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint that uh an unelected uh group of people would somehow overturn uh a duly constituted and passed uh law. Well, this uh a good example and I’m pretty confident that this court uh will recognize that and not take that step.”

It’s important to note that when Obama speaks of an “unelected group of people,” he fails to mention all of his czars, his many “recess” appointments, and the fact that much of the meat of Obamacare, the things that will do the most damage to our nation and its citizens is not even in the law itself.  It lies in the many thousands of pages in the regulations written (or yet to be written) by kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  Talk about your “unelected group of people”.  Maybe this is what Nancy Pelosi really meant when she said: “…but we have to pass the bill so that you can uh find out what is in it.”

The Joys of Government Run Healthcare

  Bureaucracy

Man’s condition deemed permanent

When Evert Stefansson of Nykoping, Sweden, initally made his request for a powered wheelchair, officials declined, citing their doubt in the permanence of his impairment. Both of Stefansson’s legs were amputated due to complications from diabetes. It’s sort of permanent. After a month of being mocked in local media, officials reconsidered and approved his request. “It’s weird that one has to scream so loud in order to get them to listen,” Stefansson’s wife, Siv, said.

Compiled from wire services and other sources by staff writer Jim Webster, who can be reached at jwebster@tampabay.com.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/bizarre/the-skinny-after-58-years-man-is-square-with-city-for-1/1208016

Obamacare Birthday

Selling Socialism: The Media’s Campaign for ObamaCare

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of ObamaCare, but if the media were the judges, the Court would rule 9-0 in favor of it. During its coverage of the health care debate, the liberal press never permitted questions about ObamaCare’s legality to interfere with their dream of a government takeover of the health care sector.

Starting even before Barack Obama became President, the press has been campaigning hard for passage of the most liberal version of health care reform as a cure-all elixir to all of America’s health problems. First, they pitched the public on the desperate need to, as ABC’s Dr. Tim Johnson demanded, fix America’s “national shame” of no universal coverage.  Continue reading at: mrc.org.

Sign the Petition: NO OBAMACARE!

This is an important petition to sign as it sends a strong message to the Supreme Court that the citizens of our country DO NOT WANT OBAMACARE! Americans for Prosperity are diligently fighting for frredom in our health care system and needs your help!

Dear Freedom Fighter,

Later on this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of several parts of the President’s wildly unpopular health care package. While the President and his allies managed to force this health care package on the American people two years ago, now we have a chance to get it  overturned with your help.

Americans for Prosperity has been a leader on the issue of healthcare reform since 2008. We’re working to show how the individual mandate is unconstitutional, and we believe the entire health care law must be struck down.

That’s why we’re making sure  all of Washington knows we oppose the unconstitutional affront to our health care freedoms. On March 27, we’re going to hold a rally opposing the health care bill, and present the Supreme Court with a statement, signed by thousands of patriotic Americans, asking the court to strike down this unconstitutional bill. We need your help to send a message toWashington.

Will you sign our statement, asking the Court to strike down this unconstitutional threat to our health care freedoms?

Please make your voice heard today, and remind Washington that the President’s health care law is both unconstitutional and a threat to our freedom.

Sign AFP’s statement to the Court today.

For liberty,

Tim Phillips

President, Americans for Prosperity

To access the petition click here…http://americansforprosperity.org/handsoff/index.htm

SCARY STUFF! ObamaCare Subjects Nearly Every Phone and Computer to Government Control

As we have been again reminded by the Barack Obama Administration’s fraudulent Sandra Fluke, abortion-pill-and-birth-control assault on the First Amendment, we are staring down the barrel of the ObamaCare gun.

Its 2014 full-on implementation will lead inexorably to more and more rescissions of our Constitutional rights, a downward spiral of poorer, slower medical attention, rationing thereof – and ultimately all of us herded into the government-only Communal Care Pit.  Continue reading on Breitbart.com which to the left’s dismay is still very much alive!

Of Condoms and Coppertone, or Maternity and Melanoma

By David Folsom – Titusville Patriots

Much energy has been expended in the past few weeks regarding the Obama/Sebelius mandate that religious groups cover the full cost of contraceptives.

