Mark Steyn, as often, gets it exactly right. I don't care what you think about healthcare or the size of government, this is bad law, period.
Speaking w/ Hugh Hewitt about John Conyers saying he wouldn't read Obamacare because it would take six days with lawyers to understand it, and now Justice Scalia saying in oral argument none of the Supremes or their clerks is going to read it either:
when a law is 2,700 pages long, it’s not a law. It’s a hierarchy of
privilege. It’s about determining where you come in the particular
rankings of privilege that the massive 2,700 pages of regulations are
going to bury you under. And that’s why no sane…the minute a law is
2,700 pages, you should vote it down automatically. And by the way, if
this Supreme Court had its marbles about it, they would take that view,
because all the stuff that got the revolutionaries all riled up, say
what you like about the Tea Act, but it was a couple of pages long, and
it was about tea, and that’s all. And that’s the way real laws are.
Justice Kennedy said during oral argument that the individual mandate would change the relationship of citizens to the state. But it's not just the individual mandate that does that, it's the sheer size of the bill and the number of times it designates "the Secretary" shall, may, provides for....
The secretary shall determine this, the secretary may determine that,
the secretary may, shall and determine anything she wants off the top of
her pretty little head. Where do you go to vote out the kommissar of
health and human services? The fact of the matter is this is not a law
in the sense of a clearly defined law being passed by elected citizen
representatives in a legislature. And that is the great problem with the
hyper-regulatory state, by the way, that the old line about ignorance
of the law being no excuse no longer applies, because you and I, and
everybody else that’s walking around, in breach of a bazillion little
regulations that some guy cooked up in the back office that we’re not
even aware of [my emphasis].
This is a "law" that makes it impossible to know what the law is.
