Medicaid violates the 10th Amendment

There’s a lot of talking about Medicaid being a large budget problem in Western New York. The local government is saying the State isn’t helping out enough and that its killing county budgets.

I can’t understand how the Federal Government even has the authority to start social programs. From my understanding the 10th Amendment to the Constitution forbids it. Then again I've only read it, not the black housecoat wearing judge's rulings that changed it.

A while ago though I read an article about a man named Sheriff Richard Mack. Sheriff Mack was upset about a little intrusion into state’s rights, in the form of the Brady Bill. The main problem is that it “billed” the states, literally. The sheriff always wanting to uphold the law, and in this case the highest law, the one called the Constitution, challenged the bill.

In JAY PRINTZ, SHERIFF/CORONER, RAVALLI COUNTY, MONTANA, PETITIONER 95-1478 v. UNITED STATES RICHARD MACK, PETITIONER 95-1503 The Supreme court ruled that the Brady Bill violated the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, basically because it required the States to pay it (Unfunded Mandate).

June 27, 1997] Justice Thomas, concurring.
The Court today properly holds that the Brady Act violates the Tenth Amendment in that it compels state law enforcement officers to "administer or enforce a federal regulatory program." See ante, at 25. Although I join the Court's opinion in full, I write separately to emphasize that the Tenth Amendment affirms the undeniable notion that under our Constitution, the Federal Government is one of enumerated, hence limited, powers. See, e.g., McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 405 (1819) ("This government is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers"). "[T]hat those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written." Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 176 (1803). Accordingly, the Federal Government may act only where the Constitution authorizes it to do so. Cf. New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992).

Before any dismiss it because Thomas wrote it:

Justice O'Connor, concurring.
Our precedent and our Nation's historical practices support the Court's holding today. The Brady Act violates the Tenth Amendment to the extent it forces States and local law enforcement officers to perform background checks on prospective handgun owners and to accept Brady Forms from firearms dealers. See ante, at 23. Our holding, of course, does not spell the end of the objectives of the Brady Act. States and chief law enforcement officers may voluntarily continue to participate in the federal program. Moreover, the directives to the States are merely interim provisions scheduled to terminate November 30, 1998. Note following 18 U.S.C. § 922. Congress is also free to amend the interim program to provide for its continuance on a contractual basis with the States if it wishes, as it does with a number of other federal programs. See, e.g., 23 U.S.C. § 402 (conditioning States' receipt)

Now I've got a few questions for our so-called representatives in Albany. If a Sheriff had the courage to stand up to the Federal Government for his county why can't you? You whine about it being out of your control, yet its not, so says the Supreme Court. Or were you hoping no one would notice?

Is there anyone out there that understands the law will enough to explain why we don't use this decision to get the unfunded mandate of Medicaid off our backs? Better yet is there a lawyer out there that would take the case?


Richard Mack is now running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, maybe he could get the other Senators to read the Constitution.

By the way I received a very nice three-page letter from Sen. McCain (sorry no pictures, I used it in the bird cage) in response to mine to him. Very nice form letter even had a stamped signature that REALLY looked like his. Though the letter didn’t address my concerns, though how could it, they were about his disregard for the Constitution. After all you have to know something exists before you can talk about it.

It’s a Living Document, Do to the People as You Want

A Time’s article looks at another page turned in the Enron case. This one though could have some disasterous effects on what little remains of the Bill of Rights.

Ken Lay's death in July, it was assumed, meant the end of the criminal case against the former Enron chairman. But prosecutors want to change that. On Wednesday, they filed a a motion asking Judge Sim Lake to hold off on signing the paperwork vacating Lay's conviction on fraud and conspiracy charges until former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling is sentenced in late October. In the motion, prosecutors propose a new law that criminal cases not be abated when the defendant dies, as is current legal precedent. In an effort to also get a Congressional hearing on the proposal, copies were sent to the Speaker of the House and Vice President Dick Cheney………….

……………….The Enron task force wants the new law to be retroactive to July 1 — four days before Lay died. The proposal has sparked a hot legal debate among those involved in and observing the Enron case…………..

So we now have public prosecutors lobbying congress for laws. Passing new laws and making them retroactive?? Scary, I hope in a “need for more revenue” the New York Legislation doesn’t lower the speed limit to 10mph “retroactively”. I can see the resubmission of thousands for tickets. Think of all the votes they could buy then.

Skilling's defense attorney Daniel M. Petrocelli says.

