Meantime, the Constitution clearly grants newspapers the right to suck

You may have noticed that now the wingnuts are vowing to get their activist judges on the Supreme Court to legislate from the bench and kill any health care bill that becomes law.

There actually are some intriguing questions regarding the constitutionality of forcing people to buy insurance. Needless to say, a recent editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Right-Wing Masturbatorium fails to engage those questions either thoughtfully or meaningfully, instead marveling that Nancy Pelosi doesn't take extremist conservative talking points seriously. And in a blog post, the RJ's editor -- his customary intellectual acuity on blazing display -- echoes the simplistic teabagger contention that anything and everything not specifically authorized by the Constitution is ipso facto unconstitutional.

Well, the space program is boring anyway. And after Roberts and Scalia declare Social Security and Medicare unconstitutional, geezers will die much more quickly, thus saving society jillions of dollars, no?

Dean Heller, who is a congressman, more or less embraces the R-J/teabagger party line, explaining "I don’t know anywhere in the Constitution where it requires a citizen here in this country to have health care."

John Ensign, America's least significant senator, has always fallen for ultra-conservative pseudo-scholarship as if it was as natural as getting your parents to pay for your sex. "Most of what the United States government does is unconstitutional," Ensign sort of famously said nearly a decade ago.

Writing about Ensign's comment at the time, then-R-J columnist Steve Sebelius (though hard to believe now, the paper's opinion pages used to be much more willing to publish non-wingnut views) wondered if Ensign's assertion meant that "he'll vote against each and every appropriations bill that contains any extra-constitutional fat."

Alas, Ensign would later demonstrate how rules that apply to mere mortals don't apply to him because Goddy McGod made him better than everyone else and daddy has a yummy checkbook. So Ensign probably has his own version of the Constitution, a special occult edition he sneaked out with him when his fellow fanatical religious extremists kicked him out of their shadowy C Street compound. In that version, no doubt the founders specifically signed off on each and every one of the quarter-billion dollars in earmarks that Ensign has requested in just the last two years, to say nothing of $415 million to restore Lake Tahoe.

(Your Gleaner is no constitutional scholar, but I think a case could be made that Ensign's right to bone his best friend's wife is covered under the Ninth Amendment. But I digress.)

Anyway, if anyone cares, a wingnut stab at a serious argument (as opposed to the superficial assertions rendered by Nevada Republicans and their pet newspaper) against the constitutionality of health care reform has been made maybe most notably by these guys. For a clear and convincing explanation of why those guys are horribly wrong, see this guy. (Or this guy. Or even this guy.)

Of course, if the Democrats would quit screwing around and just extend Medicare to the entire population (Harry Reid, however unwittingly, is already stumbling toward a means of paying for it), constitutional questions regarding individual mandates would be moot. Plus the Democrats would win every election for the next 30 years.

Comments

[Michael Green]

Masturbatorium? Gleaner, I bow before your genius.

I wonder if all of those who yammer about the 10th Amendment ever read these words:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

That happens to be the amendment before it, Big Number 9. Now, some amendments are more open to interpretation than others (I still believe only a member of a a state or government-sponsored militia has the right to own a gun), but it seems to me that the 9th can be read to mean that we have rights that may not be listed in the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights. Between that and the "necessary and proper" clause, the founders gave some room for maneuvering. Why, under the First Amendment, they even gave the aforementioned editor the right to lie about me!

[Gleaner]

Dr. Green, you mean to say you haven't heard the students on campus use that word?

Sigh. Kids these days.

[Goldy]

Are you saying the 9th Amendment is the right to bear...anything??

[Michael Green]

Gleaner, they just aren't as up on Latinate constructions as they used to be.

Goldy, given that the R-J runs a masturbatorium, I think they would say it's the 10th Amendment that gives them the right to bear that part. As for the rest ....

[Nevada Ned]

On the topic of newspapers, did anybody notice that the latest issue of The Nation has an eye-opening article, "How the US Funds the Taliban".

(www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/roston)

In Afghanistan, the US pays off insurgents not to attack the US troops. That funds the Taliban.

It's the kind of article that the RJ could never publish because they hardly ever do any investigative reporting. Facts are expensive.

[Mike Licht]

Ensign Evicted From C Street?

See:

http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/ensign-evicted-from-c-street/