Scott Walker is not going to do anything to implement Obamacare in Wisconsin until after the November elections:
Gov. Scott Walker pledged again Thursday not to phase in any parts of President Barack Obama’s signature health care reform law ahead of November’s elections even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it is constitutional…
“While the court said it was legal, that doesn’t make it right,” Walker said at a news conference. “For us to put time and effort and resources into that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
The law’s next deadline isn’t until mid-November, after the elections. But Democrats insisted the governor needs to start work now.
“Ignoring federal laws in hopes that someday they will be repealed is ridiculous and irresponsible policy making,” said state Rep. Kelda Helen Roys, D-Madison, who is running for Congress. “Walker, who falsely calls for increased bipartisanship, is once again pursuing his extremist policies at the expense of Wisconsin families.”
Of course, it didn’t need to be this way.
Update: The guy who led the recall effort behind the scenes (and who was Harry Reid’s communications strategist against Sharron Angle) is not happy:
MT @LegInsurrection: Scott Walker – talk to me about Obamacare on Nov 7 || Or, “I’m a sociopath w/less legal acumen than my dog. Worship me”
— Kelly Steele (@steelekelly) June 30, 2012
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Comments
“Ignoring federal laws in hopes that someday they will be repealed is ridiculous and irresponsible policy making,”
DREAM Act by executive order anyone?
Is there some deadline in ObamaTax that Scott Walker is going to miss? As I understand it, the entire scheme is not scheduled to go into full effect until 2014, which seems to indicate that the states have some flexibility in terms of how quickly they move to set up all their new ObamaTax bureaucracies. If that is indeed the case, then it seems to me that Gov. Walker is just being prudent in waiting until after the November elections to see how things develop. Why rush to spend millions of state taxpayer dollars on a complex and expensive scheme that may well not survive 2013? Or do Wisconsin taxpayers just have money to burn?
That is exactly what I was going to post. A little hypocrisy seems to be good for the Democratic soul.
I’d say that Gov. Walker is choosing wisely.
No need to be hasty, as the Ents would say.
Sound leadership.
just tell that waiting is a tax, its all legal then.
Wasn’t it the case that while Obama can force Americans to buy health insurance he has no authority to force states to setup exchanges or alter Medicaid? Didn’t the court basically tell Obama to go pound sand when it comes to forcing the States to act on Obamacare?
Obamacare will die through the democratic process and precisely because of the budget busting obesity built into its framework…
The real gift Roberts gave us was holding a limit on Governments ability to coerce a massive Medicaid expansion.
Evolving…
The Tenth Amendment Vs The General Welfare Clause
Since the underpinnings of ALL runaway government monstrosities are essentially founded on the General Welfare Clause.
But are the states still required to setup exchanges? Under what authority? I don’t understand that. I get that states can choose whether or not to expand Medicaid (my state will–even though we are broke. Go figure).
Another thing I don’t understand is how the future health insurance system will tier, if at all. Are $10,000/year plans the same as $2,000/year plans (or “free” after penalty or forgiveness for voting Democrap)? Can I shift plans whenever I want without a pre-condition? Will the free plan be, essentially, Medicaid–meaning that you can have “coverage”, but few doctors & hospitals will accept Medicaid patients so there is no coverage anyway?
You need to apply your second sentence to your first sentence.
If the states fail to set up exchanges, the fed gov steps in and does it for them. Not sure who pays for it at that point. The states can opt out of the Medicare expansion without losing current funding.
Thanks! I don’t think this will matter in my state, since the Democraps have already promised to implement the state exchange. But, given past history of similar Democrap projects, it will take twice as long and cost 4 times as much to get half the required features. But the project will be good for some nice Democrap graft, so at least someone will benefit from it.
>> Of course, it didn’t need to be this way. <<
A couple of days before the ruling, Intrade had the odds at 80% that the individual mandate was toast. The lefty punditry were all depressed because they had convinced themselves that the mandate was going down.
