ObamaCare: the settled law of the land… except it isn't

One of the big Democrat talking points about ObamaCare is to bleat that it’s “constitutional,” blessed by the Supreme Court, and is the “settled law of the land.”  They never explain how this is supposed to intimidate the nominally free people of the Republican from changing or repealing it – presumably it is meant to be taken as the first law in history that must be obeyed without question, forever, more powerful and permanent than the Constitution itself.

But it’s not true anyway.  Andrew McCarthy at National Review reminds us that, contrary to Democrat rhetoric, ObamaCare was not held constitutional by the Supreme Court.  Sorry, lefties, but it just wasn’t.  The bill as written would have been struck down.  Supreme Court Justice John Roberts rewrote the bill on the fly to make it constitutional.  

One of the ideas we occasionally hear floated to make the ruling class suffer the full pain of the law they inflicted upon the rest of us is to pass a bill requiring the enforcement of ObamaCare precisely as it was passed, since it has never legally been amended.  An orthodontist in Florida teamed up with Judicial Watch to file a lawsuit along these lines recently, with an eye to countering President Obama’s flagrantly illegal rescheduling of the employer mandate.  If such a suit was successful, it should logically lead to the Supreme Court striking down ObamaCare, since it was not constitutional as passed by Congress and signed by the President.

But the Affordable Care Act should have died the moment it left the Supreme Court anyway.  As McCarthy points out, the Roberts-rewritten law might have been (barely) held constitutional, at the cost of making Obama a shameless liar during all the years he claimed it wasn’t a tax… but that also made the ACA illegal, because it’s a tax bill, and those must originate in the House, while ObamaCare originated in the Senate.

No one who defends ObamaCare, or even tolerates its existence, has any right to lecture anyone about “settled laws of the land.”  ObamaCare is a power grab conducted in defiance of the law, repeatedly – from the day of its passage, to the numerous times President Obama has chosen to disobey it.  The legislators and executives of a truly lawful nation don’t get to pick and choose which laws they feel like obeying.

I thought the massive system crash of 404Care on Day One was neatly symbolic of its fatal flaw: ObamaCare is alien software utterly incompatible with the American system expected to run it.