Instapundit: Forget The Supreme Court's "Legitimacy," Wot About Congress and the Prez?
In the Washington Examiner, Glenn Instapundit Reynolds follows up on all that hand-wringing about the Supreme Court's "legitimacy" by Obamacare partisans in the run-up to last week's big decision.
[President] Obama also promised that if you liked your existing health insurance policy, you'd get to keep it—something that quickly turned out to be false, as the changes mandated under the health care law led to severe cuts in coverage, or even cancellation of coverage, by insurers.
And if the executive branch's treatment of Obamacare was characterized by lies, the legislative branch didn't look any better. Obamacare, remember, was rammed through in the teeth of popular opposition; when the special election victory of Scott Brown meant that Democrats no longer had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the bill was squeezed through via a "reconciliation" procedure under the fiction that it was a budget bill, not substantive legislation.
Add to that the intense role of lobbyists and special interests in drafting the law, Nancy Pelosi's famous remark that we'd have to pass the bill to find out what was in it and the rampant vote-buying (remember the "Cornhusker Kickback"?), and we have a process that was dishonest, corrupt and far less legitimate than any conceivable Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare.
So, at the end of the day, the legitimacy question rests not with the Supreme Court, but with Congress and the president.
As Reynolds notes, a recent Rasmussen poll puts at 22 percent the number of Americans who believe the feds have the "consent of the governed," which is not a great number.
