Scalia making sense again about another Supreme Court decision that doesn't

Here is Justice Antonin Scalia in another dissent to an increasingly liberal High Court, this time practicing its politics through King v. Burwell:

This case requires us to decide whether someone who buys insurance on an Exchange established by the Secretary gets tax credits. You would think the answer would be obvious—so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it. In order to receive any money under §36B, an individual must enroll in an insurance plan through an “Exchange established by the State.” The Secretary of Health and Human Services is not a State. So an Exchange established by the Secretary is not an Exchange established by the State—which means people who buy health insurance through such an Exchange get no money under §36B. 

Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is “established by the State.” It is hard to come up with a clearer way to limit tax credits to state Exchanges than to use the words “established by the State.” And it is hard to come up with a reason to include the words “by the State” other than the purpose of limiting credits to state Exchanges. “[T]he plain, obvious, and rational meaning of a statute is always to be preferred to any curious, narrow, hidden sense that nothing but the exigency of a hard case and the ingenuity and study of an acute and powerful intellect would discover.” Lynch v. Alworth-Stephens Co., 267 U. S. 364, 370 (1925) (internal quotation marks omitted). Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.

Read the rest here.

The Twelve Days of Obamacare

HT: AEI Ideas

The Democrats Deadly Dilemma: Why Obama and his Democratic allies are doomed

President Obama has committed the one unpardonable political sin: embarrassing your friends.

So far he has gotten away with anything he wanted no matter how much it cost the country. But now it is not just costing the country; it is costing his political allies. You can do just about anything in politics but that.

And because of this they are fleeing the sinking political ship like rats. Today, 39 Democrats broke ranks to vote for a Republican-sponsored bill that would do what Obama said he wanted to do in his speech yesterday (and what he promised before Obamacare was passed): keep your current health care policy.

But Obama says he is going to veto it if it comes to his desk. Why would the President veto a bill that would ensure that insurance companies could do what he promised they could do yesterday?

There is a very simple answer to this question: Although he wants to appear as if he wants insurance companies to be allowed to do this, he doesn't really want them to do it.

If insurance companies continue to offer the same health policies they offered before, then fewer healthier people will join the exchanges. And if they fewer healthier people don't join the exchanges, then, because of the high percentage of high-risk participants, rates on policies purchased through the exchanges will increase.

In other words, the very success of Obamacare depends on the success of driving people now insured through the individual market into the exchanges. But it also depends on people being able to keep their policies like Obama said they would.

In other words, the two criteria necessary for Obamacare to succeed are mutually exclusive:

If people are allowed to keep their current policies, then rates will increase, which will doom Obamacare. If, on the other hand, people are not allowed to keep their current policies, then they will rebel, which will also doom Obamacare. Since either people will be allowed to keep their current policies or they won't, either rates will increase or people will rebel. In either case, Obamacare is doomed.

There does not appear to be any way around the horns of this dilemma. In fact, something even worse is likely to happen.

In fact, the pressure of this dilemma has been to increase even more by the failure of the Obamacare website. What the failure of the website has done is bring about the worse possible outcome of the President's health care legislation. In most dilemmas, you are forced to make a choice between two unacceptable alternatives--in this case raising health care insurance rates or making people angry by throwing them off the plans you told them they could keep.

What the failure of the website has done is ensure that the President and his Democratic allies are impaled, not on one horn of the dilemma or the other--but on both of them.

Because of the technical problems that are preventing people from signing up for health care, it is everything but an absolute certainty that people will not get back their cancelled policies. Under the Presidents plan--and the Republican bill passed today--insurers are not required to keep offering these policies and there is no incentive for them to continue to offer them.

In addition, it will be almost impossible for the exchange to sign up enough people to keep rates low, even if the site is fixed before the end of this month--another promise Obama made which he cannot keep.

And the timing of things couldn't be worse for Democratic congressmen: The announcements of rate increases will arrive next September or October, right before mid-term elections.

High rates and lack of choice. Oh, and one more thing, because of the inauspicious timing of the Obamacare schedule, many people will be without health care policies on January 1, when, under Obamacare, they are required to have them.

If this political coffin needed another nail, there it is.

