An old piece of writing

In the search of my old emails, I found an old piece of writing about the Affordable Care Act and the October 2013 government shut down. Insurance porn. It has been insurance porn the whole fucking time. This is from back when I could write.

There is yelling. There is screaming. There are those who beat their shoe against the podium and cry that they will destroy their opponent. This is not a foreign nation threatening the United States; it is an internal struggle which is pitting the United States against the United States. The country is currently divided and there is a revolution coming, or at least there should be. If American history has taught us anything, it is that after an internal power struggling in the United States the catalyst for revolution can be the smallest thing
Americans have historically revolted for far less than the current situation on Capitol Hill. Americans seem to divide every time there is some sort of historic legislation or change. The fear of legislation led to the American Civil War, the addition of the Stamp Act led to the American Revolution. Americans fear change. The status quo seems to be the best for the appeasement and ease of American citizens as a whole. However, sometimes change is good or at the very minimum, is not entirely dangerous to the American peoples.
The current American situation with the government shutdown and the internal struggle in the legislative branch is multifaceted; however it can be explained in a rather unbiased manner if one tries hard enough. A piece of legislation was passed in 2010 The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was created to completely revamp the way health insurance works in the United States. The act did not put medical care under the control of the United States government. What the Affordable Care Act does is create regulations for the health insurance industry and places certain restrictions on what the health insurance companies can and cannot do. The tradeoff for these heavy restrictions of the health insurance companies is that all Americans are required to be covered by health insurance. Theoretically, by increasing the amount of people covered by health insurance, the cost of health insurance and health care in general will decrease for each individual in the United States. The opposition to the Affordable Care Act believe that the government is over stretching by attempting to regulate something that the American government should not be regulating and that the Affordable Care Act interferes with the freedoms of individuals who would be forced to purchase health care insurance whether they wanted to have insurance or not.
This is, nothing more than an extremely common partisan problem. The Democrats want to offer social programs they feel are necessary for the well-being of American Society. The Republicans feel that regulation of business and social programs take away from capitalism and weaken personal liberty for Americans as a whole. Big government versus small government; it is the political argument that has been in place since the Federalist and the Anti-federalists debated the United States Constitution in the first place.
The pressing question on everyone’s mind currently is what is this particular situation so different? Why are the happenings of October 2013 historic? More pressing, however is the question of why the government is being shut down because of it. This is the point where the discussion becomes a bit more biased, as there is no way to look at both sides without either side giving you a skewed version of the facts.
Ultimately, in my humble opinion as a historian and scholar of American politics there is currently no reason to shut down the government. Looking at Constitutional law the Affordable Care Act meets the technical definition of constitutionality, despite the Republicans claims that it does not. The bill passed both the House and the Senate and was signed into law by the president. A federal law just needs to go through the Legislative and the Executive Branch to become law. This what the United States Constitution actually says. This is why the United States Constitution was written in the first place. The United States Constitution sets up a representative democracy which allows, in theory, the voice of the American people to be represented. Those who are elected by direct vote to be the representatives for the people, make the laws for the country.
While the Affordable Care Act went through the two representative branches of government, there is still one more branch of the government and that is the Judicial Branch. The Affordable Care Act, unlike the majority of laws, had to pass through the Judicial Branch as well as the Legislative and the Executive Branch. The purpose of the Judicial Branch as defined by the United States Constitution is to determine the constitutionality of the law. The Judicial Branch is the final fail-safe of the American democracy. When the Affordable Care Act went to the Supreme Court and was found to be constitutional, according to the United States Constitution the Affordable Care Act became completely constitutional. There is no other possible way to look at the law at this point in time. In letter and interpretation the Affordable Care Act is one of the most constitutional pieces of legislation signed into law in recent history.
It is understandable and certainly to be expected to have some grumbling regarding a new law that changes an industry as important as the medical industry so much. However, there are other constitutional means to changing a law without completely destroying the American government and possibly shutting down the world economy. Make no mistake; the destruction of the world economy is certainly a possibility of the current situation should the standoff in Congress continue to the issue of the debt ceiling. While I am not an economist, nor would I ever profess to be an economist, it is clear to anyone who has any knowledge of economics that there is going to be a grave worldwide issue should the United States stop paying its bills. There is simply no way around it as the United States dollar is the base currency of the global economy.
The correct way, the constitutional way to oppose the Affordable Care Act at this point would be to propose legislation that would repeal or alter the language in the Affordable Care Act. That proposal would then have to pass both the House and the Senate, just as the Affordable Care Act did, and then the bill would need to be signed into law by the President of the United States, just as the Affordable Care Act did. This is what the Constitution says needs to happen so that laws are representative of what the American people want for their government.
It would not be possible to pass a law repealing the Affordable Care Act at the current political climate. The Senate is currently controlled but the Democrats, because that is who the American people voted into office to represent their views. For the sake of argument, if by the grace of God or through some kind of black magic a law repealing the Affordable Care Act made it through the Legislative branch and onto the desk of the President of the United States, the current president, who championed the law, would without a doubt veto the bill. Fundamentally what this means is that the Republicans have no chance whatsoever of legally repealing the Affordable Care Act until at least 2017 when President Obama leaves office.
The Republicans, who drape themselves in the flag and wall paper their offices with the United States Constitution, have taken the unconstitutional stance that they are going to hold up important economic legislation and to slip in wording that will repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act has nothing to do with the current budget that needs to be passed as it had already been funded by the previous budget. However, this is not to say these means are unprecedented.
Many bills are signed into law, which have unrelated extra lines that could not be passed in a bill if they were proposed on their own. However, when extra lines are added to a popular bill, many times it is necessary to pass the bill the get the main element of the bill while agreeing to smaller items that are unpopular and have it signed into law by the President of the United States. This was the issue with the line item veto proposed during the Clinton Administration. The line item veto would have allowed the president to remove certain elements from legislation before signing it into law. To discuss the pros and cons of the line item veto would require far more time and space than I have been allotted here tonight.
What is unprecedented about the current situation is the extent to which the Republicans are willing to go. The issue with this manner of politics is that the means to which the Republicans are willing to go has reached an unprecedented level. The use of using the funding of the United States as a whole as a bargaining chip to force their views, which are not for constitutional purposes representative of what the majority of the American people want, upon the American people is unconstitutional.
The next step is up to the American people. Do we accept the fact that our representative government has chosen to no longer represent us? Do we allow our government to remain a hostage in an odd game of chicken? Do we risk the global economy to maintain the principle of the United States Constitution? The answers to the questions remain to be seen. As historians we are eager to learn the answer as it will determine how or country will be governed from this point on.
The revolution will be televised, and it would appear to be on C-SPAN.