Jul 4, 2012

The Stamp and Declaratory Acts of our Era: Obamacare and the Supreme Court Decision

The Supreme Court’s appalling 5-4 ruling upholding the poorly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has thrown down the challenge to the American people. The people of America proclaimed the motto of the Gadsden Flag “Don’t Tread on Me” through the Tea Party for the last five years and the Federal Government, speaking through the majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision, has responded accordingly: “Oh yeah? Stop us then.” With that answer from the Federal Government, the second coming of the American Revolution has come closer to reality.

If one thinks back to the original American Revolution, that movement also started over two vastly unpopular laws. First, there was the Stamp Act of 1765. That law required every individual to pay for a government stamp on almost everything, from legal documents put together by lawyers to playing cards and dice used by sailors. It would be followed in 1766 by the Declaratory Act which decreed that Parliament had the “full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America in all cases whatsoever.” These acts were the closest thing to taxing and regulating behavior the modern world would see from a government until the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The acts ignited a firestorm of protests from the colonists. They were outraged at the prospect of being taxed and over-regulated by a government a long way away which knew very little about the colonies and refused to see the misery that their taxes and regulations would inflict upon them.

Today in America we are seeing a similar wave of anger against the act which has come to be known as Obamacare. In this act, which became law on March 23, 2010, all American citizens are required to either purchase health insurance or be taxed. To uphold the law under the Constitution in the June 28, 2012 Supreme Court decision on the law, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the federal government has the right to tax American citizens for any reason whatsoever. In making this decision, Roberts and the liberal justices on the Supreme Court have opened a Pandora’s Box. This law is going to hit every citizen of America and everyone is either going to have to pay more money for a limited-choice, government-sanctioned healthcare plan or see their taxes skyrocket higher every April. The Supreme Court Decision, by decreeing that the federal government can tax Americans for anything at all, has, like the Declaratory Act, given the federal government the power to regulate human behavior at any level and they do it by taxing you, just like the Stamp Act.

The gauntlet has been laid down ladies and gentlemen. Furthermore, the states are responding. Since the indefinite detention of American citizens without trial was made legal in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, several states have responded by introducing bills to nullify the NDAA, which means that that federal law will not be effective inside that state’s borders. Now, it has been proposed to nullify Obamacare at the state level and already several states have introduced legislation to do just that. This action is very similar to how the colonies responded to the Stamp and Declaratory Acts. They refused to pay the taxes and to effectively implement this refusal, they enacted a nation-wide boycott of British goods in order to avoid paying the taxes. It was, effectively, nullification of British laws by the American colonies.

So how is this leading to a second American Revolution? Just watch and wait. Once the states’ nullification measures begin to take effect and Obamacare and any other laws which are nullified prove to be unenforceable, the federal government will be forced to either let the states get away with those measures or they will have to move troops in to force the state governments to obey federal laws. If they choose the latter option (which seems likely), then expect the situation to really get out of control. The federal government already seems to be preparing for this in having the military drill inside American cities. If they implement military takeovers of the states and their local governments, one might expect history to repeat itself and events which took place in a British-occupied Boston and in the small towns of Lexington and Concord in 1775 will repeat themselves in one or more of America’s fifty states which will lead to the states rising against the federal government in a Second American Revolution to re-enforce the principles of the Founding Fathers. Only this time, the cry of warning from those seeking freedom will not be “The British are Coming!” but: “The Feds are Coming!”

© 2012 The Subsidiarity Times. All rights reserved. This material may not be re-published, re-broadcast, re-written or re-distributed without written permission from blog author.

No comments:

Post a Comment