Over at The Weekly Standard today, I describe how the desire of politicians to steer pork to their constituents is undermining actual progress in space, damaging our balance of payments with respect to Russia, and harming our national security. It’s worth noting that yesterday, because of such feckless policies, we just sent our astronauts up to International Space Station on a Russian vehicle for the first time since the Shuttle retired last summer (the flight was actually supposed to happen in September, but Russian launch failures a couple of months ago had delayed it). It is now our only way to get there, yet Congress refuses to appropriate adequate funding to solve the problem quickly, while pouring billions into a rocket with no mission and that will have ghastly costs to operate, if it ever does, no sooner than a decade from now. And all because “jobs” are apparently more important than actually accomplishing anything useful with the taxpayer money that NASA is forced to spend.
January 2012
The Supreme Court today granted certiorari in the Obamacare cases brought by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business. The court allotted 5 1/2 hours for arguments in the case. That’s many times the length of a typical Supreme Court argument, and probably more time than was devoted to any other case in the last century, says Supreme Court commentator Lyle Denniston.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit had declared the health care law’s individual mandate (requirement that individuals buy health insurance) unconstitutional as beyond Congress’s power under the Interstate Commerce Clause (Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution). But it declined to strike down the rest of Obamacare, including provisions that even the government conceded were intertwined with, and not severable from, the individual mandate, such as restrictions on insurers taking into account pre-existing conditions, and mandatory issuance of insurance to people regardless of their health status (guaranteed issue). Two other appeals courts have upheld the individual mandate, while a federal judge in Pennsylvania struck down both the individual mandate and related portions of Obamacare.
Here are the questions that the Supreme Court has said it will decide in the case being reviewed (Docket Nos. 11-393, 11-398, and 11-400):
1. “Whether Congress had the power under Article I of the Constitution to enact the minimum coverage provision.” Two hours was granted for argument on this question.
2. The Court directs the parties to additionally brief and argue: “Whether the suit brought by respondents to challenge the minimum coverage provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is barred by the Anti-Injunction Act.” An additional one hour was granted for argument on this question.
3. A total of 90 additional minutes was allotted for argument on the two severability questions: “Whether the ACA must be invalidated in its entirety because it is non-severable from the individual mandate that exceeds Congress’ limited and enumerated powers under the Constitution,” and “does the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that virtually every individual obtain health insurance exceed Congress’s enumerated powers and, if so, to what extent (if any) can the mandate be severed from the remainder of the Act?”
4. “Does Congress exceed its enumerated powers and violate basic principles of federalism when it coerces States into accepting onerous conditions that it could not impose directly by threatening to withhold all federal funding under the single largest grant-in-aid program, or does the limitation on Congress’s spending power that this Court recognized in SOUTH DAKOTA v. DOLE (1987), no longer apply?”
Liberty lovers look to America’s Founding Fathers as patron saints, rightly revering the documents those men drafted as bulwarks of individual freedom. How ironic, then, that those very Founders may have inadvertently planted the seeds of liberty’s demise in the U.S. Constitution itself.
Article 1, Sec. 8, the infamous “Commerce Clause” grants the federal government the power to “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” And ever since it was written, this seemingly open-ended phrase has been used to justify the federal government’s ever-expanding scope and power.
In 1942, for example, the Supreme Court used the Commerce Clause in its Wickard v. Filburn ruling that Congress had the power to limit how much wheat a farmer could grow, even for his own personal use, because home-grown wheat “…supplies a need of the man who grew it which would otherwise be reflected by purchases in the open market. Home-grown wheat in this sense competes with wheat in commerce.”
CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.
CEI Weekly
November 11, 2011
>>Featured Story
Last week, several CEI policy analysts spoke at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s Fifth Annual “Defending the American Dream Summit.” CEI Labor Policy Counsel Vincent Vernuccio participated in the “Big Labor vs. Jobs and Freedom” event on Saturday, November 5. Watch the highlight reel of his appearance here or watch the full video of the event here.
[click to continue…]
Not to overshadow the once-in-100-year numerically sequenced date, but today is also Veterans’ Day. This isn’t a great way to get free drinks at the bar by telling people you’re a vet (unless you actually are), but a change to give thanks for mind-blowing bravery and committment of those around us who defend our freedoms with their lives. If anyone deserves a taste of the high life, it’s those folks. While there’s no word on having the legal drinking age lowered so that 18-year-olds who can sign up for military service can also drink a cold beer before they ship out, there’s plenty of other alcohol regulation news.