Now we know that four justices were prepared to strike the entire law, and subject themselves to enormous "progressive" public abuse for months if not years to come. Using William F. Buckley's famous line, the four brave justices who deserve our praise were ready to "stand athwart history yelling Stop" to the never ending expansion of government power and erosion of liberty. Roberts single-handedly snatched defeat from the jaws of that victory for limited government. And politically, he gave Obama the biggest win of his term.
But our side is still busy taking victory laps for hypothetical future wins that may very well prove to be illusory.
I just cannot figure them out.
“I predict that the individual mandate will never mandate anyone. Yet the mandate will be long remembered as one of the most consequential laws enacted by a Congress. The result of the “bank battle” was that even though a central bank was judicially permissible, central banking was politically toxic for the rest of the century. The “mandate battle” may have the same effect in deterring any future thoughts of congressionally-imposed mandates. (Putting aside the obvious exception for mandates that have a solid basis in the constitutional text, such as jury service.)
The enactment of the mandate has also significantly increased the probability that the next Supreme Court appointments will be made by a President and confirmed by a Senate which denounces the mandate as unconstitutional, and that the new Justices will be the kind who are inclined to vigorously enforce the many strong constitutional limits on congressional over-reaching which are articulated in NFIB v. Sebelius.”
_____________________________________________
http://www.volokh.com/2012/06/29/next-step-repeal-the-individual-mandate-because-it-is-unconstitutional/
Well, we’ll see, won’t we. I think the decision was a thin legal victory (terrible defeat for the Constitution) for Obama, and a political dose of hemlock for Pre. Composite.
Obamacare: A bill written by Big Business, with checks written by the poor.
See WH emails on writing the bill, and the regressive taxation that it is.
Sounds more like Fascism (where big-business and big-government are in cahoots) than Socialism (where they’re enemies).
This is no victory for Conservatives OR Socialists. This is a victory for bureaucrats and politicians.
It is fascist economics.
Where you are confused is WRT “fascists v. socialists”. They are all Collectivists flying different colored bunting, but that is all. They are inbred spawn of the same family.
heh. That phrasing puts me in mind of a scene from “Deliverance”. Rather fitting for the different fruits and nuts in the Socialist granola.
Bravo!!
Two sides of the same coin.
I had coffee this morning with a young lady who’s like another daughter to me. She’s a smart, hard-working post-graduate student with a very bright future and… at least before today, a headstrong, fledgling Leftie.
Our conversation turned to the SCOTUS decision and ObamaCare in general. Currently, she’s got a typical young person’s health insurance policy – relatively cheap, no frills – through one of her employers (the kid works 3 P/T jobs).
She was shocked and more than a little upset when I told her that under the ACA
individual mandatebuy-or-get-taxed plan, she’d be compelled to buy a more expensive, HHS-approved plan, so we could fatten up the risk pool for us old farts! “You’ll be subsidizing people like me, your mom, your grandparents…”“That’s not fair! I work my butt off! How can that be?” she asked.
“Hon, that’s ‘fairness’ according to the Democrats. That is ‘sharing the wealth’ and the ‘hope and change’ you voted for!” I said.
From there, we had a good discussion about ‘social justice,’ which heretofore had been an abstract to her, as well as the whole concept of ‘fairness’. I told her, “Everything the government gives away, they took from someone else.”
I could clearly see that she had an epiphany, of sorts, as some of her undergraduate indoctrination crashed in the face of the real world. That there was a noticeable shift to the center, was most evident!
Young people don’t understand voting your pocketbook until their pocket gets picked by experts!
I had a friend tell me that she and her husband were Democrats until he got a “real” job and they realized how much was being taken out of his paycheck each month to pay for all those freebies they enjoyed before becoming adults. It had never occurred to them that someone else was paying for their freebies. It came as a real shock when she got pregnant and was not eligible for Medicaid due to her husband’s income and they had not insured her under his employer’s plan, because, “hey, it’s free from the government.” Oops.