"The proposed legislation is openly unconstitutional. And the motion to the court asks the court in the starkest terms to participate in a knowing violation of the Constitution. I trust the court will reject the invitation."

Umm, I wouldn’t bet on it. Mistake number one, trusting the court to uphold the Constitution.

While some attorneys, and victims of the Enron scandal, argue that letting Lay — even in death — off the hook is a miscarriage of justice, others say the proposal is mean-spirited. "It's a disguised attempt to punish Lay further — not to help crime victims," says attorney Joel Androphy, author of the legal text White Collar Crime. "It has no global purpose other than being vindictive." Even though the criminal case is over, Androphy points out, Enron victims will still be compensated, because Lay's estate will have to pay any civil judgments. He argues that the proposed law sends a message that the government could strip away other constitutional rights, from jury trials to Fifth Amendment protections. "Who knows what will be next," he says.

Hold it, “proposed law sends a message that the government could strip away other constitutional rights”. Three words New London, Conn. The message has gone out and the message reads; “It’s a Living Document,” and “Do to the people as you want”.

To better serve the people the state most force the people to serve it.

The War on Drugs, the Real Stepping Stone to Hard Drugs

The Internet is a marvelous thing. Even an uneducated smock like myself can find intelligent people that we can quote, or point too to prove a point, or opinion.

Today while jumping around the “web” from link, to link, to link, I found a site that has the transcripts of an interview with Dr Milton Friedman.

Paige: Let us deal first with the issue of legalization of drugs. How do you see America changing for the better under that system?

Friedman: I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there's a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which they're sure of the quality. You know, the same thing happened under prohibition of alcohol as is happening now.

Under prohibition of alcohol, deaths from alcohol poisoning, from poisoning by things that were mixed in with the bootleg alcohol, went up sharply. Similarly, under drug prohibition, deaths from overdose, from adulterations, from adulterated substances have gone up.

What's really great is how Dr. Friedman explains how government prohibition of Marijuana is the REAL stepping stone to harder drugs, and not Marijuana itself.Transcript

One justification for the prohibition is the addicts, but Milton Friedman explains the flip side of the coin:

So, the evidence is very mixed. But I have to admit that the one negative feature of legalizing drugs is that there might be some additional drug habbits. However, I want to qualify that in still another way.

The Child who's shot in a slum in a pass-by-shooting, in a random shooting, is an innocent victim in every respect of the term. The person who decides to take drugs for himself is not an innocent victim. He has chosen himself to be a victim. And I must say I have very much less sympathy for him. I do not think it is moral to impose such heavy costs on other people to protect people from their own choices

In a prior post I had asked "How many lives are worth a socialist idea, now though, how many lives are worth an moralistic idea?

Constitution Day

Now I see why the Buffalo News doesn't use Walter William's A MINORITY VIEW

Each year since 2004, on Sept. 17, we commemorate the 1787 signing of the U.S. Constitution by 39 American statesmen. The legislation creating Constitution Day was fathered by Sen. Robert Byrd and requires federal agencies and federally funded schools, including universities, to have some kind of educational program on the Constitution.

I cannot think of a piece of legislation that makes greater mockery of the Constitution, or a more constitutionally odious person to father it -- Sen. Byrd, a person who is known as, and proudly wears the label, "King of Pork." The only reason that Constitution Day hasn't become a laughingstock is because most Americans are totally ignorant of, or have contempt for, the letter and spirit of our Constitution.

Kind of ironic also.

President Grover Cleveland vetoed many congressional appropriations, often saying there was no constitutional authority for such an appropriation. Vetoing a bill for relief charity, President Cleveland said, "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit."

Free Buffalo has posted an article about President Cleveland, I really didn't know much about him, though now I'll start looking to read more about him. There's also talk about a Grover Cleveland Library, odd that a man that was Erie County Sheriff, Mayor of Buffalo, Governor, and President doesn't have a Library/Museum in his hometown.

But back to Constitution Day, Walter Williams ends with:

Here are my questions to you: Has our Constitution been amended to authorize federal spending on "objects of benevolence"? Or, is it plain and simple constitutional contempt by Congress, the president, the courts and, worst of all, the American people? Or, am I being overly pessimistic and it's simply a matter of constitutional ignorance?

Or arrogance?

