“Push back! Push back! Push back!” the crowd of more than 350 shouted at the first Nullify Now! rally held in Ft. Worth, Texas on Saturday, Sept. 4th. They were responding to GOP congressional candidate Stephen Broden of Texas as he urged the nullification of Obamacare in his talk at the rally. Broden is running to defeat the socialist Eddie Bernice Johnson for a congressional seat in the Dallas area.
Various groups were represented by booths and attendees at the Texas Rally, the largest being The John Birch Society (the parent company of The New American magazine) and various Tea Party groups. All agreed that author Tom Woods, the keynote speaker of the event, made everyone aware that it was the constitutional duty of each state to use the tool of nullification to stop the unconstitutional actions, mandates and legislation coming from Washington.
Part 2 (You Tube)
Part 3 (You Tube)
Part 4 (You Tube)
by Michael Boldin, Tenth Amendment Center
“The several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government.”
–Thomas Jefferson
Today, voters in Missouri helped bring the Jeffersonian principle of Nullification one step closer to the mainstream by approving Proposition C – the Health Care Freedom Act.
The new Missouri statute is nearly identical to Virginia’s Health Care Freedom Act – which is being defended by Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli, and was given the green light to proceed in court by a Federal Judge this week. The Missouri proposition passed the Senate on May 4th by a 26-8 vote, and the House on May 11th by 108-47 vote. Today, voters approved Prop C by a wide margin – early returns showed over 75% in favor.
The legislation provides that:
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a key provision of President Barack Obama’s health care law, sending a clear message of discontent to Washington and Democrats less than 100 days before the midterm elections.
With about 70 percent of the vote counted late Tuesday, nearly three-quarters of voters threw their support behind a ballot measure, Proposition C, that would prohibit the government from requiring people to have health insurance or from penalizing them for not having it.
That would conflict with a federal requirement that most people have health insurance or face penalties starting in 2014.
WASHINGTON — President Obama intends to bypass Congress and appoint Dr. Donald Berwick to head Medicare and Medicaid, the White House announced Tuesday — filling the job while Congress is in recess to get around Republican opposition that threatened to derail Berwick’s confirmation.
Berwick’s supporters say he is the right man in the right place at the right time. But his opponents have lined up against him. They say that while he may be a the highly respected doctor, he is also an outspoken proponent of the British health care system, which they say is all wrong for Americans.
“This recess appointment is an insult to the American people,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Tuesday night. “Dr. Berwick is a self-professed supporter of rationing health care, and he won’t even have to explain his views to the American people in a Congressional hearing.”
Berwick, a 63-year-old pediatrician, heads the Institute for Health Care Improvement in Cambridge, Mass., and he has been a longtime leader of the movement to reform health care from within. For decades he has challenged doctors and hospitals to provide health care that “is safe, effective, patient-oriented, timely, efficient and equitable,” with a surprising degree of success. In the months since he was nominated, not one industry group has voiced opposition to his nomination.
But the early accolades for the Harvard Medical School graduate’s nomination to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services came to an abrupt end in May when a triumvirate of Republican senators attacked Berwick for “favoring health care rationing” and “being in love” with Britain’s National Health Care System.
When Glenn Beck urged his listeners, “Please, pick it up. The Road to Serfdom. Make it part of your essential library,” sales of Austrian Economist Frederick von Hayek’s book at Amazon.com pushed it to Number 1 the next day. Prior to the election of President Obama, “The book sold respectably at a clip of about 600 copies a month,” according to Bruce Caldwell, editor at the University of Chicago Press. “But then, in November 2008, sales more than quadrupled, and they haven’t slowed down since.”
When John Stossel, host of Fox Business, featured the book on his show on February 21, sales jumped again.
Opinions as to the remarkable interest in a book published in 1944 by an obscure economist vary, but most center on the book’s uncanny prediction that is now being fulfilled in the United States: centralized and expanding government and its increasingly obvious tyranny impacting citizens’ lives on a daily basis.
Caldwell said the book provides “arguments about the dangers of the unbridled growth of government … including the characterization of the health care debate as being about socialized medicine…. [The book] taps into a profound dissatisfaction in the public mind with the machinations of its government. Furthermore,” he says, “a recurrent theme in the news is that, in contrast to the millions who are suffering, the politically connected are doing just fine.”
Professor Thomas Woods, senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, who was Beck’s guest, said that Hayek was “warning about … people [who] think that there is a way to centrally-plan an economy, or run a society … that doesn’t involve methods that we would find utterly distasteful and barbaric.”
“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told us just weeks before Congress passed President Barack Obama’s health care plan. Well, the nation’s post-passage Obamacare education continued yesterday when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that the federal government will have to spend an additional $115 billion implementing the law, bringing the total estimated cost to over $1 trillion. The estimate had been requested before passage of the bill by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), but the CBO was too overwhelmed with the Democrats’ other constant revisions to the law to get back to Lewis before the final vote.