My son recently had that same epiphany as I explained to him the need to withhold FICA taxes for self-employment. One of his pt jobs will be reported via 1099. I explained how now that the IRS & federal government knew about his pay he was obligated for another 7.5% tax on his revenue. Telling him it was for my good and that he would never see a penny of it was rather cruel, I admit.
I cannot wait to tell him about his Obamacare taxes. But I will make him feel better by reminding him that the money is also going to old farts like me as well as illegal aliens.
If by the poor you mean middle class, then yes. The dirty little secret is that chocolate gumby didn’t give anything to the poor that they did not already have.
“The fundamental problem with the court’s approach to this case is this: It saves a statute Congress did not write… The court regards its strained statutory interpretation as judicial modesty. It is not. It amounts instead to a vast judicial overreaching.” –Justice Anthony Kennedy
What will be interesting is to see if Kennedy holds his anger into the future.
Hopin’…
Remember the amount of lying, bribing, and rule-changing that the democrats used to get Obamacare enacted, including the voter fraud re Al Franken. They know that November is the last chance for our side to stop it. There is clarity in my mind that the democrats will engage in an unprecedented amount of voter fraud in November to re-elect Obama and to keep the senate. I have little confidence that our side appreciates the magnitude of what the democrats will do or is up to stopping the voter fraud.
I don’t think they much care about voter fraud. If the Republicans cared, they would be making noise about it. Even the stupidest people would have “gotten it” by now.
My opinion: Republicans LIKE being the minority. They can then vote against the Democrats but still get what they want (big government and graft for themselves) and have an excuse to cave in (“compromise” for “future considerations” that never materialize).
Far too many Republicans are corrupt idiots in politics because they’d never be successful in the real world. They are conservatism’s taxi squad, going up against the Democrat Marxist All-Stars.
The Tea Party changed all of that.
If nothing else, the illegal immigrant problem has taught us that if a large enough number of people disobey federal law, the feds haven’t the will to do anything about it. Having said that, what would happen if large numbers of American citizens simply refused to obey any mandate? Yes, they get penalized, er, taxed, er, whatever, but what if they refuse to pay? I’m guessing there’s a mechanism where eventually you could be jailed, but do we think the federal government would jail large numbers of American citizens?
The Supreme Court failed to kill Obamacare.
Romney promises to repeal and replace, however, Bill Clinton did not have sex that woman, George HW said, ‘read my lips, no new taxes’, and Nixon was not a crook. Anyone loathe to place trust in political promises is warranted in doing so. Romney may win the WH, yet fail to repeal Obamacare.
Romney may lose the election.
The penultimate resort will be civil disobedience in large numbers. I don’t even want to think about the last resort.
Interesting analogy.
However, the Establishment loooooves illegals, and will do anything they can for them, regardless of the will of the people. They’re nice to them because they’re on the same page as far as goals.
Ignoring Obamacare laws…well, it could get very dicey. Although mass disobedience is probably the only legitimate way to bludgeon it to irrelevancy. But don’t be surprised if they do mass arrests, mass show trials (or not even trials: “administrative hearings,” a kind of kangaroo court, for failure to comply with a regulation). It WILL get very ugly.
The IRS will just garnish your wages or withdraw money from your bank account. And if that isn’t enough it will steal your property. Ultimately, the IRS will just send you to jail.
Illegals are under the IRS radar. The middle class is under the fed’s thumb.
So instead of passive civil disobedience, active civil disobedience would be required. 500,000 protestors burning down the Internal Revenue Service building in DC might get their attention. Tar and feathering of political appointees has its merits as well.
I’ve been thinking about this, as well. The law is an authoritarian’s wet dream. It seems to me that the amount of power it explicitly grants to the state against the individual is unprecedented in the history of written legislation.
