05 July 12
[Gazette Blog Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from a much longer article. To read the entire article click on the Reader Supported News link above.]
ntonin
Scalia and the three other right-wing justices who sought to strike
down health-care reform cited no less an authority on the Constitution
than one of its key Framers, Alexander Hamilton, as supporting their
concern about the overreach of Congress in regulating commerce.
In their angry dissent
on June 28, the four wrote: “If Congress can reach out and command even
those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the
market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or
in Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws . . .
spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.’”
They footnoted Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 33.
A portrait of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull, 1792.
That sounds pretty authoritative, doesn’t it? Here’s
Hamilton, one of the strongest advocates for the Constitution, offering a
prescient warning about “Obamacare” from the distant past of 1788.
Except that Scalia and his cohorts are misleading you.
In Federalist Paper No. 33, Hamilton was not writing about the Commerce
Clause. He was referring to clauses in the Constitution that grant
Congress the power to make laws that are “necessary and proper” for
executing its powers and that establish federal law as “the supreme law
of the land.”
Hamilton also wasn’t condemning those powers, as
Scalia and his friends would have you believe. Hamilton was defending
the two clauses by poking fun at the Anti-Federalist alarmists who had
stirred up opposition to the Constitution with warnings about how it
would trample America’s liberties.
In the cited section of No. 33, Hamilton is saying the
two clauses had been unfairly targeted by “virulent invective and
petulant declamation.”
It is in that context that Hamilton complains that the
two clauses “have been held up to the people in all the exaggerated
colors of misrepresentation as the pernicious engines by which their
local governments were to be destroyed and their liberties exterminated;
as the hideous monster whose devouring jaws would spare neither sex nor
age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.”
In other words, last week’s dissent from Scalia and
the three other right-wingers does not only apply Hamilton’s comments to
the wrong section of the Constitution but reverses their meaning.
Hamilton was mocking those who were claiming that these clauses would be
“the hideous monster.”
Since Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito don’t
have the real history on their side, they apparently saw little option
but to make up their own.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.
1 comment:
That doesn't mean Obamacare isn't unconstitutional AS PASSED. Health insurance is NOT interstate commerce. Forcing people to buy something they don't need, want, and can't afford is WRONG. If it's supposed to be a tax, then it should be applied to everyone as part of the income tax code. We needed health care reform but this was NOT the way to do it.
Post a Comment