SCOTUS: The Superbranch of Government

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There was very little doubt that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has made itself into a “superbranch” of government, usurping for itself not only judicial powers but also legislative ones, and now the rogue opinion of the majority of the court in King v. Burwell has removed any remaining doubt.

Since President Franklin D. Roosevelt strong-armed the Supreme Court into backing his patently unconstitutional socialist schemes, the nation’s highest court has established a growing pattern of usurping powers not granted to it by the U.S. Constitution. Now, SCOTUS not only adjudicates on the bills passed by our legislative branch and signed into law by the chief executive, but also reserves for itself the “right” to create law for itself.  The Supreme Court’s “right” to create law is not subject to the electoral accountability of the people, since Supreme Court justices are not elected, nor is the Supreme Court’s “right” to create law subject to the approving signature of the chief executive. The majority of the Supreme Court can simply decide “This is what the law should say,” and because apparently no one has the guts to stand up to their tyranny, their opinion is accepted as law.

We saw this at least as long ago as 1973 when the Supreme Court majority manufactures a “right” for a woman to kill her own child for any reason, so long as part of its body remained inside the mother. Never mind morality. Never mind the right to life recognized in our nation’s founding document. Never mind the fact that the federal government is not given authority over abortion or health care in Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, and that the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution makes it clear that any such governmental authority would rest with the states, not the federal government.

Though it is far from the only instance since then, we saw another egregious example in 2012 of SCOTUS usurping legislative powers not granted to it by the U.S. Constitution.  When the brazenly unconstitutional ObamaCare scheme came before the Supreme Court in 2012, the court majority–including no less than the Republican-appointed chief justice–wrote a tortured, laughable excuse to “justify” ObamaCare under the taxation powers of the federal government.  Though some speculated Chief Justice John Roberts was blackmailed into the decision due to the illogical and incomprehensible nature of his opinion, the court was allowed to create a new “law” which in essence allows the federal government to do anything it wants, so long as there is a tax associated with that action.

The troubled and broken ObamaCare scheme found itself in trouble yet again with regard to the taxpayer-funded subsidies it sought to provide to people who had not earned them. You see, in order to even remotely provide the illusion that ObamaCare made health care more affordable (for some people)  and could get more people “insured,” they had to include a scheme to put the taxpayers on the hook to pay for some people’s health care insurance.

But in order to “incentivize” the states to go along with the scheme and keep some of the burden off the federal government, ObamaCare was crafted to provide to the states some of that taxpayer largess if they would set up their own exchanges. Unfortunately for ObamaCare enthusiasts, most states didn’t take the bait and refused to set up their own health care exchanges–meaning, as the law was clearly written, people in states that didn’t set up their own health care exchanges were not entitled to taxpayer-funded subsidies. Since most states didn’t do this, the financial inviability of ObamaCare was once again laid bare, and Leftists began to file suit to “have their cake and eat it too,” i.e. force the taxpayers to cough up more money, even though their own law clearly prohibited it. That is the essence of King v. Burwell. Lower courts found it difficult to manufacture “law” that did not exist, and ruled against illegally putting the taxpayers on the hook for more largess.

We even have ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber on video admitting the scheme, and admitting that the ObamaCare authors were counting on the stupidity of the American people, that taxpayer-funded subsidies would only be available in exchanges that were “established by the state.”

Now, some of the people who are being forced by the federal government to purchase their “free” health care in states that didn’t play along with ObamaCare are screaming because suddenly the “free” health care they are being forced to buy costs more than it otherwise would have before ObamaCare.  So now that their little scheme didn’t work and the peasants are screaming, the government health care nuts want to “rewrite” the law (without having to go through the icky process of actually rewriting the law via the constitutional method, and in a Republican-majority congress, at that) to save their bacon. And the SCOTUS majority is playing right along like good little lawless tyrants.

The issue has made its way to the Supreme Court…and oh-so-sadly-predictably, lawless judges on the Supreme Court have once again rescued the anti-American socialists in the executive and legislative branches from their own incompetence.

The majority opinion admits that their motivation is not adherence to the law as stated, but to once again manufacturing “law” to save the socialists from their own incompetence:

The combination of no tax credits and an ineffective coverage requirement could well push a State’s individual insurance market into a death spiral. It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner.

