Janet Adamy and Jonathan Weisman wrote in yesterday’s Wall St. Journal about how the visceral outrage manifesting itself at Health Care Town Halls and other public meetings is about much more than health care. President Barack Obama’s (D) and Congress’s misguided proposals to reform our screwed-up health care system have brought the anger out of the wood-work, but the anger is indeed much deeper and about much more fundamental issues.
Yes, the health care proposals have plenty of things in them to make normal Americans mad. But we’re also mad about the ballooning federal deficits. We put a new party in the White House (and gave them large super-majorities in Congress) on a promise that they would ‘change’ this maddening federal spending, and those new leaders have promptly quadrupled the deficits we wanted them to eliminate.
And it gets even deeper than that. The out of control spending under this administration and the last are symptoms of a government that answers to itself, not to us. It’s a government that blithely oversteps the authorities granted it by the Constitution and is slowly-but-surely seizing more and more control over our lives. We saw Bush spending billions to bail out Wall Street investors and misguided car companies and angrily voted for a new direction. Obama, following his election, went right about his business with the same massive bailouts, the government seizure of banks and car companies, and then embarked on an effort to seize control of our health care.
It’s interesting that our Constitutional scholar president seems, like most of his colleagues, to have never read the 9th and Tenth Amendments. The people are mad that they are losing their republic, and in the coming elections they will likely vote accordingly.
