United Liberty

Paul Krugman confirms it:

PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Think about people on the right. They’re simultaneously screaming, they’re going to send all of the old people to death panels and it’s not going to save any money. That’s a contradictory point of view.

TAPPER: Death panels would save money, theoretically.

KRUGMAN: The advisory path has the ability to make more or less binding judgments on saying this particular expensive treatment actually doesn’t do any good medically and so we’re not going to pay for it. That is actually going to save quite a lot of money. We don’t know how much yet. The CBO gives it very little credit. But most of the health care economists I talk to think it’s going to be a really major cost saving. I have to say, I’m wearing an FDR tie in honor of the fact that we have gone from the New Deal to the Big Biden Deal, I guess we’re allowed to say.

TAPPER: Big bleeping deal?

KRUGMAN: Yes.

TAPPER: Peggy?

Anyone as uncomfortable as I am with the idea of a government panel deciding if you’ll be able to get that life-saving operation ?

I can already tell that a lot of people aren’t going to like this decision:

BALTIMORE – The father of a Marine killed in Iraq and whose funeral was picketed by anti-gay protesters was ordered to pay the protesters’ appeal costs, his lawyers said Monday.

On Friday, Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ordered Snyder to pay $16,510 to Fred Phelps. Phelps is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, which conducted protests at Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder’s funeral in 2006.

The two-page decision supplied by attorneys for Albert Snyder of York, Pa., offered no details on how the court came to its decision.

Attorneys also said Snyder is struggling to come up with fees associated with filing a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court.

The decision adds “insult to injury,” said Sean Summers, one of Snyder’s lawyers.

I’m sure it does, but it’s the law.

Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 39 says this:

(a) Against Whom Assessed. The following rules apply unless the law provides or the court orders otherwise:

(1) if an appeal is dismissed, costs are taxed against the appellant, unless the parties agree otherwise;
(2) if a judgment is affirmed, costs are taxed against the appellant;
(3) if a judgment is reversed, costs are taxed against the appellee;
(4) if a judgment is affirmed in part, reversed in part, modified, or vacated, costs are taxed only as the court orders.

In other words, the losing party on appeal pays the appeal costs (meaning the filing fees, transcript fees, and printing fees they incurred, NOT their attorneys fees) of the victorious party. The Court really has no discretion in the matter.

The Hill notes that Republicans are looking to the Supreme Court to stop ObamaCare if all other avenues fail:

Republicans admit it will be difficult for Congress to repeal the legislation in the next few years, but they see a potential ally in the Supreme Court.

“It’s very probable that a number of provisions in this monstrosity violate constitutional principles,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I think there will be a lot of ongoing litigation for years to come.”

Sessions said the provision in the law that requires individuals to buy insurance or face a penalty raises “very serious constitutional questions.”

This is probably a misplaced hope. Let’s face it, the Supreme Court is not exactly a beacon of liberty, even in recent years with less of a progressive presence. Yes, there have been some rulings that restored basic constitutional principles, such as District of Columbia v. Heller, Citizens United v. FEC and Boumediene v. Bush. However, there is a much longer history, specifically in the last 80 years, where the Court has undermined core constitutional principles.

Today I had the chance to shadow a fellow University of St. Thomas graduate and lobbyist at the Minnesota capital.  Many people have a very negative view of lobbyists.  Perhaps it is because they have collectively gained a significant amount of power at every level of government.  Perhaps it is because government has become bloated and oftentimes lobbyists pushing for more government intervention win out over those pushing for less.

What I find striking is that the blame has been shifted from the lobbyists and away from the representatives. What I mean by this is that hardly do we hear people singing the praises of lobbyists, but we oftentimes see people praising certain legislators for voting this way or that way. All lobbyists do is try to influence representatives to vote a certain way. They do this through funneling information, meeting with them, and presenting arguments.

I don’t think people realize how many lobbyists there are. You name an issue and there is likely a lobbyist - on both sides of the issue (sometimes there are even more than two positions). For all my libertarian friends out there who denounce lobbyists, you should know that statement implies that Campaign for Liberty, MPP, NORML, the NRA, and a whole host of organizations fighting for Constitutional principles and limited government are also “bad.”