The administration came out with their version of “compromise” allowing the religious groups themselves exemption, but mandating that their insurers cover the cost. Great example of Democrats’ “compromise.”

Any opposition to the mandate by Republicans was met as usual with the Democrat response of “Another Republican war on women.”

It seems that to NOT require a religious group to pay for a product or service that violates their sacred beliefs denies an employee the freedom to procure the product or service herself. This has been portrayed as an attack on women’s health.

Contraceptives, from condoms to ortho-novum, are used to prevent a medical condition – maternity.

Maternal Mortality rates range from 2,000 per 100,000 pregnancies in Siera Leone to zero per 100,000 in Ireland. According to the WHO, the U.S. comes in around #3 with 11 per 100,000 pregnancies. 1/100 of 1% of those women who become pregnant die as a direct or indirect result of the pregnancy.

The primary mortality factor is complications from abortion, an irony that Democrats never seem to mention. At any rate, to force women who work for religious organizations to pay for their own contraceptives or go without violates the fraudulently famous “Separation of Church and State” which we all know is Paragraph 1, Section 1 of our Constitution.

Having never actually FOUND the text itself, I guess that separation goes only in one direction.

If failure to require employers/insurers to fully pay for condoms for women is a war against women, should employers/insurers not ALSO be required to fully pay for Coppertone and Ray-Bans?

Melanoma is the #1 cancer risk in the U.S., and fair-skinned groups the most at risk. Of the fair-skinned groups, the mortality rate for men is twice that for women. Have the Democrats declared war on men? Specifically white men?

The incidence and mortality climbed for melanoma in the 1973-1994 period with an increase of 26% for men, 22% for women. From 1990-1994 the increase for men was 6.8%, while women actually had a decrease of 1.3%.

But insurance coverage for Coppertone and sunglasses is completely ABSENT from the Democrats’ health plan. I see no explanation other than the fact that Democrats want to eliminate men, especially fair-skinned men.

Looking around Washington, it appears they have at least emasculated them.

Next: Poor dental health kills more people than pregnancy, yet toothpaste and floss are ALSO absent from the democrats’ health care plan. The reason?

/

New Tax on Health Insurers To Facilitate Rationed Care

A new tax to fund research to validate rationing medical care starts this year.

“Beginning in 2012, Uncle Sam will charge insurance companies a new fee to fund the PCORI’s research. The tax will be $1 per person in 2012 and will double in 2013 and increase with inflation in the following years. Insurers will soon receive guidance on the new tax from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).”

“This latest semi-secret tax is being levied so the feds will have the necessary cash to pay bureaucrats to examine everyone’s health records and, in turn, the government can save money by cutting back on care. The official plan, as noted by Judicial Watch’s blog this week, is to conduct research to find out which drugs, medical procedures, tests and treatments work best.”

“As with other corporate taxes, Americans can expect to have the additional fees passed on to them through either higher premiums or reduced coverage.

Obama has already given this sort of medical effectiveness research a big chunk of change. In fact, his disastrous 2009 economic stimulus bill included more than $1 billion for this kind of work through a different government agency.”

Full article…http://www.newswithviews.com/NWV-News/news292.htm

Are You Seventy? Want to be Seventy Someday?

“Some of us are nearing 70, over 70, or know and love someone who is.   The articles in the Health Care Bill that are alarming are coming to light thanks to Physicians who are being prepared for the change.   This bill takes us back a century in the medical field.   Help is there and will be denied.  Restructure? – The quality of life and care [will be] in the hands of bureaucrats rather physicians.” – Hat tip: Tea Party Tribune

A Message for Doctors – A Warning for Patients

I received the following article from the author, Dr. David McKalip, a Florida neurosurgeon.  It was originally published on 12/1/2011 on his blog,
SUNBEAMTIMES.COM:

This is a long post but I urge you to read it.  And read it as if you’re your life depends on it – because it does.  Talk to your doctor at your next visit.  Ask your doctor what YOU can do to take more responsibility for your medical care and to help preserve the physician/patient relationship and keep big government out of medical decisions.

