The interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution has been a wild ride with serious implications. The clause grants Congress the power to “regulate commerce . . . among the several States”. For decades it has been used to justify the federal government’s regulation of certain aspects of the economy. Recently, ObamaCare legislated the individual mandate, which will fine people for not obtaining health insurance beginning in 2014. The administration points to the Commerce Clause as their Constitutional right to impose the individual mandate and referred to the fine as a “tax” in court to defend the action as government’s “power to lay and collect taxes”.

Dean is right about the public option; it is unpopular and it should be. Obama is now trying to defend it in the courts as a tax even though he denied it was a tax for over a year! A poll by the Progressive Campaign Change Committee found that while people favored the public option 59% to 31%, people opposed the individual mandate without a public option 56% to 33%. According to Rassmussen, a slight majority actually supports health reform now. However, this is after Obama launched a $700,000 ad campaign (taxpayer financed) to “correct the record” after the bill had already been passed. Back in September, 56% of people opposed it.

Today however, the Obama administration is facing lawsuits from 21 states over the mandate. So how do they defend it? Under the taxing powers of Congress of course.

The military draft is indefensible in anything other than an extreme national emergency in which it would be almost certainly unnecessary. The reason it’s indefensible is simple enough, as Russell Kirk said, “the military draft is slavery.” Yes, quite literally, by definition, it’s slavery.

We’ve written before in favor of gay marriage, so I guess I’m happy to see Prop 8 overturned by a federal judge. Unfortunately, we’ve also written in favor of federalism and I see nothing in the Constitution pertaining to marriage. Regardless, I find the progressive “victory” yesterday somewhat ironic. The reason I find it ironic is because although gay marriage is a cause celeb for progressives, assuming the federal ruling holds up, the progressive “victory” was won in a completely anti-democratic way.

H.R. 2454 is a train wreck of corporate welfare that ignores better alternatives and probably dedicates too much of our scarce resources to fighting climate change, but those are aside the point. The point here is that almost a year after the House passed cap-and-trade on April 20th, the massive BP oil leak started. Fortunately, they just capped the leak, hopefully for good, after it had been gushing millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. But the capped leak was and still is being used to push through cap-and-trade.

The new job data is out and it was so bad it caused a 300+ point drop in the Dow Jones. The market is now down over 10% since late April. Robert Reich is now saying what I thought would happen: we are headed into a double dip recession. Basically, only 431,000 jobs were created, but that itself is very deceiving.

Not only will transfer payments redistribute some wealth to subsidize health care reform, but expect to pay more for your future health expenditures if you’re healthy.

Or perhaps rewriting the past would be a better way to put it. The Obama administration claims its saved between 2.2 and 2.8 million jobs with the stimulus. However, the folks at Biggovernment.com compared the Obama administration’s claims about jobs saved/created to what was said before the stimulus. This would seem like fuzzy math to me:

“It looks like [Goldman Sachs] wants more regulation. The question is: What’s in it for Goldman?… stricter federal liquidity and capital requirements would amount to regulators doing Goldman’s work for Goldman. They want Uncle Sam to mitigate “uncertainty about counterparties’ balance sheets.” That is, they want the government to reduce the risk that Goldman’s debtors or insurers will run into trouble.”