Social Justice has nothing to do with justice in any sense of what is right or fair. It's a political concept, contrived for the convenience of a political class who make a princely living by extorting money from anybody who has it and promising it to anybody who can be persuaded that they're entitled to it. Funny how so much of it rubs off along the way. Funny how slow some people are so slow to realize what's going on. Take the Catholic Archbishops, for instance.
The 12 federal lawsuits filed Monday by 43 Catholic plaintiffs against the Obama Administration's birth-control mandate are a big political and Constitutional moment. The nation's most prominent Catholic institutions are saying that the same federal government they have viewed for decades as an ally in their fight for social justice is now a threat to their religious liberty.
This can't have been an easy decision, especially because the plaintiffs are hardly founding members of the tea party. They include the Archdioceses of New York and Washington but also Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and even the University of Notre Dame.
It's as if some people have to be hit over the head before they get it. Liberal politicians, or progressives as they now like to be called, talk the talk about freedom, by which they mostly mean license or entitlement, but it's all about getting and holding onto power.
President Obama made a calculation that the tipping point had arrived. The Republican massacre in the 2006 mid-term elections, followed in 2008 by the historic election of our first African-American president signalled that the time was at hand when Social Justice could finally take priority over free markets. Barack Obama would focus the agencies federal government, and with Democrats in control of congress they would make it happen.
Of course, imposing Social Justice is an exercise in the use of power, a fact which early on seemed to escape everybody but the Tea Party. But it shouldn't have been so hard to notice that with every bailout and reform he proposed, Barack Obama had set about establishing a new federal dominance and the preeminence of Democratic party influence.
With the automobile industry President Obama took over the bankruptcy reorganization, injecting tax dollars into GM and Chrysler with the condition that the United Auto Workers Union would be given an equity stake in the companies while bond holders, who by law were first in line for repayment, were brushed aside. Had the bankruptcies been allowed to follow the normal legal process, the companies might well have escaped from onerous union contracts and liabilities, which would have been a blow to the UAW. Federal intervention preserved the UAW income stream for Democratic party coffers. That was the primary objective.
Health care reform could have been implemented in any number of ways, but it was devised with an individual mandate that would impose a penalty in the form of a fine for failure to buy a private health insurance policy. Justice Kennedy said this during Supreme Court oral arguments over the law's constitutionality.
The government is saying that the federal government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act. And that is different from what we have in previous cases, and that changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in the very fundamental way.
Justice Scalia asked:
The federal government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers; it’s supposed to be a government of limited powers. And that’s what all this questioning has been about. What is left? If the government can do this, what else can it not do?
The Affordable Health Care Act is was crafted in a way that was intended to expand federal power to the point where there are virtually no limits on it. By removing the severability clause that would leave most of the bill intact in the event that the court struck it down, Democrats in congress and the president issued a deliberate challenge to the Supreme Court, a dare if you will. If you strike down the mandate, you must invalidate the entire law.
Obama has done almost nothing on the domestic policy front that hasn't had an overriding political objective, either to obliterate limits on his own power, to pay off big campaign bundlers, to reward political allies, or to punish enemies. The Catholic Archbishops just found out they're the enemy.
Obama and the Democrats are determined to let nothing stand in the way of Social Justice, and if Obama wins another term it could spell the end of America as we know it. Social Justice means the entrenchment of progressive majorities. If we're stuck with a second Obama administration, it could become all but impossible to get the scoundrels out.
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