The post begins here:

I sent this out to a large group of doctors today in Pinellas County.  It should serve as a warning to patients. Doctors are being transformed into a group that you may not be able to trust with your lives.  Make sure that you ask questions when you see your doctor. Make sure they are working for you and are more concerned about your interests than the interests of their employer, hospital, insurance company or government.  You can see this sort of doctor to avoid in this You Tube video from Dr. Truth Hurts

Serving the Patient and Not the Collective – Protect your Patients First and Your Own Moral Future.

Recently I was engaged in a conversation with two prominent members of our medical staff in the doctor’s dining room.  The main points we were arguing was whether physicians had an ethical duty to preserve social resources and to ration care for the collective good or if their primary job should be to serve the patient and consider financial issues in a secondary way.  I was alarmed that these two trusted colleagues of mine vociferously defended the position that physicians had a positive duty to defend the financial resources of the state or the insurance company and must be part of a rationing scheme to do it.  They went as far to agree that it is okay to deny care – such as Avastin for advanced breast cancer – if it only added a “few months” to the life of a patient.  I pointed out that many younger women had dutifully paid their insurance premiums expecting that maximum effective treatment would be provided, even if it had a known rate of failure.    I asserted that our duty is to the patient and if we become mere rationing agents for the state, we are no longer professionals. In fact, if we ration for the state I would suggest that we are not doctors at all, but merely cogs in some nebulous system that serves itself at the expense of individual patients.

I ask you to consider when your practice causes you to be sucked into an amoral system.  You will be asked to sacrifice patients, withhold care, and terminate care early when a reasonable or even small chance of success remains. You will be asked to not tell patients of effective treatments or not to offer them surgeries.  You will be told that you may get a bonus or avoid a penalty if you do so. You may “gain share” with hospital monetary savings or be rewarded in less tangible ways through marketing, referrals, benefits or prestige.   You will be putting yourself and the system before the patient. You will – in short – be asked to violate your conscience to benefit a larger system and will sacrifice your patient on the altar of collectivism.

Don’t do it. Don’t sacrifice your primary duty to the patient. Don’t ration care for the government. Your patients will suffer. Patients will die who could have been saved. You will regret it. You will pay the price later. These moments will come to haunt you and you will live in tortured regret.  If you believe in God as I do, you will be held to account for your actions by a higher authority.

I ask you to read this brief story written by a President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). Dr. Hieb tells the story of Dr. Karl Brandt who transformed from heroic trauma and spinal surgeon to Hitler’s Reich Commander of Health and Sanitation and personal physician.  As you read, pay particular attention to the incremental nature of change that leads to unthinkable evil. While war-torn Germany may seem an extreme example that is not applicable to your situation, think again. The same sort of rationale to managed limited resources is created in Obamacare through Accountable Care Organizations, Pay for Performance, the Complete Lives system, guideline compliance to the government and insurance companies,  Comparative Effectiveness, Control of medical practice through health information technology and and the rationing decisions of the FDA and the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPA.  The pressures to ration will be intense as you are further ground under the system through denial of just payment for services and  added regulatory expenses. Resist the temptation to engage in this immoral behavior. Dr. Brandt was executed for his euthanasia program that was instituted to save resources for the state. He regretted his move later and Hitler ordered his execution as well. Finally it was the Nuremberg Trials that put him to death.  I hope he was able to repent to the point that he found some peace and redemption with God.  May God have mercy on our souls if we choose this path.  Serve your patient first and you will serve yourself, society and God the best.

The Lessons of Karl Brandt

http://www.jpands.org/vol16no1/hieb.pdf in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

Please Join the AAPS to receive important monthly and quarterly updates on how to thrive as more forces seek the utter destruction of the profession of medicine.

The Lessons of Karl Brandt

Lee Hieb, M.D.

Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana famously said that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it. Unfortunately, the converse is not true, i.e. even those who do study history cannot be assured of avoiding the same mistakes.

