Combs Spouts Off

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Archive for July 3rd, 2012

Preparing to embrace defeat

Posted by Richard on July 3, 2012

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell thinks that even if the Republicans take control of the Senate, repealing Obamacare will be hard and the odds are against it. I’m not surprised. This is the Mitch McConnell I’ve come to know and loathe. After all, it was only a few months ago that he blocked an Obamacare repeal vote and reportedly planned to do so all year in order to avoid angering Harry Reid, avoid a “procedural stalemate,” and “shield his Senate GOP colleagues from voting to repeal popular portions of the healthcare law.”

If this worthless wuss becomes Senate majority leader again in January, I predict he’ll do what he’s always done: He’ll start out talking a good game. Then he’ll mumble, fumble, and bumble his way toward compromise, concessions, and capitulation. He’s preparing now to embrace failure and defeat.

We need more than returning control of the Senate to the current sorry leadership of the GOP. We need the current crop of young limited-government, pro-freedom stalwarts like Jim DeMint, Pat Toomey, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul to get reinforcements like Jeff Flake (AZ), Ted Cruz (TX), Josh Mandel (OH), Richard Mourdock (IN), and Mark Neumann (WI). And we need them and whatever allies they can muster to fight for new, bold leadership. I bet Tom Coburn wouldn’t worry about angering Harry Reid or prepare to embrace failure and defeat.

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The power to destroy

Posted by Richard on July 3, 2012

Howard Rich at Investor’s Business Daily:

Nearly two centuries ago Daniel Webster stood before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of James McCulloch, head of the Baltimore branch of the Second Bank of the United States.

At issue were two basic questions: Did the federal government have the authority to establish a bank? And did states have the authority to tax that bank (and by extension the federal government)?

“An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy,” Webster famously argued in opposition to the latter question. Chief Justice John Marshall agreed, parroting Webster’s words almost verbatim in his ruling. “That the power to tax involves the power to destroy … (is) not to be denied,” Marshall wrote.

Yet this “undeniable” premise — first invoked in 1819 on behalf of an onerous expansion of federal authority — has been explicitly rebuked 193 years later in support of an even more onerous expansion of federal authority. In fact the destructive power of taxation has just been extended far beyond a mere list of items subject to duties, imports or levies — it can now actually compel participation in the private sector.

More than at any other time in American history, the power to tax has indeed become the power to destroy — our economy, our liberty and perhaps one day even our lives. Chief Justice John Roberts’ refusal to rein in this destructive force will have immediate and lasting reverberations.

RTWT.

Apologists for Roberts have argued that his opinion cleverly constrained the Commerce Clause — as if he didn’t have the option of making the same finding as part of a majority striking down Obamacare in its entirety, and as if there were no dispute regarding Roberts’ ruling (see numerous July 1-3 posts on the Volokh Conspiracy about whether Roberts’ discussion of the Commerce Clause is a holding or a dictum).

Even if the ruling modestly restricts the federal government’s powers under the Commerce or Necessary and Proper Clause, so what? The power to tax is the power to destroy. And Roberts has given them permission to impose punitive taxes for failing to obey their dictates. Limited government, my ass.

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