Claptrap Legislation

Claptrap Legislation
By Emmett Tyrrell
10/20/2011

WASHINGTON -- I do not know what the learned political scientists of the Republic say about it, but it seems to me that the laws of the land are now so poorly written that almost no one knows what they mean. That is a government bureaucrat's delight!

The healthcare bill, disparagingly and often referred to as Obamacare, is typical. No member of Congress could have read it before voting on it, and, even now, I doubt any congressperson has read it through. I know someone who did read it all, but he is an insomniac and does not count. Then there is Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York. She read it through, but only because she thought it an atrocity and wanted to protect Americans from it.

Finally, someone over at Health and Human Services at least read what it said about long-term health care and the authorities there made a surprising admission: It is unworkable and possibly illegal. HHS said Friday that it would not be implemented. It would have been nice if they had admitted that the whole bill was unworkable before all the Democrats clapped their hands and voted it into law back in March of last year. The law does not control health costs. It (set ital) will (end ital) ration healthcare. And it ruins the vast majority of Americans' insurance policies, while lumping us all into that characteristic product of the Obama administration, chaos.

Then over the weekend, we are told President Barack Obama broke from campaigning and took an interest in what his government is doing. Now he is for the section of his healthcare bill that his HHS Department told us Friday was defunct, the long-care health provision. He is waiting for the Republicans to vote it down, and he will veto their work. So we are now told. As I said, the resulting product of Obama is chaos!

It seems to me that this tendency to pass laws that are inscrutable is a growing problem for the Republic, but it is not unintended. The progressives and liberals favor these abstruse laws. It is their intention to confuse the public. They intend that the laws are so convoluted, complicated and, in the end, soporific, that the electorate will eventually go away with a headache.

Herbert Croly, one of the founding fathers of the progressive movement -- read Liberal movement -- wrote in 1909 in his groundbreaking book "The Promise of American Life," "To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy. The national advance will always be impeded by these misleading and erroneous ideas, and, what is more, it always should be impeded by them, because at bottom ideas of this kind are merely an expression of the fact that (set ital) the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat (end ital)" (emphasis added).

The origins of liberalism were always undemocratic. Now the Liberals are ever bolder in their pronouncements. Peter Orszag, formerly with the Obama administration before the chaos became too much for him, just penned an article in the New Republic titled, "Too Much of a Good Thing: Why We Need Less Democracy" - and, by the way, the New Republic was founded by Herbert Croly. Beverly Perdue, the governor of North Carolina, said publicly, "I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover." The "them" here are our representatives in Congress.

Those are the sentiments of people with little faith in democracy. They want laws written that are inscrutable, and they will leave it to the bureaucrats to interpret them in ways that favor the state and the (set ital) zeitgeist (end ital). Give thanks that we have the Constitution and the Tea Party.
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To read another article by Emmett Tyrrell, click here.