Tragically, we rarely see history in enough detail to recognize ourselves and our contemporaneous life in previous tragic events. When we look at the grotesque outcome of Nazi medicine, we see only the end results. We do not readily see the small incremental steps that took the German doctors along the path leading to the “crimes against humanity” for which several prominent physicians were executed.

Recently, while rummaging through a book store I happened upon a biography of Karl Brandt. Dr. Brandt, like me, was an orthopaedic spinal surgeon (although in the 1930s physicians were not officially designated by this specialty, that was his field), so the discovery that Brandt was Hitler’s personal doctor caught my attention. If you look for Karl Brandt on the internet, you will only find pictures of him in the docks at Nuremberg, and will read a broad outline concluding that he was hanged for his role in the euthanasia program and for experimentation upon prisoners. It is hard to identify with such a picture. But, look more closely, and for those of us in medicine, his life, his career and the choices he made are frighteningly familiar, contemporary, and personal.

Karl Brandt was born just after the turn of the 19th century, in late Wilhelmine Germany. Karl’s childhood, unlike that of his future employer, epitomized middle-class normality. His father was a policeman, and his mother came from a long line of physicians. The family, living away from major city centers, escaped much of the turmoil of the Weimar era, but not its changing ethos.

Karl grew up at a time when private medicine was being replaced by government medicine. Kaiser Wilhelm II first introduced “free health care” to the German people strictly for political purposes. His advisers thought that bribing the populace with a “little bit of socialism” could prevent wholesale takeover by the increasingly popular Social Democrats. For years, the system worked as advertised, bringing medicine to under-served areas and strengthening the power of the crown.

In fact, Karl’s grandfather was the first government physician (known colloquially as “vaccination doctors”) in his region of Germany. However, as the result of World War I and reparations, the German government ran out of money. And the government medical system had brought about a critical philosophic change: Care that was once done employing individual ethics and Christian charity was now done through a collective ethic and nationalized welfare. When the money ran out, this system of care was no longer available, and only the inefficient bureaucracy remained. As Marc Micozzi wrote in his excellent review of Weimar medicine: “What remained of the humanistic goals of reform were state mechanisms for inspection and regulation of public health and medical practice.” [1]

In this system a young Karl Brandt studied very hard and was given a residency position with the famous surgeon Ernst Sauerbruch. As part of his medical education Brandt was also taught psychiatry by Alfred Hoche, coauthor of the widely discussed pamphlet Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. In this booklet, Hoche and his lawyer coauthor defined three groups of people unworthy to live: the terminally ill who request death, “incurable idiots,” and those in vegetative states such as post-traumatic coma victims. They suggested a government body of doctors, lawyers, and psychiatrists would oversee the selection, judging patients’ economic value to society and applying “cost/benefit” criteria [emphasis mine].

Dr. Brandt’s rendezvous with destiny occurred in the early 1930s when he and his fiancée were enjoying a summer vacation trip. His fiancée had been an Olympic swimmer, and had come to the attention of the new Führer. She was invited for a luncheon at Hitler’s retreat in the mountains, and the couple was driving the last car of the motorcade proceeding to Berchtesgaden. The car ahead of them swerved off the road into the ditch, and the driver—one of Hitler’s inner circle—was severely injured. Dr. Brandt, as a trauma surgeon, leapt to the aid of the injured man, taking him in his own car to a nearby hospital and performing the major surgery himself. During the next few weeks of his vacation, Brandt tended the patient daily until he made a full recovery. Hitler, always fearful of an assassination attempt, and observing the young surgeon in action, asked Brandt to join his staff as his personal surgeon.

Hitler was surrounded by two groups of close confidants—the sycophants who did little work but enjoyed the luxuries of the Führer’s entourage, and the “technocrats” such as Albert Speer—the people who made the country function. Brandt joined the latter group, and to the disgust of the non-technocrats, continued to practice surgery.

