"There you go again..." is the only possible response to the procustean pronouncement of Judge Roger Vinson in his ruling on the Affordable Care Act. Rising from his constitutional procustean bed to compete with the inanity of Mississippi jurisprudence, the honorable Florida jurist has decreed, "I must reluctantly conclude that Congress exceeded the bounds of its authority in passing the Act with the individual mandate. Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void."
This atrocious interpretation will undoubtedly dictate that mandatory automobile liability coverage is also constitutionally illegal for all those states requiring it of their automobile owners. Here, the court seems to be requiring that everything we do in daily life be pre-authorized in the founding document. Such nonsense is precisely contrary to the judgement of thousands of political science scholars who have, over the past two centuries, been praising the document for its ambiguity. No mere return to the fantasy of originalism, this is the judicial antithesis to the precautionary principle currently embraced by all sentient risk assessment experts.
Judge Vinson and like-minded ideologues would have us believe that we should conduct our affairs according to the worldviews of great thinkers who kept slaves, deprived women of a say in governance, and forgot to include the Bill of Rights in the original governing document. What did they not know about? Here are a few REALLY IMPORTANT THINGS: that disease can be caused by microorganisms (and cured by antibiotics); that E=MC2 ; that men (and, presumably, the unacknowledged women) can travel to (and from) the moon; that biological organisms have evolved (and continue to do so) according to their biological fitness; that the earth is about 5 billion years old; that ships can travel from Europe to Asia under the north polar ice cap; that a 16-year-old girl can sail solo around the world (and live to tell about it); that humans can fly above the earth (and land) safely; that San Francisco is a city; that nuclear fission is dangerous; that dynamite would be invented in less than a century; that nuclear fusion fuels the sun and (thereby) all life on earth; that DNA is readable and codes for the shape of their noses; that organs from dead humans (not long dead, mind you) can be transplanted into living ones; that the village of Auschwitz would have special ovens in about 150 years (and modern people maintaining their ignorance of them); that carbon fiber string would conduct electricity even better than Ben's kite string; that Native Americans are at least 3/5ths of a person (maybe more); that Vitamin C can prevent scurvy; and, oh, Hell, we just can't repeat it all here, AIDS, microwave ovens, subways, six billion humans simultaneously alive on the planet, radio, automobiles, the internet. Suffice it to say that the ignorance of the "Founding Fathers" would fill volumes, nay, libraries, as we have acknowledged in the information age. They may have found it comforting to know that we are still trying to prove, in the absence of any empirical evidence whatsoever, that there is life after death.
Are the framers of our Constitution, or, their holy script, really the authorities who should be in charge of determining our own health care policy, foreign policy, science or educational policies? Were they promising us a real opportunity to govern ourselves in the future, or only a monstrous apparition that could re-assert its authority whenever the narrow economic interests of selected plutocrats are threatened? In the face of the limits of knowledge of the Founding Fathers, how can we bequeath to our own children the idea that these old white men, experienced as they may have been in the frailties of human existence, were of such prescience that they could be entrusted with writing indelible code for life hereafter in these United States, or in the world to which we belong?
Judge Vinson's "reluctance" is clearly not sufficient to ensure sound governance. Surely a modest revision of our own Constitution, incorporating what we know now and eschewing unprovable myths, might be a productive step toward life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the future. Perhaps it is time for yet another Continental Congress.
One can only hope that a higher court will strike down this egregious lower court ruling before its vapors can reach the Supreme Court where the likes of Scalia and Thomas can stir it into the judicial broth with the eye of Newt.
Cross-posted to The Renaissance Post
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