Island Dweller presents with an exchange between him and his Esteemed Associate:

Your esteemed majesty:

Your minion here on the Island express-shipped Lobot-Ami back to EA in a heated crate to avoid our feathered friend becoming frostbitten, or hitching a ride on some northbound semi to save himself from being quick-frozen in the sky. Imagine my surprise today to again hear the flutter of wings on the back windowsill, accompanied by the soft tinkling of ice crystals falling from his wings and the muted thumping of his beak on my window. I removed the following missive from the message tube affixed to LA’s bandy little leg:

It looks like we are going back to the future. Jason Furman, the Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, tried to convince us this week that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of Obamacare costing the US economy the loss of the equivalent of 2.3 million full time jobs was really about providing “options” to those currently in employment situations they consider suboptimal. This was after CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf testified that it provided a “disincentive” for lower-income workers to find more lucrative employment. The first thing that came to my mind was Timothy Leary’s quote, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” And to think that this is coming from an administration that refuses to aggressively enforce drug laws. I’m sure there are plenty of fertile (and non-drug-addled) imaginations that can find even more “coincidences.”

Your Esteemed Associate

After a quick rubdown and then encasing LA in his modified fur-lined golf club mitt for warmth, I penned the following response:

Well, based on what I’ve seen there are really only two options – continue in the suboptimal employment – although it is employment nonetheless – or, if you’re truly disgusted with it, “drop out” and climb on the overloaded benefit wagon working Americans are pulling. No mention is made about bettering the economic climate in this country so folks have the option to find something they at least halfway enjoy doing for a living. I have no doubt this entire predicament is engineered to get the American people used to accepting government handouts – which we would call “incursions” into our lives – with fewer and fewer reservations, thus making them used to government being the first instead of last recourse to handle problems like this. Of course, the unspoken corollary to this thought of bettering the economy is the elimination of Obamacare and its replacement with a better coverage system that really does allow choices in plans for working people and would also cover those people who have a hard time finding insurance coverage, if they truly desire it in the first place.

One of the options mentioned on at least one news network is the idea of insurance companies being allowed to sell plans across state lines, rather than having individual offices in states and territories. This option eliminates some overhead and staffing and administrative redundancies in these companies. As we have discussed, it would also seem at first blush to make these interstate sales of plans subject to the authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and other Federal agencies – thus adding another layer of government bureaucracy to an already complex situation. Wonder how we could get around that?

Simply put, Obamacare is dead on arrival. There are two types of Americans: those that know the law is a disaster and must be nullified and the 40% of Americans who apparently don’t even know what it is yet. Sure, there are plenty of folks who claim to love the law and support it, but they are actually in the 60% who know it ain’t gonna work in this lifetime.

Reform plans? Like web browsers in the 1990s, everybody seems to have their own. The irony of course would be that an off-the-street plan is better than what we have; the reality, however, is that Obamacare never was supposed to be a healthcare reform plan to provide increased protection or lower costs. The whole thing was a ridiculously transparent attempt to solidify Democrat strongholds.

So much so that Operative BJ asks an intriguing question:

Y’know, it would be funny as hell to find out that Justice Roberts knew what would happen if the ACPPA was approved all along, and that’s why he found a way to legitimize it. If so, he may have been the smartest man in the room. Or, at least, the smartest tactician.

The thinking may have gone something like this:

“The American people don’t realize the crap they’ve done to themselves over the past 80 years or so with the astounding increase in accumulated power over The People taken by the central federal government, both through Congressional acts approved by the President and by judicial fiat. What we really need is a law that is so very obviously un-Constitutional, so patently unfair, so obscenely wrong, a law that is deemed as passed – rather than voted on – without due deliberation and by only one of the two major political parties. We need a law that cannot be defended by any amount of logic or common sense. We need a law that will get Americans so angry at the central government that they will wake up and realize that they’re voting themselves into tyranny.

Hmmm…. Now, this ACPPA thing, with its mandates, obscure language, incomplete reasoning, and indefinite rules – this might just be it. The ultimate variability in this law is defined by fact that the statement ‘The Secretary shall determine’ appears within it, and in the number of necessary definitions and specifications – the stuff to make the law work – that are not enumerated anywhere in the Bill.

As well as implementing limitless authority, the statement ‘The Secretary shall determine’ allows each successive administration to arbitrarily change the rules in midstream without any notice, meaning that there will be no way for The People to determine the next rule or regulation coming out of this law. The confusion is compounded by the ACPPA’s incredible number of references to other obscure laws, Titles, and regulations, and by the sheer size of the Bill itself.

Now let’s add in the current administration, which is quite comfortable lying to The People by both twisting fact into lie and lie into fact.

What could we get as a result? Well, The People could find themselves questioning whether They need a central government at all. And if They need one – and they do, if only to ensure that only the core powers of the Constitution are enforced and balanced against the protections in the Bill of Rights – perhaps They will finally realize that the federal government has become too powerful to permit The People to pursue Happiness on their own terms: the People’s own terms, not those terms set forth by a slavish Congress and an authoritarian President.

I could approve this law, and then write ‘Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices’* in the text describing the reasoning behind my decision.

Yeah, that might just get The People angry enough to start paying attention to what they are doing to themselves, change their officeholders, and vote themselves out of this mess. Just as the founders wanted them to. By using Constitutional processes.

I think I’ll find a way to allow this ill-conceived, poorly-designed, coercive Act to become Law.”

That could describe the faint smile you see on his face almost all the time.

I can dream, can’t I?

Your faithful minion.

(*exact text from the decision, National Federation of Independent Business et al v. Sibelius, docket 11-393, pp. 6

The Czar took a lot of guff when he and Mandarin asked a similar question back in June, 2012. And some of that criticism was fair—Justice Roberts scuttled around, prepared two opinions, and pulled the trigger on the legal-but-tax decision evidently at the last moment. And he has steadfastly avoided talking about his selection, very much in line with someone who wants to avoid revisiting it. As if he made the wrong one, you see.

But our analysis remains correct: Justice Roberts packed into his decision everything that would be necessary to challenge the law as a harmful tax. Indeed, for all the rending of teeth and gnashing of hair and pulling of garments (hey, you protest how you want) from conservatives and libertarians over his decision, the reality is that many legal challenges were immediately launched in exactly those same lines. And indeed, those challenges are not surviving review. Roberts could have dealt it a death blow in one shot, but then faced decade after decade of it being a zombie law—like Roe v Wade—that keeps coming back. Or, he could have provided guns and ammo to anyone who wants to rip it apart for good.

It wasn’t the easiest approach, we know—but nothing about this law was smart. And as you say, BJ, the American people deserve every slap in the face that follows. Just as Wilson led to Coolidge, and FDR led to Ike, and Carter led to Reagan, we can expect Obama will lead to another conservative/libertarian renaissance. The Czar hopes it happens really, really soon. Like, starting in 2010.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.