Last week the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding the Constitutionality of Obamacare --the Affordable Care Act. While there is alot more to say about this (especially in light of the remarks by the President to the highest Court in the land, and the fact that there is nothing "affordable" about it...), I would like to post for you part of an article written by Mark Steyn for the Orange County Register. This was printed in the Wall Street Journal's "Notable & Quotable" column on Monday, April, 2, 2012.
"What happened to the Eighth Amendment?" sighed Justice Scalia the other day. That's the bit about cruel and unusual punishment. "You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?"
He was making a narrow argument about "severability"--about whether the court could junk the "individual mandate" but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a "law" by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there's no equality: Instead, there's a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown and unnumbered bureaucracy. It's not just that the legislators who legislate it don't know what's in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can ever hope to understand it, but that even the nation's most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.
If the Supreme Court really wished to perform a service, it would declare that henceforth no law can be longer than, say, 27 pages....
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