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[Guest post] The Real Battle Behind the ACA

The Supreme Court's decision last week upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act was only the latest landmark moment in a long debate that goes back to the very founding of our nation. I'm not talking about trivia like the scope of the Commerce Clause, or strict constructionists versus more liberal interpreters of the Constitution. The real debate was and is one between Constitutionalists and Confederates.

Well, perhaps a better term for the latter would be Confederationists, just to avoid unnecessary confusion with those unruly Civil War era states down South. But those who favor state's rights, state nullification, and a generally weak federal government appear to favor a system more like the Articles of Conferation than that of the U.S. Constitution.

George Washington once wrote that the weakness of the Articles, which lacked the Constitution's power to tax and spend for the general welfare, almost cost us the Revolutionary War. The founders addressed this by writing a Constitution that empowered Congress to "legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union." Since then, American leaders have had the power necessary to solve large national problems, including the Great Depression, legal segregation in the 1960s, or inadequate access to health care in the 2010s. Under the Confederation, programs like Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, or the ACA likely would have never stood a chance. When Congress banned whites-only lunch counters, segregationists claimed the ban exceeded the federal government's authority; likewise, that states could simply ignore decisions like Brown vs. Board of Education. Fortunately, they lost, unanimously, in the Supreme Court (another innovation in the Constitution which was missing from the Articles). Even today, secessionists want to take their marbles and go home because the ACA decision didn't go their way.

The ACA decision was not just a victory for President Obama, but for the much-extolled wisdom of the Founding Fathers in scrapping the unworkable Articles of Confederation with the the enduring Constitution.

Posted at 17:11 by Rich Stelt   [/guest/rich]   Comments | Perm Link |
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