The End of Obamacare?

At his website Legal Insurrection, Prof. William Jacobson thinks the U.S. District judge who ruled the other day that Obamacare is unconstitutional may have the winning argument:

If the ruling holds up on appeal, Obamacare is dead. As a doorknob. Not just the mandate or some other particular provisions. He killed the WHOLE THING.

. . .

Here’s the short version. Texas and other states sued to declare the individual mandate unconstitutional because in the recent tax reform the penalty for failing to pay the mandate was removed. (2nd Amended Complaint here) With the removal of the mandate penalty, the mandate no longer was a function of Congress’ taxing power, which was the basis upon which John Roberts and the liberal Justices on the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the mandate in 2012. The Court conservative and Roberts had ruled the mandate violated the Commerce Clause, but Roberts broke with the conservatives on the tax power issue.

Architects of Obamacare are not happy, and that’s a good sign. Katie Pavlich reports:

Essentially, without the mandate -- Obamacare cannot stand.

Architects of the program, including the guy [Jonathan Gruber} who called Americans "stupid," aren't happy about it. Despite arguing for years the mandate was essential to the success of Obamacare, they're now backtracking in an attempt to save what's left. 

Let’s hope Jacobson and Pavlich are correct.

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Border Security and Media Malpractice

Rick McKee cartoon credit: teapartyamerica.blogspot.com

Cleveland Tea Party often links to reports concerning illegal immigration issues. Failure to enforce border security and immigration laws have a profound impact on so many fronts, but Cleveland Tea Party points to the enormous costs, whether of welfare, healthcare and problems that accompany illegal drugs, all of which come under one of the three Tea Party platform plans, i.e., fiscal responsibility.

Cleveland Tea Party also regularly links to reports on media malpractice and the 24/7 propaganda we see on television and in the mainstream media. Today, Amalric de Droevig addresses both topics in an article at American Thinker titled “What a child's death on the border says about our country”. De Droevig begins his essay:

The mainstream media's treatment of a young girl's death while in the custody of the Border Patrol is a case study in how the mainstream media control the national narrative and manipulate public opinion to advance their leftist agenda.

The purpose of flooding the internet and the airwaves with propaganda about the death and life of Jakelin Maquin isn't to edify or inform the public; it is to make Americans feel bad about enforcing any immigration laws at all.  The real crime here isn't any wrongdoing on the part of the Border Patrol.  The real crime, according to our Cultural Marxist overlords, is that the Border Patrol exists in the first place.

He further elaborates on the media’s dishonesty and moves on to the grim consequences of opposing border control and law enforcement:

Defending our borders is arguably the most essential duty of government.  Moreover, the enforcement of every single law brings with it certain minor, highly attenuated risks to human life.  If the mere detention of criminals is considered too harsh a measure for our nation to stomach any longer, there is no hope for the rule of law or for the Republic's continued survival.  If our government is permanently unwilling or somehow unable to defend our borders, we should not shut the government down temporarily, as Trump is threatening.  We should shut it down permanently.

The full article is here.

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Good news from the Washington Times

The headline:

Kasich admits he couldn't beat Trump if election held today:

'But that's today. It's ever changing'

The report is here.  

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Christmas Lights at Public Square

Photos by Pat Dooley Photography

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The propaganda mill is working overtime

Image credit here

Time Magazine has announced its Person of the Year, actually several Persons of the Year, including “journalist” Jamal Khashoggi who was murdered in Turkey last October.

Who was Jamal Khashoggi? Well, he was not a journalist. He was not a U.S. citizen. He was not even a Green Card holder. Khashoggi was a Saudi national and a political operative for the Muslim Brotherwood. From Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage:

The Khashoggi case demands context.

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth.

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

And from LiberalForum:

Since Khashoggi's October 2 murder at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, media across the United States has claimed he was a U.S. green card holder. As a result, reporters and editors urged the White House to change long standing policies and partnerships with the Kingdom. 

But according to a report in Business Insider, Khashoggi wasn't actually a green card holder and simply visited the U.S. on a visa.

Mohamad Soltan, an Egyptian-American activist who sees Khashoggi regularly in Washington, told Reuters that Khashoggi was in the United States on an O-visa. . . .

The media is bestowing on Khashoggi increased visibility and now, “credibility” as a martyr for journalism, honored by Time magazine in the company of other journalists who risked their lives to report the news. As I see it, Time is cynically using those other journalists to provide cover for Khashoggi as a journalist. So now the media can continue to use him as a cudgel to whack away at President Trump’s Middle East policies as part of their anti-Trump agenda.

Alexander Downer at the Financial Review published an excellent summary of the story that the media won’t report, click here. The mainstream media’s dishonesty and bias is on full display 24/7, but it’s not always this blatant. Or self-serving.

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Walls

Amidst all the pontificating about "The Wall" being "immoral" and useless, this one is making the rounds:

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Tea Party and MAGA vs Uniparty

Image via Conservative Treehouse

Sundance has must-read history lesson starting with the Tea Party movement in 2009, its metamorphosis into the MAGA movement, and why the GOP continues to break its promises and obstruct President Trump’s initiatives. A few extracts from Sundance’s history lesson at Conservative Treehouse:

An interesting pattern of seemingly disconnected political stories is beginning to show signs of a common continuity.  In the bigger of the big pictures seven words continue to set the baseline: “There are trillions of dollars at stake”.

When the common sense Tea Party movement formed in 2009 and 2010 it contained a monumentally frustrated grassroots electorate, and the scale of the movement caught the professional republican party off-guard. When Donald Trump ran for the office of the presidency he essentially did the same thing; he disrupted the apparatus of the professional republican party.

The difference between those two examples is one was from the bottom up, and the second was from the top down.  However, the commonality in the two forces resulted in the 2016 victory.

. . .

A few years pass and the issues that spurred the Tea Party movement remained unresolved.  In 2015 Donald Trump taps in to that exact same Tea Party frustration toward the control authority within one-half of the DC UniParty; again, the professional republican apparatus was disrupted.  The movement re-branded and now the MAGA movement wins the presidency.

So it should not come as a surprise to see an eerily similar response from within the GOP toward the new threat; the Trump presidency.  After all, there are two constants in an ever changing universe: (1) “NeverTrump” didn’t go away; and (2) the Bush-clan, or GOP old guard, will never accept losing power.

The professional republicans and the professional democrats, ie. “the uniparty”, have a common enemy in President Trump.  The vulgarian leader of the deplorable coalition never asked for permission; never paid the indulgency fees; never attended the necessary cloistered club meetings paying homage; and never offered the indulgent team of political elites terms for his takeover.

Thus Donald Trump, just like the Tea Party, would never be accepted.

. . .

There are no MAGA lobbying groups in Washington DC advocating for policies that benefit economic nationalism.  On this objective President Donald Trump stands alone.

We don’t need a third party in Washington DC, we actually need a second one.

I no longer think of the GOP as the “party of Stupid.” I think of the GOP instead as the “Party of Bought” -- that would be the (R) half of the “Uniparty.”

Read the whole thing here.

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