John Locke Foundation President John Hood has had enough of the shenanignans being contemplated by congressional Democrats to pass their health care bill, such as the Slaughter Rule.
Instead, they are going to cheat.
They are going to employ some kind of legislative trickery to pretend to pass a bill that, they now realize, will never become law through constitutional means. They may use the now-infamous Slaughter Rule, which would allow House members to claim to have voted to amend the objectionable Senate bill without actually having passed it through the House. Or they’ll come up with an even-zanier scheme, including a subsequent reconciliation process in the Senate designed to overcome the very filibuster they’ve used to block conservative bills and nominees in the past.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not planning to recognize such a result as legally binding. I’m not going to pretend to obey any dictates from federal health-care bureaucrats that have never been authorized by a constitutional vote of both houses of Congress. I will not submit to any extra-constitutional order to dismantle the consumer-driven health plan I have set up for my employees.
I will not comply. If the government tries to make me comply, I’ll sue. And I’ll win.
So where should we go? JLF’s Joe Coletti explains the characteristics of consumer-driven health care in this brief interview.