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Bad Faith Governance Through Coercion and Lawlessness
I didn’t intend for this to become a series of posts…but it appears it must. This little nugget passed by rather quietly earlier this week on Instapundit (less than 40 comments as of this posting):
OFFICIAL LAWLESSNESS: On ObamaCare, Democrats Defy the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, the link is to a Wall Street Journal article to which I do not have access. But the Instapundit correspondent provided the meat:
The multitrillion-dollar tax, climate and entitlement spending bill the House passed last week cuts funding for hospitals that treat uninsured patients. It likely violates the Constitution in the process by punishing states that have declined ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion.
Seven states, including expansion and nonexpansion states, still use uncompensated-care pools to reimburse providers for charity treatment. Section 30608 of the Build Back Better bill contains two separate provisions that would apply solely to nonexpansion states. The first would reduce by 12.5% their Medicaid disproportionate-share hospital payments, which offset the costs of hospitals that treat high numbers of uninsured patients.
…While the new subsidies authorized under the bill would expire in 2025, the reductions in Medicaid payments—which the Congressional Budget Office estimates at approximately $4 billion a year—are permanent.
That clearly violates the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius, which declared ObamaCare’s mandatory expansion of Medicaid unconstitutionally coercive on states.
Yes, we all know that the phrase “clearly violates” is laughable with the Roberts Court … or, more specifically, with that complete joke of a “conservative” Chief Justice, Mr. Roberts himself. But also notice the deafening silence from opportunistic media whores like Republicans for the Rule of Law. (I’m beginning to think that they were every only as real at this Q character. But I digress.)
Regardless, while slightly more hidden than the mocking re-issuance of the eviction moratorium and the cynical Federal Contractor Executive Order, here we are again: The machine in DC continues to function in contrast to the good faith requirement in the voluntary founding compact for this little experiment.
Unfortunately, it is clear that this kind of “coercion and lawlessness” can go on all day every day and most of We the People won’t even notice…and the reliably incurious (or just plain collusive) press sure as hell isn’t going to spread the word. Worse, within our perimeter, there will continue be those who rationalize away all of these individual little cuts that are just adding to the thousands of others already inflicted on The Republic (Is it not already nothing but a rotting corpse?) and others will just look down there noses to utter their conscience protecting mantra: “Things really aren’t that bad.”
When does it begin to matter?
Published in General
……,,,,,:::::://////aaaassrrrrgghhAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! (Moving from a small complaint sound to a full throated expression of outrage.)
When it’s too late.
The Left succeeds at obliterating even more mediating institutions. Everything in the state. . .
I expect Mitch McConnell to issue a fund raising email in response. That’ll do it.
The eviction moritorium cost me a rental house.
Don’t you guys get it? Rules, Morals and Laws are for schmucks like you Republicans, er – true Republicans and I guess we can’t count the ever so Adult in the Room Never Trumpers in that group.
Grab Power, Control and the Big Mullah by any means possible. That’s the Dem and Never Trumper Way. Threats, Coercion and exercising Punishment against your enemies are the really fun benefit of the Police State.
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(Somewhere along the line it seems we – or I – stopped getting notifications about promotions. For what it’s worth, that is/was an important feature to at least one of us.)
It seems to me it was redistributed to someone else…as planned. (Sure, I laugh now…until they come for my house, and my 401K, and my… … … It is all just a matter of time now.)
It began to matter from the beginning, which, regarding this case, was just over 100 years ago at the height of the “Progressive” era in America, which established the basis for the Progressive downlhill slide of America into what is now becoming an autocratic, mostly socialist, chaotic hellhole (at least as compared to the vastly more prosperous, peaceful, and powerful nation it would have been had the Progressive era not happened).
Progressive policies pave the road to serfdom, or worse. With malice aforethought.
We are now beyond the critical stage, in my view, and have no possibility of recovering from our Progressive psychosis. Our governing class is hallucinatory. Almost all of the rest of our society is also in the terminal throes of this psychosis. Effective treatment of this state of collective psychosis would likely be lethal, but continuing on our current course will also be lethal. Worse, we are not just continuing on our current decline–we are massively accelerating it.
My estimate is that America as originally constituted will no longer exist by mid Century, so rapid is our decline. The territory of the United States of America will be a failed state, in a state of anarchy, a collapsed civilization. Think Europe in the 14th Century. Or Somalia in the last decades of the 20th Century. A mad max territory. That will happen a decade or two sooner if Biden gets a second term.
The alternative, that I concede might occur, is a totalitarian Stalinesque state, America become a 21st Century version of the old Soviet Union. We will miss Solzhenitsyn.
Do you really mean hallucinatory and psychotic? Or it his metaphorical?
Or it it “mostly”; like something nearly hallucinatory or nearly psychotic, as being and acting crazy, but not quite fitting the definition of endogenous mental illness?
Among the many miserable aspects of this, there are apparently at least 30,608 sections to this apocalyptic bill.
Within a margin of error, exactly zero people have read this bill.
I used to work in a state’s largest hospital system, in their budgeting office. It’s been years now, but the charity care component was hundreds of millions each year, given away for free. This was largely for costs that were either unreimbursable, the patient either couldn’t or wouldn’t apply for Medicaid or Medicare, or to cover costs not covered under any reimbursements plan (private insurance or Medicaid/Medicare/the military one whose acronym I’ve forgotten).
In other words, it’s there in the budget to cover known misses in reimbursements, so the hospital doesn’t go in the red. It’s a planned-for expense that varies annually.
By singling out certain states, and then reducing their Medicaid bolus of cash by what looks like an entirely arbitrary 12.5%, they’re just punishing the un- or under-insured, and increasing the rates for private insurance (which is the only place states can go to raise revenue).
Like most gov’t solutions, once you’ve tied yourself into a knot that results in your cranium being rectally inserted, the only possible solution is to pay a contractor to put on an OSHA-approved steel toed boot and have them kick your cranium even further up the tailpipe, as hard as they can, repeatedly.
Gov’t. Where rationality goes to die.
From my perspective they are at a minimum delusional, but compared to actual reality, what they think is real is imaginary, which qualifies as hallucinatory, psychotic.
Clearly, I need to find someone to proofread for me.
A quick side note for those paying attention: All of our once very vocal R> locals that exhibited such hysteria about Trump being a “existential threat” to the Republic or to the Constitution every time he merely criticized a judge in a tweet have been completely silent on these “bad faith governance” posts. There was a time when they couldn’t wait to cut-n-paste their favorite MSNBC material to “defend” the constitution. The silence if very telling.
If they think we’re “back to normal” now, that suggests they don’t think there’s anything to complain about.