''There are those trying to say somehow that Democrats should be admitting they were wrong'' in opposing the gulf war resolution, Kerry noted in one Senate floor speech. But he added, ''There is not a right or wrong here. There was a correctness in the president's judgment about timing. But that does not mean there was an incorrectness in the judgment other people made about timing.''
For you see, Kerry continued, ''Again and again and again in the debate, it was made clear that the vote of the U.S. Senate and the House on the authorization of immediate use of force on Jan. 12 was not a vote as to whether or not force should be used.''
In laying out the Kerry Doctrine -- that in voting on a use-of-force resolution that is not a use-of-force resolution, the opposite of the correct answer is also the correct answer -- Kerry was venturing off into the realm of Post-Cartesian Multivariate Co-Directionality that would mark so many of his major foreign policy statements.
Back in 2008 our Fave Constitutional Law Prof was inclined to oppose the individual mandate on the grounds that such measures grant Congress far too much power:
...in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that, ‘If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of his 78-page ruling Monday.
Of course, the beauty of evolving standards of Constitutionality is that legal scholars like the President need wait only a year or two before heaping scorn on their own arguments!
Much of Judge Vinson‘s ruling was a discussion of how the Founding Fathers, including James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, saw the limits on congressional power. Judge Vinson hypothesized that, under the Obama administration‘s legal theory, the government could mandate that all citizens eat broccoli.
White House officials said that sort of “surpassingly curious reading” called into question Judge Vinson‘s entire ruling.
“There’s something thoroughly odd and unconventional about the analysis,” said a White House official who briefed reporters late Monday afternoon, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
One wonders: did that "anonymous" White House official realize that his boss had made precisely this argument just a short time ago? Ah well... this is hardly the first time the Obama administration has been caught talking out of both sides of its mouth. Why, just a few months ago the individual mandate was not - we repeat, NOT - a tax:
... Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.
...When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”
Congress anticipated a constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. Accordingly, the law includes 10 detailed findings meant to show that the mandate regulates commercial activity important to the nation’s economy. Nowhere does Congress cite its taxing power as a source of authority.
It took only few months for that argument, too, to become "surpassingly curious", if not downright "odd and unconventional":
When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”
And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
Here we see the beauty of the Kerry Doctrine, in which the administration and Congressional Democrats can argue that the individual mandate is NOT - we repeat, NOT A TAX - while claiming that it is justified under Congress's well known power to collect things-that-are-NOT-taxes for the general welfare. The severability argument is likewise disposed of by the Kerry Doctrine. Judge Vinson's finding that the individual mandate cannot be severed from the overall bill without fatally compromising the bill's overall objective is plainly an unwarranted and unreasonable judicial power grab:
... both the administration, which is implementing the law and defending it in court, and Congress, which wrote and passed the law, have made clear that the individual mandate is an absolutely critical provision. Vinson explains:
The defendants have acknowledged that the individual mandate and the Act’s health insurance reforms, including the guaranteed issue and community rating, will rise or fall together as these reforms “cannot be severed from the [individual mandate].” As explained in my order on the motion to dismiss: “the defendants concede that [the individual mandate] is absolutely necessary for the Act’s insurance market reforms to work as intended. In fact, they refer to it as an ‘essential’ part of the Act at least fourteen times in their motion to dismiss.” [bold added]
Vinson provides several examples, and also notes that Congress itself, in drafting the law's text, put forth a similar claim:Congress has also acknowledged in the Act itself that the individual mandate is absolutely “essential” to the Act’s overarching goal of expanding the availability of affordable health insurance coverage and protecting individuals with pre-existing medical conditions.
Of course, when both Congress and the administration made the same argument the searing, Kerryesque logic was impossible to refute.
Lesser minds might see hypocrisy in the administration's toffee nosed condemnation of its own arguments, but discerning intellects know that false dichotomies like "right/wrong" or "then/now" cannot withstand the compelling logic of one John Foragainst Kerry:
Kerry has made clear that if he is elected president, the nation will never face a caveat shortage. He has established the foragainst method, which has enabled him to be foragainst the war in Iraq, foragainst the Patriot Act and foragainst No Child Left Behind. If you decide to vote for him this year, there would be a correctness in that judgment, but if you decide to vote for George Bush, that would also be correct.
How conveeeeeeeeeeeeeenient.
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