The New Intellectual bringing about a New Dark Age

In an interview conducted by the Objectivist Center with Walter Williams, Dr. Williams said;

the kinds of things that are tolerated on the college campuses today—it’s despicable. The shouting down of people that they disagree with. Or the recent running out of the President of Harvard, just because he speculated that the reason why women are not highly represented in the sciences may have something to do with genetics.
Take that incident. In terms of the actual evidence that we have, it turns out that women are never as dumb as men, but, on the other hand, they’re never as smart as men. That is, at the very high end of the IQ range, there are relatively few women. At the very low end of the IQ range, where you find imbeciles and idiots, there are relatively few women. And that might explain why women aren’t in jail as much as men. But he was not being a sexist for saying that; he only said, maybe that’s one of the reasons. Yet he was just lambasted at Harvard University and elsewhere. He also said something else: that maybe another reason is because married women just don’t have as much freedom to devote 80 hours a week to research as males do, because they have some obligations. Many times, married women have obligations of household and kids. But anyway, just for making some reasonable speculations, he was run out—he resigned.
What this shows in the university community and the academy is a growing intolerance for intellectual diversity. They’re for all kinds of diversity, whether it’s sex or race or et cetera, but they’re not for intellectual diversity.

John Stuart Mill wrote:

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

I remember all the “hub-bub” over the example Dr. Williams uses. Could it be that the self-proclaimed enlightened elite were upset that their beliefs were questioned?

Mill also wrote:

In the present age- which has been described as “destitute of faith, but terrified at skepticism,”-in which people feel sure, not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them-the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society.

It might be a stretch, but there seems to be similarities between Dr L Sumers and Harvard University and Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church.

Galileo questioned the church's scientific beleifs with observations; Dr Sumers questioned the elitist's political beliefs with observations.

Mill again:

There are, it is alleged, certain beliefs, so useful, not to say indispensable to well-being, that it is much the duty of governments to uphold those beliefs, as to protect and other of the interests of society.

Though it hasn’t come to the point of opinions being outlawed, a small group of intellectual elitist are doing their best to make it all but illegal. By trying to silence opinions or thoughts are the intellectuals concerned about truth, as Galileo was, or do they feel that although their beliefs might be lies, theirs are just "indispensable to well-being" like the Church? Intellectuals once brought the world out of the dark ages, now the self proclaimed ones might just take us back in.

How Many Lives are Worth a Socialist Idea?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It was probably first used after seeing the results of socialist ideas in action, and in New York there's tons of them. After answering my front door once to many times, only to find a salesmen on the other side, I've come to the opinion that it is way too kind to the incompetence and shortsightedness of those who constructed it (the road).

Has anyone noticed the increase in door-to-door salesmen lately? Could it be a direct result of the "Do not call list"? My elderly neighbor recently put a No soliciting sign in her door. I guess the elderly that were victims of telemarketers and phone scams, have no fear of strangers constantly at their doors. Speaking of what the do not call list law did for the elderly, what's harder, screening your phone calls, reaching for it or getting up and answering the door. How many people have been physically assaulted over the phone vs. answering their front door?

I'm sure that the number of assaults perpetrated by those posing as salesmen will go up, and then a cry of "there should be a law", after door-to-door salesmen are illegalized, we'll need a wheel barrel to empty our mailboxes. There should be a law.........

With the unintended consequence of salesmen, from a simple law like the no call list. What do you think the unintended consequences of socialized medicine would be?

You constantly hear the phrase, "How much is a human life worth?" by socialist, the next time you hear it, ask them, How many lives are worth a socialist idea? We can get the answer by looking at history, for Stalin it was 30,000,000 To Mao 40,000,000.

Senator Clinton on more then one occasion has said, "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good". Stalin and Mao only took it to the logical conclusion, your life for the State.

Free Markets and Charities Work Better then Government Mandates/Rationing

A letter in the Buffalo news “Buffalo should not deny water services to anyone”, stated water should not be grouped with commodities, but free for basic survival. This water isn’t falling from the sky or over the Falls. Even with a graduated scale, increasing the amount per gallon in excess of government quotas, the facility probably would operate in the red. Increasing the cost per gallon means those using an “excessive amount” will cut back. Then you go through another long drawn out process of government boards for new increases? Other questions that need to be asked, who decides the Formula for “basic needs”? Do infants get the same as a 200-pound man; or office workers to ironworker? Male/female, medical issues. This proposed policy creates layers of bureaucracy in an area that employees more government workers then any industry does with private.

Turning to government with good intensions creates unintended consequences that through history have proven to do more harm then good. The energy used to impose government mandates would be better spent helping charities that are better suited in helping the “most in need”. They are also better judges in differentiating between the needy and those that are just plain irresponsible.