Lied To, Scorned and Betrayed!

That's how a majority of the American people have been treated by the majority in its government and its court. In a 2009 interview, President Obama said "you can't just make up the language and decide that that's called a tax increase." (Video here.) Yet that is exactly what the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court today just did.

National Review called the majority's ruling "Chief Justice Roberts's Folly:"

The dissent acknowledges that if an ambiguous law can be read in a way that renders it constitutional, it should be. It distinguishes, though, between construing a law charitably and rewriting it. The latter is what Chief Justice John Roberts has done. If Roberts believes that this tactic avoids damage to the Constitution because it does not stretch the Commerce Clause to justify a mandate, he is mistaken. The Constitution does not give the Court the power to rewrite statutes, and Roberts and his colleagues have therefore done violence to it. If the law has been rendered less constitutionally obnoxious, the Court has rendered itself more so. Chief Justice Roberts cannot justly take pride in this legacy... [emphasis added]

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli called the decision "a dark day for American Liberty," and 
Rush Limbaugh said it was "the largest tax increase in the history of the world."

The text of the Court's individual mandate opinion is here.

Obamacare: We Shall Never Give Up!

The High Court’s decision today letting Obamacare stand may mark the end of this one legal journey, but it will not mark the end of Americans’ quest to preserve their God-given freedom.

The Court today has given America’s radical Leftists a constitutional platform on which to establish a thoroughly wealth redistributionist society. Left in place, Americans are no longer individuals endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, but serfs begging Washington on bended knee for their bread. It cannot stand.

It is a time to remember the words of Winston Churchill, “This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never given in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

To understand the weight of the mountain of taxes the High Court today authorized, see Americans for Tax Reform’s list of new and increased taxes.

Pipes: How Will White House Respond to Obamacare Decision

Health care expert Sally Pipes looks at the 4 most likely outcomes of the US Supreme Court decision on Obamacare and how the White House might respond to each one. It's worth reading to understand why the court's decision, however it comes out, isn't likely to mark the end of the health care reform debate.

WSJ: How High Court Could Rule on Health

The Wall Street Journal blog offers a useful summary of the 4 most likely ways the Supreme Court could rule on Obamacare and the fallout from each one: (1) found entirely constitutional; (2) insurance mandate struck down, but rest of law remains; (3) mandate and 2 related regulatory provisions struck down, but rest of law remains; and (4) found entirely unconstitutional.

'Fast and Furious' Story Gets Legs

"Fast and Furious hasn’t been discussed a lot in the mainstream media, which is why the facts can seem so preposterous when you read them for the first time," writes Tim Stanley at the UK Telegraph. "But the story is slowly unraveling and the public is catching up with the madness" following a House Oversight & Government Reform Committee vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for withholding documents and President Obama's 11th hour decision to invoke Executive Privilege on them. Stanley does a masterful job of summarizing the story succinctly:

Here’s what Fast and Furious is all about — and for the uninitiated, be prepared for a shock.

In 2009, the US government instructed Arizona gun sellers illegally to sell arms to suspected criminals. Agents working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were then ordered not to stop the sales but to allow the arms to “walk” across the border into the arms of Mexican drug-traffickers.

Washington's Insane Regulatory Burden

Deficits, taxes, and spending are the defining issues of 2012, write Ryan Young and Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but "regulation deserves a seat at the table, too." Consider the following from CEI's annual Ten Thousand Commandments report:

• Federal regulations listed in the Code of Federal Regulations is more than 169,000 pages long and growing.
• The annual cost of complying with federal regulations has exceeded $1 trillion since around 2005, and none of those costs appears in the federal budget.
• Small businesses bear an outsized share of the burden: small businesses with fewer than 20 employees pay $10,585 per employee per year to comply with federal rules.
• Big businesses, with more than 500 employees, pay about $7,755 per employee per year to comply, giving them a built-in competitive advantage of nearly $3,000 per employee, courtesy of Washington.

Those price tags will only grow as big government agencies and their regulations expand.

Congress passed 81 new laws last year, but agencies issued 3,870 new regulations. ... Of those rules, 212 are classified "economically significant," which means they cost more than $100 million per year. 

The authors argue that regulations-without-representation, i.e., regulations and rules written by bureaucrats requiring no approval by Congress, needs to be stopped.

Just as Congress is supposed to pass a budget every year for what it spends, it should pass a regulatory budget. If it caps regulatory burdens at, say, $1 trillion, it would then have to prioritize which rules it believes provide the most bang for the buck. Voters would also know when Congress votes to increase regulatory costs, giving members at least some incentive to keep regulation in check.

The fight for real regulatory reform is a long one, not least because neither party has shown the seriousness needed to see it through. But the only way to win is to fight.

Get the Economic Growth Choice Right

"Get the growth choice right, and we'll be ok," argues Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal. "Get it wrong and your kids will be talking Australia emigration."

Right now, with growth stuck below 2%, we're toast. With strong growth at 3% or better, there will be jobs. With long-term growth, Medicare, debt and the rest of the horribles that keep worrywarts awake at night are solvable. With strong growth, the U.S. will not have to cede world leadership prematurely to whichever Chinese functionary slugs his way to the top of their heap. With strong growth, your college graduate can move out of the house. With normal American growth, Europe may be irrelevant but it won't die, and a U.S. president won't look oddly small talking to the Vladimir Putins of the world.

Mr. Obama was exactly right in Cleveland when he said economic growth "is the defining issue of our time," that his and his opponents' views on growth are fundamentally different and "this election is your chance to break that stalemate." This he gets. Only the most obtuse "pragmatists" persist in believing the solution lies in a mystical center somehow combining elements from this ideological oil and water. ... Voters have to pick [between] two competing growth models, which means paying attention to what the candidates are saying about economic growth.