In short, there’s no escape. If you don’t comply, they’ll find you and punish you. It’s even worse than anything Orwell imagined.
That said, there’s always an “out.” People are clever, and if pushed, will find a way. Nobody has started looking–yet.
But I agree with you. We might have to re-play the Revolutionary War.
I am speaking symbolically about “re-playing the Revolutionary War.”
The biggest problem with a bonafide, blood-and-bullets revolution: even if you defeat the old order, you never know the end-result. It’s almost never good. At best, it’s transitory and unsatisfactory: remember, the USA had the Articles of Confederation for more than a decade.
Mass civil disobedience, as in India 60 years ago, would probably be the best bet. A kind of non-violent Revolutionary War. It worked in Selma, too. It could work again. It would also destroy the legitimacy of the Ruling Class, who would have to slink away.
However, we’d have to ensure something better replaced them with and barred the ruling class forever. Otherwise, you get what happened in South America and Russia: the totalitarians sit quietly for a few years, studying the new system and figuring out how to game and subvert it, then come back and take over.
The mere size of the Obamacare/tax legislation, together with its enormous delegation of rule-making to “the secretary,” guarantees government gone wild. I agree with the thoughts that Obamacare, if implemented, is too much for our country to withstand. If Obamacare in its current form, or anything like it is implemented, I will support some form of general citizen push-back in that the federal government, to me, will have lost its legitimacy.
The concept of “refusing to pay” simply won’t fly. The boys in Washington have you by the shorthairs; withholding federal tax refunds and/or garnishing of wages insures they get theirs, or at least what they claim is theirs.
My whole thesis is based on “in large numbers”. If one, or a dozen, or a thousand Americans refuse to obey, sure, the IRS does whatever the law says to do as punishment, but if 100,000 or 1,000,000 Americans refuse to obey at the same time, I think two things happen: (1) all politicians get cold feet over the political ramifications of mass jailings, and (2) more and more Americans jump on the refuse to obey bandwagon.
I nominate Luke to go first. We’ll wire him for sound and video, see what happens. A brave lad, our Luke.
LukeHandCoolansky the Refusenik. I like it. Only, in this case, Luke will be the one to do the refusing.
“But Democrats insisted the governor needs to start work now.”
Maybe he should act like a Democrat … and flee the state.
Regarding Kelly Steele’s tweet:
Uh oh. Somebody wasn’t born with a “congenial disease.”
He’s just a Gore loser.
It didn’t take Andrea Mitchell’s Wawa scam to make me suspicious of that film clip, in which an extremely short extract of Walker’s statement is shown.
I didn’t even have to google to confirm my suspicions. From Bill’s link:
Why didn’t the news report mention this? Here’s why:
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
NB: My comment only addresses the most egregious thing that came to mind about that film clip. It is not a beginning-to-end fisking.
Quote:
Or, “I’m a sociopath w/less legal acumen than my dog. Worship me”
Unquote
These people are poisonous, obsessed, and evil. Іmagine a Republican tweetіng something like this!
Well, if you don’t like what Gov. Walker is doing, you can always spend millions of dollars on a recall attempt.
Oh, wait …
I don’t think that many understand our politicians. They really, really don’t care about us or the welfare of the country. The only issue is playing the game. I have known many of our leaders and find that they change on being elected. They only follow a set of rules and will not step out of line to do what they were elected for.
Civil disobedience will not work here as Americans have always been a nation of cowards. We are not the home of the brave. For my part, I am sick of the whole process and wish for my state to once again secede.
It seems to me that there is an equal protection argument here for young adults ages 21 and 26 who are going to be “taxed” for the reason that they don’t have parents with insurance that can cover them.
Does anyone know anything beyond “kids can stay on their parents’ insurance until the age of 26?” Do the kids decide or parents decide if they stay on? Who pays for it? Does it include married children? What about children who’s employers offer health insurance? Does that disqualify them?