ObamaCare Supporters Channel Billy Wilder

In the movie Some Like It Hot, a cinematic gem (with Marilyn Monroe how could it be otherwise) and comedic classic, which unfortunately overshadows another Billy Wilder movie -- his practically unknown masterpiece One, Two, Three (link), a ruling mobster played by Nehemiah Persoff turns down his hearing aid as he responds to the George Raft character, a mobster who at the formal banquet has just had a large cake rolled out in front of him that, unbeknownst to him, contains a machine-gun wielding assassin about to spray bullets his way, and who protested suspiciously, “but it ain’t my birthday for a couple of months”, saying with false affection but malign intent, “so what’s a couple of months ... between friends?”

I was reminded of this line when reading a concise and trenchant account of the various serially flimsily specious rationales the Obama team has advanced to attempt to prove up the Constitutionality of the individual mandate in Obamacare – the ground-breaking part of the law that requires private citizens to purchase a private product from a private firm (in this case, but only as the first step down the slippery slope, health insurance). Vegetables and DVDs about global warming climate change are next up for federal mandates.

David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey write (link) in today's Wall Street Journal:

Consistent with the fundamental principle that the federal government is one of limited, enumerated powers, more than 220 years of case law requires that exercises of the commerce power be grounded in a meaningful, judicially enforceable, limiting principle. ObamaCare's defenders can't articulate such a principle…. If ObamaCare is to be upheld, then the Supreme Court will have to abandon … precedents, along with the plain meaning of the Constitution…. Thus the administration's position comes to this: What is one unconstitutional law, more or less, among friends?

John M Greco