A Place to Stand

Senator DeMint
Sarah Palin

Lets see if the US Constitution holds up in internal matters. Some years ago Clinton broke the Constitution with impunity by making war on Yugoslavia without asking Congress despite the Constitution making it unambiguously a prerogative of Congress. He got away with it. This one is arguably more basic because it is an internal matter & however wrong it is to bomb foreigners it is a more basic violation of a Constitution's purpose if it is broken to affect US citizens.

The particular instance is less important than war crimes. It is an attempt to circumvent the constitutionally mandated rules on the power of Congress & in particular to prevent a future Republican majority repealing laws. This is from Sarah Palin's Facebook

Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over. The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C. No one is certain of what’s in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board can’t be repealed or amended without a 2/3 supermajority vote. Senator DeMint said:

“This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses.”

In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?

The Constitution says the Senate make laws on a majority basis. Amendment X says specifically that if a right is not in the Constitution they can't make it up. So I have less doubts about its illegality than Senator DeMint. The question is will the Constitution, as written be upheld by the Supreme Court? Theoretically they could say that makes it a Constitutional Amendment which does indeed require a 2/3rds majority & that that makes the whole Bill such - that would be pushing it a bit. They could just say that part is unconstitutional. They cannot legally say it is allowed - but they may.

If it stood it would clearly be a precedent which could destroy the entire Constitution since it would allow any group with a temporary 50% + 1 majority to pass a law saying the President or any other appointee can do anything & require a 99% majority for repeal. However I am not arguing that the Constitution be interpreted in the spirit of freedom but simply interpreted according to what is written.

It should be noted that ultimately the law is not what any judge says it is but what it says. This is a dangerous doctrine since it allows, arguably requires, anybody who disagrees with the judges to resist. On the other hand anything else is more dangerous.

It is probably only a coincidence that this illegality has been carried out on the section which Sarah Palin was so widely condemned & supported for describing as a "death panel". My opinion is that she was technically right, in that a panel of people having the power to decide that some medical treatment required for survival is to expensive is a "death panel" but wrong to suggest it was new. There is an infinite amount of treatment available which has or may have a small chance of preserving life for a limited time. No society, capitalist, socialist or theocracy can give it all so there will be some sort of "death panel" under any system. What I am arguing against here is purely the fact that this section of the law is unambiguously contrary to the Constitution.

We will seE what happens - acquiescence could be fatal to the USA.

Labels: International politics

From the newspaper that all politically correct fascists hate, the Daily Mail, comes this unofficial government forecast of our coming energy crisis (all achieved as part of the war against the catastrophic warming so widely evident)

Household gas and electricity bills are expected to rocket fourfold to nearly £5,000 a year by the end of the decade to meet Government-imposed green targets.

And the price heavy industry will have to pay by 2020 is so high that energy-dependent firms could be wiped out, causing thousands of job losses, said an industry spokesman.

A massive rethink on the cost of 'green energy' is taking place in Whitehall among senior regulators and industry, leading some to question whether the public will be prepared to pay increasingly high bills for the UK to become greener than most countries.

Officials at regulator Ofgem now privately admit that a report they issued only last year severely underestimates the cost of cutting carbon emissions by building a new energy infrastructure for the UK.

The watchdog's earlier report suggested that gas and electricity prices could double to £2,000 by 2020 to meet the £233.5 billion cost of going green by investing in nuclear energy and wind and wave power.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said the Government-imposed 2020 target of a 34 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020 and the 2050 target of an 80 per cent cut in greenhouse gases, both from 1990, were among the most ambitious in the world.

Ofgem's worries about those figures are backed up by new research from an energy-switching company that calculates £548 of the average household bill of almost £5,000 in 2020 would be to pay for the investments in nuclear and renewable energy. note there will be no government investment in nuclear - suggests this article is still being overly kind to the eco-fascists

Already energy bills are loaded up by five separate charges to help fund the battle to combat climate change and become greener. They are the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target, the Renewables Obligation, the Community Energy Saving Programme and shortly there will be a levy on investing in clean coal projects.

Although householders will be badly hit, the damage to industrial energy users will be even more dramatic. These companies, which range from steel and chemical plants to industrial gas companies, are dependent on reasonable energy prices that can, in some cases, account for 70 per cent of their entire costs...

'We are not against cleaning up the environment, far from it,' he said. 'If every country faces these costs then so be it, but the UK has decided to be greener than any other country. The huge costs involved will make us totally uncompetitive.

'We are already highly efficient and cannot cut our costs further. If we find ourselves faced with these sort of increases, there will not be any heavy industry left in this country. We will be wiped out and with that thousands of jobs will go.'

Over recent years electricity prices have gone up from +£600 to +£1,200 per household. The Ofgem report in question said another 60% was coming - to £2,000. Thus £5,000, or anything even remotely close to that means either nobody in Ofgem or the Department of Energy & Climate Change (a title that shows the department to be at best lukewarm about its duty of keeping the lights on) is remotely competent at arithmetic or, more credibly, that they figures in the original report were total & deliberate lies intended to help the government. My guess is that there are some people in government capable of counting. If so somebody among the Tories should be asking if this semi-leaked figure is truthful. Despite Cameron's windmillery most Conservative supporters are sane on this subject. Despite his windmillery the Conservatives could & should come out fighting on the government's apparent dishonesty in saying it would only go up to £2,000 per household.

As further background only about 1/3rd of electricity is domestic. That would mean the net cost to the whole country of this will be £15,000 a year per family. It is easy to see why sensible investors aren't investing here.

The total cost looks like about £100 bn a year which doesn't quite match our budget overspend but not far short. It is also something which will visibly hit voter's pockets. It seems unlikely this will encourage people to vote Labour.

Nobody interested in government not taking £5,000 extra from them (well OK £4,700 since nuclear would cost about £300) is going to vote LiDem if this gets properly reported, since the LDs say windmillery is, along with "fairness", the only big reason to support them.

Of relevance to Scotland note that the particular lunatics running our asylum in Holyrood voted unanimously for far tougher restrictions in Scotland, together with the total abolition of nuclear. That looks likely to cost Scotland £10,000 per family directly & £30,000 in total.

Of course the 25,000 annual toll of unnecessary deaths each year is now rising because of this but don't expect the politicians responsible for it, & who have always been willing to "pay the price" in human lives to shed anything more than crocodile tears on this.

Labels: British politics, Fixing the economy, nuclear