Additionally, Brandt took an interest in medical logistics, and during the campaign on the Eastern Front, Brandt frequently visited the war zones. Finding surgeons in scarce supply, he would roll up his sleeves and operate. He soon discovered problems in transporting the wounded back to Germany due to lack of hospital beds. Reporting this to Hitler, Brandt was tasked with researching the problem. He discovered that most of the trauma hospitals had been flattened in the bombing raids on the major cities, and the lack of trauma care was impacting not only the soldiers’ survival, but the mortality rate of civilians injured in the air raids. Brandt found that the psychiatric hospitals, which were generally built out in the countryside, were relatively undamaged and could easily be converted to provide needed surgical suites and wards. But, he also witnessed a nearly total breakdown of coordination of medical services due to the often conflicting chains of command within the medical hierarchy. Brandt told Hitler that to solve the problem he would have to be given authority to override local medical fiefdoms. So Hitler conferred upon Brandt the title of Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation.

Brandt worked tirelessly caring for the injured, moving supplies, and recreating a medical trauma infrastructure. The mortality rate of returning soldiers was reduced directly as a result of his efforts. But problems arose as supplies diminished, and choices about who got the diminishing resources had to be made. Do they feed the returning wounded soldiers, or the chronic schizophrenics, who could neither help in production nor fight in the war effort? The government, and the nation at “total war,” shunted its resources into those people likely to be productive. Consequently, those unable to care for themselves began to starve.

Lowest on this food chain were the mental patients, displaced to provide hospital space for the wounded. And caught in the middle were physicians acting as medical directors who were charged with caring for mental patients without the resources to keep the patients alive. It was in this environment that medical directors asked to be allowed to carry out “mercy killing” rather than being faced with watching their patients slowly starve to death. And Brandt, now the head of the entire medical system, signed the program authorization.

The end of the story is well known. Euthanasia morphed into a nightmarish killing machine, and Karl Brandt, as head of the euthanasia program, was hanged after the Nuremberg Doctors Trial. What is less well known is the conclusion of the allied prosecutors after the Doctors Trial. Leo Alexander summed up the conclusion of the French, British, and American prosecution teams when he opined that the fault of the German doctors (of whom Alexander had once been a member) was not that they were intrinsically evil, but that they worked for the government:“We should never let doctors work for the government again.”

It is a lesson we forgot after a mere 20 years.

Karl Brandt was not a monster. At one level he was a caring, competent doctor. I can picture him as the kind of surgical chief resident everyone hopes to work for—the one who knows the latest techniques, the studious hard worker, the guy who jumps in when he sees something that needs doing. Many of us today have practiced triage of mass casualties, yet thankfully never had to make such decisions. Unfortunately, Dr. Brandt was a physician in a world gone mad.

So is there a lesson for us today? I believe there are several:

First, Hippocrates said, “I will enter into the house only for the good of the patient.” Dr. Brandt found himself triaging a nation as a whole, and in the process signed the death warrant for some in order to possibly save others. Hippocrates did not say to do what is right for the state at the expense of your patient, but Brandt was educated during a time when the collective took precedence over the rights of the individual—a sentiment he took with him to the gallows—and one being expressed with increasing frequency in our country today.

Second, to paraphrase Canadian philosopher Stefan Molyneux, it is not necessary to fight evil, because no one consciously does evil. The difficulty is to recognize evil in its earliest forms. Dr. Brandt did not just decide one day to kill a number of helpless people. Rather, faced with bad or worse options, he made a series of progressively less innocuous choices that resulted in a great collective evil.

Third, people and societies tend to great inertia, and it is difficult to recover once they are headed in the wrong direction. Dr. Brandt was like a man stumbling, never able to catch his step, until after several lurching moments he falls down. He began his career avoiding involvement with the Nazis, then signed on for one assignment after another until he couldn’t turn back. In fact, when Karl Brandt finally did repent of his association with Hitler, Hitler had him arrested and given a death sentence. He may be the only man to be sentenced to death by both sides in the war.

Finally, at some point it is time to get off the runaway bus. Karl Brandt, Albert Speer, and other so-called technocrats, doing what they were trained to do, went from crisis to crisis patching the German nation together. Had the technocrats just said “no,” the German war machine, without supplies, food or medical care, would have come crashing down in a matter of months. But to do so this would have meant—in the case of Dr. Brandt—denying immediate care to some in order to stop the killing of many others. Imagine today, if all the orthopedists in America tomorrow stopped caring for Medicare patients, it might bring down an intrinsically bad system, but could we deprive the patient in front of us just to make the point? The time to get off the bus is before it picks up speed.