I'm trying to think of what is going on right now in the minds of those people who predicted just a week or so ago a drubbing of the Republicans at the polls next year because of the threatened government shutdown. In fact, does any even remember that now?

Obamacare website Hell

A lady describes her experience signing up online:

...I tried again, was able to get on and was then told that I needed to authenticate my identity.  I was asked several questions such as “What town did you live in when you lived on Pinewood?”  Three of the four questions, while going back 18 years ago, were reasonable and I was able to answer.  Then we came to a fourth question – “In the past you purchased veterinary insurance for your pet…What was the name of the pet?”  I answered “none of the above” because I NEVER purchased health insurance for my pet(s).  Since I answered “none of the above” I was given another question…”What was your former telephone number?”  All the answers were for area code 803.  I never lived in area code 803 and had to look it up on the internet.  I never lived in the state.  So…I could go no further.  I called the Center and they told me that they were having systems issues and to try back.

Read the rest here.

Obamacare in one sentence

Here is Dr. Barbara Bellar, an Illinois state senate candidate, summing up Obamacare:

So let me get this straight: ... We're going to be gifted with a health care plan we are forced to purchase, and fined if we don't, which purportedly covers at least 10 million more people without adding a single new doctor, but which provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it (but exempted themselves from it), and signed by a President who smokes, with funding administered by a Treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before the benefits take effect, by a government which is already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke.

HT: Catholicvote.org

What could possibly go wrong with Obamacare?

HT: Carpe Diem:

Does the Catholic prohibition on contraception make sense?

Those protesting the Obama administration's directive forcing Catholic institutions to provide their employees with contraceptives against the religious teachings of Catholicism are careful to point out that your view on whether the Obama administration is right is distinct from what you believe about the Catholic position on birth control.

At the same time, it's not a bad time to say something about the Catholic position on birth control. It is probably the ethical position most at odds with the modern utilitarian view of morality, and it makes no sense if you don't understand the central principle of Catholic ethics in general.

The central principle of Catholic ethics is that it is teleological. If you don't get this, then most Catholic ethical positions will make no sense at all.

There are basically three kinds of ethical systems. The first is consequentialist: an action is right if it produces good effects. Utilitarianism is the most widely known kind of consequentialism. The second is deontological: an action is right if the intension is to act in accordance with ethical rules. Immanuel Kant's ethics is considered a paradigm case of deontological ethics.

The third school of ethical thought, that to which Catholics are at least supposed to adhere, is teleological. What does it mean to say that Catholic ethics is "teleological"? The word comes from the Greek word telos, meaning, roughly, "purpose." This is widely known today as "virtue ethics," a view of human actions that is based on an Aristotelian-Thomistic view of reality. In modern times this view has been championed most notably by G.E.M. Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre. In fact, MacIntyre's book After Virtue is one of the most important and influential philosophy books to have come out in the last 50 years, and is almost single-handedly responsible for the contemporary revival of virtue ethics.

MacIntyre makes the case that, since the rejection of the Aristotelian-Thomist worldview during the so-called Enlightenment, teleological ethics has largely been abandoned in favor of various consequentialist and deontological views of ethics that have largely failed for a variety of reasons. And this, in turn, is the result of the rejection of two of Aristotle's four cases: formal cause, which the intrinsic pattern inherent in every thing, and final cause, which is the inherent purpose (telos) in every thing, and is aligned implicitly in each thing to that things formal cause.

The only coherent system of ethics, MacIntyre argues, is teleological.

Ethics in the teleological view is very simple. There are men as we find them in the world and men as they would be if they fulfilled their telos. Ethics is the best way to get from the first to the second.

Furthermore, because formal and final causation are rational concepts, virtue ethics yields a rational ethical system, one which short-circuits the fact/value distinction that plagues every other ethical system. There is no fact/value distinction in Catholic ethics, since ethics is itself a rational system.

Catholic ethics then, being teleological, is based on purpose. But more specifically, it is based on the intrinsic purpose in natural things, most importantly in man. If you look at the list of Catholic ethical positions, it will make sense only if you understand this.

This is particularly evident in sexual ethics. In Catholicism, a sexual act, like any other act, is judged right or wrong according the telos implicit in the act. The telos of the sexual act is reproduction. If the sexual act is performed in conflict with this purpose, or if the purpose the act is somehow interfered with, then it is wrong.

