Dem Gets Burned by Tea-Partier in Constitution Fight « SpeakEasy (A Liberal Blog)

The nice thing about bellowing that the insurance reform bill passed by Congress is unconstitutional — and the fruit of some kind of dastardly undemocratic process — is that, like this guy, you don’t have to trouble yourself over what’s actually in the bill, or what it will in fact do in the real world. It’s a lazy argument that’s a lot easier to make than acquainting oneself with all those dreary policy details.

Here is a bumbling Democratic lawmaker, Illinois rep. Phil Hare, getting caught in a ‘gotcha moment’ by an extraordinarily smug tea-party Constitutional scholar wannabe. Hat tip, naturally, to the similarly smug folks at Reason (actually, it’s from Radley Balko who is, in my view, their best by far).

If you can’t watch video on your computer, the gist of it this: Hare, at a meeting with constituents, is asked where in the Constitution Congress is given the authority to mandate that people by health insurance. Hare first says he wasn’t thinking about the Constitution when he voted for the bill, he was thinking about the real human suffering of the uninsured Americans in his district. The questioner, who was videotaping the exchange, pushes Hare further, and he then says that he “doesn’t care” what the Constitution says because the health care crisis is so severe for so many of his constituents.

As soon as the tea-party type asking the question hears that, he responds with all the enthusiasm of a teenager proving the teacher wrong: ‘you just said you ‘don’t care’ about the Constitution you swore to uphold!’

I have no idea why so many Democrats are such poor communicators. While Hare’s heart was in the right place, it was about the worst response one could give to a question whose premise is so utterly ridiculous.

The correct response is this: The Constitution says the legislative branch writes our nation’s laws. I’m a member of Congress, so I had a chance to help shape and eventually vote on this legislation.

The Supreme Court has long held that the federal government can regulate things that impact the national economy under the Commerce Clause. That’s in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Whatever else you might believe, everyone agrees that the health-care delivery system plays a huge role in the economy.

And if you believe that Congress can’t regulate the nation’s health-care system, then you also believe Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program are all unconstitutional, and I’m sure most of the people in this room would disagree.

Now, some folks think that the Supreme Court’s rulings over the years don’t support this particular law. But I’m a member of Congress, and I don’t get to decide that anymore than you do — Article 2 of the Constitution says that the Supreme Court decides those questions.

Some state Attorneys General are suing the government on those grounds, which is the way these Constitutional questions are supposed to be worked out. But most experts believe that their legal case is very thin, and will probably lose even before a Supreme Court that now has a conservative majority. Unless the court does in fact rule in their favor, I’ll keep representing my constituents to the best of my ability.

Now, if he wanted to be smart alecky, and utterly ruin the tea partier’s entire day, he could have added:

Some of those Attorney Generals say that the government has never in the history of the Republic forced citizens to purchase goods and services from private companies. They say the founders would be rolling in their graves if they heard of such an arrangement.

Now, I don’t particularly like the fact that we’re mandating that people buy plans from the insurance companies either, and that’s why I supported the publicly administered, non-profit insurance option that the conservatives killed in order to protect their corporate patrons’ bottom lines. I’ll continue to support adding that public option in the future.

But the argument also doesn’t stand up. Back in 1792, when many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were still active participants in our government, Congress passed a law called the Second Militia Act of 1792, and it required every white male between the ages of 18 and 45 to purchase a whole laundry-list of equipment, with their own money, from private companies. George Washington was president at the time, and he signed the bill into law.

Now, because I’m lazy and he did such a good job, I’m going to reprint this entire post by Steve M. from No More Mister Nice Blog, Take it, Steve Tom [EDIT: OK, I screwed up big-time -- that was actually a guest-post written by Tom Hilton from If I Ran the Zoo -- my apologies]:
Here’s How It Works, People:

You get to vote in elections (or not vote, but that’s your choice). Elections can go either way. Sometimes your candidates win, and sometimes they lose. When your candidates lose, that doesn’t mean the results are illegitimate.

The people who do win these elections are then authorized to make decisions on your behalf, even if you didn’t vote for them. That authorization continues until they leave office.

Sometimes the winners do things you don’t like. The fact that you don’t like them doesn’t mean those things were done without your consent or representation. You gave your consent when you voted in an election, and you are represented by whoever wins. Unless you didn’t vote. In which case, you gave your consent by default.

When this happens, it isn’t an abuse of power, or unconstitutional, or tyranny. It’s the political system working in an entirely legitimate way. A way you might happen not to like, but the way it was meant to work.

Oh, and by the way? The people do not directly vote on legislation. An opinion poll is not a plebiscite. When Congress passes a bill that a majority of poll respondents oppose, that isn’t un-democratic; it’s just a different decision about what should be done, by the people whose job it is to make those decisions.

When you claim that any given result of the legislative process is illegitimate just because you don’t like it, you de-legitimize the process as a whole. Which you’re perfectly free to do, because it’s a free country, and people can say stupid things if they want to. But if you do try to de-legitimize the legislative process, you don’t get to pretend that the people who designed the process are on your side.

Got that?