Bull****!!! The proponents of ObamaCare openly and brazenly admitted that “congress meant the Act to operate in this manner.” What did Gruber say?

“Yeah, so these health-insurance Exchanges, you can go on ma.healthconnector.org and see ours in Massachusetts, will be these new shopping places and they’ll be the place that people go to get their subsidies for health insurance. In the law, it says if the states don’t provide them, the federal backstop will. The federal government has been sort of slow in putting out its backstop, I think partly because they want to sort of squeeze the states to do it. I think what’s important to remember politically about this, is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an Exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits. But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying to your citizens, you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these Exchanges, and that they’ll do it.”

The architects of ObamaCare didn’t expect the states to turn down a big pot of money that was waved in front of their faces…but many of the states surprised them and valued freedom over easy money. That shot a big hole in the shaky scheme known as ObamaCare.

You can’t be as stupid as the Supreme Court majority wants us to think it is, and that “stupidity” not be on purpose. In other words, purposeful “stupidity” is otherwise known as deliberate rebellion against what is right and lawful.

The Supreme Court majority may think all Americans are stupid enough to buy this BS, but we are not. As if there was any doubt, Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent lays bare the illegal and unconstitutional acts of the court majority:

Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that “established by the State” means “established by the State or the Federal Government,” the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as “inartful drafting.” Ante, at 14. This Court, however, has no free-floating power “to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.” Lamie v. United States Trustee, 540 U. S. 526, 542 (2004) (internal quotation marks omitted)… It is entirely plausible that tax credits were restricted to state Exchanges deliberately—for example, in order to encourage States to establish their own Ex-changes. We therefore have no authority to dismiss the terms of the law as a drafting fumble.

Let us not forget that the term “Exchange established by the State” appears twice in §36B and five more times in other parts of the Act that mention tax credits. What are the odds, do you think, that the same slip of the pen occurred in seven separate places? No provision of the Act—none at all—contradicts the limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges…

The Court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people’s decision to give Congress “[a]ll legislative Powers” enumerated in the Constitution. Art. I, §1. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them. This Court holds only the judicial power—the power to pronounce the law as Congress has enacted it. We lack the prerogative to repair laws that do not work out in practice, just as the people lack the ability to throw us out of office if they dislike the solutions we concoct. We must always remember, therefore, that “[o]ur task is to apply the text, not to improve upon it.” Pavelic & LeFlore v. Marvel Entertainment Group, Div. of Cadence Industries Corp., 493 U. S. 120, 126 (1989)….

More importantly, the Court forgets that ours is a government of laws and not of men. That means we are governed by the terms of our laws, not by the unenacted will of our lawmakers.

Scalia concludes with this damning and dead-on analysis:

[the court’s two decisions on ObamaCare] will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

I also agree with Scalia that maybe we should start calling ObamaCare “SCOTUSCare”. After all, it may have been pushed by Obama, but SCOTUS has now rewritten it twice, so it’s essentially the Supreme Court’s law now. SCOTUSCare.

Unfortunately, those who care about the truth, about the rule of law, about the Constitution, are in the minority on the Supreme Court, with only Scalia, Thomas and Alito in freedom’s corner. Tyranny has carried the day once more.

Once again, the rule of of law takes it on the chin, in the shorts, and ultimately through the heart.  Lawlessness and tyranny have become the order of the day in the once-free United States, and it will only continue to get worse as long as good people refuse to rebel against it as our ancestors did 239 years ago.

All six of these criminals should be immediately impeached for violating the U.S. Constitution and their oath to uphold it. Do any of our elected representatives in congress have the guts or the virtue to do what needs to be done?

John Adams said some 200 years ago that the United States is “a government of laws, and not of men.”  If good men go along with this lawless opinion, then the truth of his statement is indeed dead.

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Bob Ellis has been the owner of media company Dakota Voice, LLC since 2005. He is a 10-year U.S. Air Force veteran, a political reporter and commentator for the past decade, and has been involved in numerous election and public policy campaigns for over 20 years. He was a founding member and board member of the Tea Party groups Citizens for Liberty and the South Dakota Tea Party Alliance. He lives in Rapid City, South Dakota with his wife and two children.

Bob Ellis

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