The main thing we should all realize is this: there are many lobbying groups that are lobbying for things we are against. Yes, they may be powerful but ultimately the representative is responsible for their vote regardless of how influential these lobbyists are.

Photo taken at a rally in Los Angeles in March:

It gets better. Did you hear the one about the guy who runs a consulting company that charges money in return for lessons on how to organize a successful anti-capitalism protest?

As economist Tyler Cowen would say, there are markets in everything.

The bounce Democrats got with passage didn’t last very long. According to the most recent Gallup/USA Today survey, negative views of the health care bill still prevail:

In the poll, 50% call passage of the bill “a bad thing” and 47% say it was “a good thing.” That’s at odds with the findings of a one-day USA TODAY Poll taken a week ago — a day after the U.S. House approved the legislation — in which a 49%-40% plurality called the bill “a good thing.”

Politico notes that the impact of the health care bill has been marginal. He is almost where he was before it passed Congress:

The most prominent political prognosticator who predicted a post-reform bump for Obama was President Bill Clinton – who told reporters last year that Obama would add 10 points to his approval rating “the minute health reform passed.”

But Obama’s approval in the Gallup daily tracking poll stands at 48 percent – near his all-time low of 46 percent in the three-day rolling average. Near the time of passage, Obama ticked up to 50 percent in the poll.

“People thought Obama might get a significant uptick,” said Frank Newport of the Gallup Poll. “Obama’s approval seems to have moved up a few points during and slightly after passage. Then it fell back down again.”

A new Washington Post poll shows that voters still oppose ObamaCare, even with a favorable sample:

In the days since President Obama signed the farthest-reaching piece of social welfare legislation in four decades, overall public opinion has changed little, with continuing broad public skepticism about the effects of the new law and more than a quarter of Americans seeing neither side as making a good-faith effort to cooperate on the issue.

Overall, 46 percent of those polled said they support the changes in the new law; 50 percent oppose them. That is virtually identical to the pre-vote split on the proposals and similar to the divide that has existed since last summer, when the country became sharply polarized over the president’s most ambitious domestic initiative.

Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey points out that WaPo oversampled Democratic Party voters:

As always, the sample tells more about the poll than the results.  This poll has a D/R/I split of 34/24/38, giving Democrats a ten-point advantage in the partisan split.  That’s an increase of four points since the February survey, and far outside of reality.

Judge Andrew Napolitano joins those predicting that the health care reform bill will be struck down, although his time frame is far longer than anyone else’s:

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV’s Ashley Martella, Napolitano says the president’s healthcare reforms amount to “commandeering” the state legislatures for federal purposes, which the Supreme Court has forbidden as unconstitutional.

“The Constitution does not authorize the Congress to regulate the state governments,” Napolitano says. “Nevertheless, in this piece of legislation, the Congress has told the state governments that they must modify their regulation of certain areas of healthcare, they must surrender their regulation of other areas of healthcare, and they must spend state taxpayer-generated dollars in a way that the Congress wants it done.

“That’s called commandeering the legislature,” he says. “That’s the Congress taking away the discretion of the legislature with respect to regulation, and spending taxpayer dollars. That’s prohibited in a couple of Supreme Court cases. So on that argument, the attorneys general have a pretty strong case and I think they will prevail.”

(…)

Napolitano tells Newsmax that the longstanding precedent of state regulation of the healthcare industry makes the new federal regulations that much more problematic.

We all knew that the “created or saved jobs” rhetoric was a red herring. The administration’s attempt to spin declining jobs after passing massive Keynesian-style spending to “bring us from the brink.” The Congressional Budget Office has gone along with it, but recently we got some truth from the head of that government agency:

CBO director Doug Elmendorf has finally conceded that they never actual examined this stimulus bills’ affect on the economy. Responding to a questioner following a recent speech, he admitted that the CBO’s jobs count was “essentially repeating the same exercise” as their initial projections. When asked if this means their jobs projections would have ignored any failures of stimulus spending to perform as CBO predicted, Mr. Elmendorf responded “that’s right.” (Exchange begins at 38:20.)

CBO never actually counted the jobs. Nor did their analysis take into account the rising unemployment rate. Or the economic figures. Or how effectively the money was spent. They merely assumed this government spending “must have” saved 1.5 million jobs.

There you have it. Now, if only the media give it some attention.