Today, we as physicians and surgeons are increasingly becoming government doctors. We are given “guidelines” which then are translated into dicta of cookie-cutter medicine. We are expected more and more to work for the greater collective good, and not just to consider our patients. We are facing cost-benefit analyses in the rationing of care.

We are on the bus, and it has left the terminal. Will we get off in time? Or will we ride it over the cliff as Karl Brandt did?

Lee Hieb, M.D., practices orthopaedic spine surgery in Logan, Ia., and serves as AAPS president. Contact: loganpod@gmail.com.

1 Schmidt V. Hambledon Continuum; 2008.

2 Micozzi MS. National health care: medicine in Germany 1918-1945. 1993;43(11). Available at: www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/nationalhealth-care-medicine-in-germany-1918-1945/.Accessed Feb11, 2011.

3 Schmidt U. Palgrave McMillan; 2006. Karl Brandt: the Nazi Doctor: Medicine and Power in the Third Reich. Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’ Trial. Freeman

The Courts and Obamacare

Obamacare: Is the Deck Stacked on the Supreme Court?

The following newsletter is from U.S. Congressman John Fleming.  It deals with the issue of whether or not Supreme Court Justice, Kagan should be recused from hearing the challenge of Obamacare when it comes to the Court early next year.

Dr. Fleming has been actively fighting the PPACA from day one and introduced H.. Res. 615 on July 8th, 2009 which states:

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that Members who
vote in favor of the establishment of a public, Federal Government
run health insurance option are urged to forgo their right to participate
in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) and agree
to enroll under that public option.

Next year the U.S. Supreme Court will render one of the most important rulings of our lifetimes when it decides whether the government can force Americans to buy health insurance or face a fine. I’m glad the high court has agreed to hear this challenge, but I’m concerned that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan will not be impartial.

You may remember that Justice Kagan was President Obama’s Solicitor General, the attorney who represents the federal government in cases that come before the Supreme Court. In recent months it has become clear that she played an active role as the Obama Administration was preparing its legal defense for health care reform. She cheered its passage, designated her top deputy to oversee its defense, and both received and responded to emails about Obamacare litigation.

In Congress, I have led the call for the release of any documents that would shed light further light on this crucial matter. However, the Justice Department has called our requests for information “unseemly,” and refused to cooperate.

They have insisted that SG Kagan was “walled off” from Obamacare deliberations and decisions. If that’s the case, then they should tell us how it was done. Was there a gatekeeper? What were the instructions? How did they prevent emails from going to her? These are easy questions to answer. Their silence is self-condemning.

Ultimately it will be up to Justice Kagan to decide whether or not she will recuse herself from a case involving legislation that she already actively supported. The law is clear. A federal judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” That’s the threshold. Is it reasonable to look at Justice Kagan’s previous involvement with the Obama Administration and health care reform and have reasonable questions about her impartiality? I think the evidence is clearly pointing what way.

What do you think? I’m asking you that question in a poll on my website: Do you believe there is already reasonable evidence to question Justice Kagan’s impartiality on Obamacare, and should Congress continue to press for more documents on this matter? Please go to my website and register your preference.

Ultimately, I believe that we still need a full repeal of the unconstitutional health care reform law, with market-based solutions put in its place. I will continue to work hard toward that end on Capitol Hill.

Sincerely,

JOHN FLEMING, M.D.
Member of Congress

P.S. If you’d like more information, please take a minute to visit my website at www.fleming.house.gov or follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/repjohnfleming or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/repfleming

See a related post at:  http://commonsensepost.com/2011/11/21/senate-gop-leaders-to-holder-your-kagan-testimony-belied-by-the-facts/

 

Obama Presidency by the Numbers

Barack Obama:  “If I don’t have this done in 3 years, then it’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

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