This is why the Catholic Church is opposed to contraceptives: They interfere with the intrinsic purpose of the sexual act.

Now as soon as you say this, you get rhetorically jumped by people who either don't understand teleological ethics or don't agree with it. They either argue that reproduction is not the only purpose of the sexual act or that no act has any intrinsic purpose and that the purpose of any act is whatever the doer has in mind.

As to the first kind of response, the usual argument is that pleasure is obviously a purpose of sex, and therefore reproduction is not the only purpose. But the argument that reproduction is not the only purpose of the sexual act is irrelevant, since it is not the position of the Catholic Church that it is. The Catholic position is that reproduction is the primary purpose and other purposes are subordinate to it.

It is also irrelevant because the argument confuses the natural purpose of a thing and it's extrinsic, human purpose. As Catholic philosopher Edward Feser has put it:

It is also irrelevant that people might indulge in sex for all sorts of reasons other than procreation, for I am not talking about what our purposes are, but what nature's purposes are, again in the Aristotelian sense of final causality. Now it is true of course that sexual relations are also naturally pleasurable. But giving pleasure is not the final cause or natural end of sex; rather, sexual pleasure has as its own final cause the getting of people to engage in sexual relations, so that they will procreate.

In other words, of course there are other purposes to sex than procreation, but they themselves only serve to enhance the primary purpose.

Then, as we said, there is the argument of those who don't think anything has any intrinsic purpose at all. This is the real objection, and, in fact, the people who argue that sex has some purpose other than procreation really don't believe in intrinsic purposes at all, anyway, even though they sometimes talk as if they do.

If you take this position--and reject all formal and final causes in nature--then you are left with the position that the heart is not for pumping blood, and the kidney is not for filtering the blood, and teeth are not for chewing, and the brain is not for controlling the rest of the body.

Just be glad doctors don't believe this--or at least that they don't act as if they did.

Under this view, nothing, in fact, is for anything.

And if you take this position, you are, of course, in the strange predicament of saying that the reproductive organs are not for reproduction.

It's not a position I would want to defend.

Right to Life of KY responds on Obamacare

Michael Janocik of Right to Life of Kentucky takes on a response to his original letter in the Louisville Courier-Journal on Obamacare:

My sympathy and prayers go out to C. Stone, who lost her young husband to cancer. In her rebuttal to my letter in the Louisville Courier-Journal, "Obamacare Leads Us Down a Dangerous Path," Stone rightly points to serious flaws in the current third-party private health insurance market. Most Americans believe we can do better and I applaud Mrs. Stone for her contribution to do so on behalf of her husband and others. The point of my CJ letter is that Obamacare will exacerbate, not alleviate, the problems with which we are all too familiar - the denial or hindrance of health care coverage by third party payers.

Notwithstanding Stone’s helpful criticisms, her rebuttal actually affirms my argument. Stone writes: "Janocik, assistant director of Right to Life Educational Foundation of Kentucky, and his ilk continue to spout these "death panel" threats and continue to obscure what health care reform is all about. Can we please quit terrifying people?” Nary a handful of keystrokes click by before she writes, “I do agree with his comment that ‘when third-party, unaccountable bureaucracies control health care decisions, rather than patients and physicians, involuntary rationing is the inevitable result, with involuntary euthanasia not too far behind’,” citing the role that private insurance played in denial of care for her husband.

To redress that denial of coverage, Stone wrote she was able to pay for care above and beyond what her insurance covered. That is true and that is precisely one of the freedoms, among others, that Obamacare will abolish - Stone’s ability to purchase health care treatment beyond the scope of her government-approved insurance policy.

It seems counter-intuitive then, that Stone would defend health care legislation that would, by her own acknowledgment, 1. ) further concentrate power to deny health care coverage within one federal bureaucracy, rather than within hundreds, if not thousands, of private insurers and, 2.) deny her the means by which to pay for additional medical care for her husband that will not be covered by “universal health care.”

Stone’s exegesis of the current health care failings seems well-informed by her personal challenge to do right by her beloved husband. Perhaps her perception of the solution, however, is clouded by same.

Michael Janocik
Assistant Director
Right to Life Educational Foundation of KY