This is by far not the only nasty little surprise that has come back to bite Obamacare after passage. Shortly after it became law, U.S. employers began reporting hundreds of millions if dollars in losses thanks to tax changes in the bill. AT&T and Verizon alone pegged their Obamacare tax losses at around $1 billion each. At first, Democrats in Congress were outraged by the announcements and threatened to hold hearings persecuting these companies. But then the Democrats not only found out the companies were obligated by law to report their Obamacare related losses, but that the losses were a signal these companies might have to dump their employees’ and retirees’ health care coverage all together.
More hope and change–
A damning health care report generated by actuaries at the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department was given to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the health care vote. She hid the report from the public until a month after democrats rammed their nationalized health care bill through Congress.
The results from the report were troubling. The report released by Medicare and Medicaid actuaries shows that medical costs will skyrocket rising $389 billion 10 years. 14 million will lose their employer-based coverage. Millions of Americans will be left without insurance. And, millions more may be dumped into the already overwhelmed Medicaid system. 4 million American families will be hit with tax penalties under this new law.
Of course, these were ALL things that President Obama and Democratic leaders assured us would not happen.
Via Special Report:
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D.-Fla.) is insisting that the new health care law she voted for last month does not mandate that individuals buy health insurance, despite language in the law that plainly says otherwise.At an April 5 town hall meeting in Fort Lauderdale (see video below), a constituent asked Wasserman Shultz where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandate that individuals buy health insurance. She responded that the new health care law did not require individuals to buy health insurance.
In a written statement to CNSNews.com on Wednesday, her press secretary, Jonathan Beeton, said it was true that the health care law did not mandate that individuals buy health insurance and that Wasserman Schultz stood by her assertion at the townhall meeting.
Some Democrats went home for the holiday recess and encountered what Politico, to their credit, described as incivility and a forecast for rage. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter and Rep. Paul Hodes, both involved in seriously contested races this fall (Hodes is running for the Senate), got an ear full from seniors at a Manchester senior services center. Here is a snippet of Hodes experience:
MANCHESTER, N.H. – If the experience of this state’s two Democratic House members is any indication, the raw emotion and mistrust emanating from last summer’s congressional town halls never really went away.
Instead, the unrest simmered over the ensuing months only to return to a boil when Rep. Carol Shea-Porter and Rep. Paul Hodes, who is running for U.S. Senate, returned home to meet with their constituents here during the first week of the Easter recess.
Their public events provided a bracing reminder to Democrats that the political pivot from health care to economic and financial issues is going to be much more arduous than they expected.
At a senior center in Manchester Wednesday, one woman turned away when Hodes offered his outstretched hand for an introduction.
“I don’t want to shake your hand. You voted for health care, so just go,” snapped Carmen Guimond, as she refocused on her lunch of roast beef and mashed potatoes and waved him on.
When Hodes decided to stay at the table and launch a defense of what’s considered to be one of the more popular provisions of the law — closing the “donut hole,” a gap in prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients — she challenged whether he had read the entire bill and dismissed his explanation.
“Two hundred and forty dollars in the first year. That’s all it is,” she said, referring to the initial subsidy. “That’s not much.”
“And over time, by 2020, it closes the donut hole,” Hodes explained.
“We’ll all be dead by then,” she deadpanned.
Mississippi State Senator Chris McDaniel and I have filed a class action lawsuit today, Good Friday 2010, challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as “ObamaCare” and a variety of other less polite euphemisms.
We believe that the PPACA is DOA for several equally important reasons, but only one of which has received much attention. Most folks know by now that Congress has invoked the Commerce Clause to justify this massive expansion of governmental power. Our “Good Friday” Complaint spends many pages discussing how Congress has clearly exceeded the limits of its power under the Commerce Clause. I strongly urge you to read the entire Complaint. What I really want to point out, though, are some things you probably don’t know, and definitely will not like — even if you consider yourself a “Liberal.”
Consider for a moment that you have now been commanded to enter into a contract with an insurance corporation, whether you want to or not, whether you need to or not. Yes, there are many who actually choose to be uninsured. For most, it is simply an economic decision that often works out to the uninsured’s economic advantage. Not always, of course, but that’s the beauty of liberty — you get to make the decisions, and live with the good or bad that comes of them.
Now that you realize that a dictate has been handed down, compelling you to contract with an insurance corporation or else, consider what you have to do. It’s not like you can go to a vending machine, swipe your debit card and pull out a policy. You still have to apply. True, they cannot turn you down, but so what? You still have to give a big, scary, mean corporation a lot of private medical and psychological information about yourself and your family. Then, forever after, the insurance corporation’s bureaucrats will gather this private information without even bothering to let you know. As our Complaint states:
