Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Second Judge Rules ‘Mandate’ Unconstitutional

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Judge Roger Vinson of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida ruled today that the federal government does not have constitutional authority to require citizens to purchase health insurance. This ruling concurs with a separate ruling last December in Virginia that invalidates the ‘individual mandate,’ a core provision of President Barack Obama’s (D) landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Notably, Vinson’s ruling invalidates the entire health care reform bill on the argument that the unconstitutional individual mandate is ‘not severable’ from the rest of the act.

The health care reform act was signed into law in March of 2010 and immediately challenged by many states on Constitutional grounds. This particular case, ‘Florida et al v. United States Department of Health and Human Services’ (3:10-CV-91-RV/EMT), is the largest challenge with 26 state plaintiffs: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

State of the Union Experimental Live Blog

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I live-blogged the State of the Union address and the Republican response this evening on the Off on a Tangent live coverage page. This was my first attempt at a live blog, so it was definitely an experimental trial-run (and a first technical test of my simple live coverage platform, which I intend to use for other events in the future).

The transcript of the live blog is included below (with some minor formatting added).

Read more . . .

State of the Union Address Tonight at 9pm

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President Barack Obama (D) is scheduled to give the annual State of the Union address tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST before a joint session of Congress. The address will be followed by a Republican Response to be delivered by Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI 1st).

As I do every year, I encourage all of my readers to watch both the State of the Union address and the opposition response. I recommend the unfettered and uninterrupted coverage from C-SPAN, but the addresses will also be available on most broadcast channels and cable news networks.

The Constitution requires that the president report to Congress annually on the state of the union, but does not specify the method or form of this report (Article II, Section 3). The in-person State of the Union address has been a tradition since 1913.

Transcripts of all 1945-2009 addresses before joint sessions of Congress, including each State of the Union, are available from C-SPAN.

“That Among These is Life . . . ”

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One might be forgiven for thinking that the ‘pro-life’ position on abortion is an exclusively religious position. It is true that the most vocal and consistent voices in opposition to pre-birth infanticide are those in the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, but to describe the anti-abortion position as one exclusively religious in nature doesn’t do it justice. If considered honestly and rationally, even cold, scientific logic requires us to be pro-life.

Consider, if you will, that the purpose of science (properly applied) is to increase knowledge and support the well-being of all humanity. Obviously, there have been ‘scientists’ who didn’t subscribe to this, but I think most of us can agree—whether religious or atheist—that science and medicine ought to be serving people, not killing them. If we accept this obvious argument, the question then becomes one of how we define humanity. Is an embryo in a woman’s womb a person, or is it a lump of tissue that is just a part of a woman’s body?

Contrary to the way it is often portrayed, science and religion are rarely (if ever) in true conflict with one another. The Catholic Church has, for example, claimed since antiquity that human life begins at the moment of conception. At the time, there was little direct scientific evidence to support this argument; it was an argument purely from faith. Science did not ever disprove, or even shake, this faith position. On the contrary, at every step the increase in scientific knowledge has bolstered the argument that life begins at conception.

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Best Democratic Party Strategy: Repeal and Replace

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It was only a decade ago that the Democratic Party styled itself as the party of unbridled democracy, attempting to throw out the rule of law and the unique legalistic nuance of our electoral system in an effort to make sure that the winner of the popular vote—then-Vice President Al Gore (D)—became president. In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court had to weigh in, ruling that Florida’s election laws had to be followed as-written and couldn’t be changed on a whim because the outcome didn’t meet with everybody’s approval. As such, the state’s electors went (with the presidency) to then-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX).

Many Democrats were apoplectic, declaring that the will of the people had been usurped by a cadre of beltway elites in Washington. It may have looked that way on its face, but we simply don’t elect presidents by popular vote. You might not like the Electoral College system—heck, I’m not sure I like it either—but it’s the system we have, and its outcomes don’t always align with the popular vote. That’s reality, and we are free to amend that system at any time using one of the two methods of amendment provided-for by the Constitution itself.

Regardless, you would think that the party of unbridled democracy—that which treats the will of the people as the most sacrosanct of things, never to be ignored or usurped—would have refrained from passing a health care reform act opposed by a clear plurality of the voters (a majority in many polls) and likewise thought to be more harmful than helpful by just under two-thirds of doctors. The will of the people is quite clear: we want health care reform, but we don’t want the version of it that Congress passed last year. If there was any doubt about this, the last Congressional election should have made it painfully obvious. You would think that the Democratic Party would be the one to have noticed that the people were not at all happy with what they were doing.

Read more . . .

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.