National: The Brewers Association reports that the beer tasting event at Congress, which I mentioned in my last roundup, was a big success. Four additional members signed up as co-sponsors to the “Small BREW Act,” HR 1236 bringing the total number of co-sponsors to 137. The Act would reduce excise taxes on small breweries.
California: Craft beer lovers in the city of Sacramento lament an ordinance passed in the mid-‘90s called the “single serve ordinance,” which prevents off-premise sales of single bottles of beer — consumers much purchase a six-pack or more. Would-be craft beer store owners along with beer lovers are urging legislators to change the out-dated law which bars the city from carrying many of the high-end beers, those that come in bottles of 22 ounces or 750 milliliters and aren’t packaged in 6-pack form.
Georgia: As I reported in October, Georgia recently overturned the state-wide ban on Sunday sales by allowing counties and cities to vote on whether or not to maintain the prohibition-era blue laws. On Tuesday, Georgians sent a message to their lawmakers that they are so over prohibition. More than 100 counties approved ballot measures allowing Sunday alcohol sales.
Also in Georgia: The Athens-Clarke Commission voted by a vote of 7-3 to reduce the distance that beer and wine shops must be from churches, schools, and homes, from 200 yards to 100 yards.
Land-use and Transportation Policy Analyst Marc Scribner explains why allowing the government to seize land from its owners and give it to developers is a bad idea. Voters in Mississippi agree; on Tuesday they overwhelmingly passed a ballot initiative that would place limits on eminent domain abuse. Marc discusses the pros and cons of Mississippi’s initiative and the prospects for reform in other states.
There was a lot of noise in the news this past week, so you may be forgiven if you let this little nugget slip past you. From Reuters: ”Alabama’s Jefferson County filed for bankruptcy court protection on Wednesday in the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.”
There are three words in there that should never be in the same sentence — biggest, bankruptcy, and history — but there you go. Jefferson County has now followed Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (a state capital, incidentally), Vallejo, California, and Central Falls, Rhode Island, in going recently — and literally — belly up.
First cities then counties, the collapse is upward. People waiting for an economic apocalypse are anxiously watching banks, financial institutions, and national governments, but they are looking in the wrong place — at the local level, the level in which most people live most of their lives, the apocalypse is now.
CBS San Antonio affiliate KENS 5 reports that a San Antonio candy company, Judson-Atkinson Candy Company, has ceased operations after 110 years of making candy. The company has been forced to lay off more than 100 employees, and currently has only 14 people in its production facility. The family-run business says that the company simply can’t compete with firms outside the U.S., since domestic companies pay more for candies’ main ingredient: sugar. According to the owner of the company, Amy Atkinson Voltz, the candy company pays more than twice the international price for sugar, which caused an additional $2 million in costs for the company. “It’s totally unfair competition,” Atkinson said. “It’s been really hard. We had to bring in employees who had worked here 20-plus years and tell them that we were not going to produce candy right now.”
With the costly and unnecessary U.S. sugar program, it’s no surprise that American candy and beverage manufacturers have a hard time competing against international products from countries like Brazil and Mexico. While some domestic manufacturers are able to switch to alternative products like high fructose corn syrup, its application is limited in the candy manufacturing and baking industries.
OPINION
NATE ANDERSON: “Remember the Borderless Internet? It’s Officially Dead”
“‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ wrote L.P. Hartley in his terrific novel The Go-Between. But Hartley knew nothing of the Internet when he wrote his novel of adolescent sexual awakening; if he had, he might have been shocked at just how quickly the past became a foreign place. Indeed, from the perspective of the recently introduced Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would set up US website blacklisting, require search engine censorship, and divide the Internet into ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ sites, the sorts of Internet arguments being made in the late 1990s don’t sound like something from a foreign country so much as something from a foreign planet.”
CATHERINE RAMPELL: “Rick Perry’s Intrade Flash Crash”
“During last night’s Republican presidential debate, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas made an ‘oops‘ when he forgot the third of three federal departments he wanted to eliminate. As Nate Silver’s blog post noted, Mr. Perry’s odds of winning the Republican nomination halved within seconds on Intrade, an online market where people bet on the odds of various events.”
SHIKHA DALMIA: “Liberal Programs Deserve Blame for Income Inequality”
“Liberals are treating a new Congressional Budget Office study showing that income inequality increased in America over the last three decades as the smoking gun they’d always been looking for—the ultimate indictment of America, capitalism, and apple pie.”
In the latest episode of “Fred Weekly,” CEI President Fred Smith discusses the Occupy Wall Street movement and why the protesters ought to be targeting crony capitalism, not free markets. Watch it below:
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