Once again, President Obama has shown how politically nimble he is with the alleged accommodation for faith-based organizations that do not wish to pay for contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization.
Enthusiastically hailed by those who want this issue to go away, the accommodation is just an accounting hat trick. But in putting forward his accomodation, the president did something that is just as much a threat to our liberty as the administration's assault on the First Amendment right to religious freedom.
The president ordered private corporations to provide something for no cost. I couldn't help but notice he did this almost flippantly.
Charles Krauthammer asks:
Has anyone considered the import of this new mandate? The president of the United States has just ordered private companies to give away for free a service that his own health and human services secretary has repeatedly called a major financial burden.
As Krauthammer notes this is “government by fiat.” It happens all the time in Venezuela, but it’s relatively new for us here in the U.S. What President Obama has done is nationalization in all but name:
Under Obamacare, the state treats private insurers the way it does government-regulated monopolies and utilities. It determines everything of importance. Insurers, by definition, set premiums according to risk. Not anymore. The risk ratios (for age, gender, smoking, etc.) are decreed by Washington. This is nationalization in all but name. The insurer is turned into a middleman, subject to state control — and presidential whim.
Third, the assault on individual autonomy. Every citizen without insurance is ordered to buy it, again under penalty of law….
This constitutional trifecta — the state invading the autonomy of religious institutions, private companies and the individual citizen — should not surprise. It is what happens when the state takes over one-sixth of the economy.
Writing about the religious freedom issue, Peter Wehner argues—correctly, I believe—that the liberalism/progressivism project “in its purest and most undiluted form” has as its goal the kind of state expansion we just saw in the president’s diktat to insurance companies:
It does, in fact, want to weaken and eventually replace civil society and expand the reach of the state even into the internal life of the church. And it no longer even attempts to disguise its aims.
The American people can’t say we don’t know what the end game here is.
Krauthammer notes that all the GOP presidential candidates say they want to repeal Obamacare. But none of them are talking about why.
I can see an opening here for Mitt “I Am a Businessman” Romney, the GOP candidate most in need of a big idea.
Romney should say, next time Romneycare comes up, something like, “Whatever I did in Massachusetts, I never wanted to design an abhorent system that takes from us our basic rights, eats at the oaken heart of liberty, and destroys our civic institutions. Obamacare is a state power-grab, better suited to a banana republic than a free nation. I will not allow this to stand. For the sake of economic, religious, and individual liberty, I will kill this monster.”
And don’t worry about offending banana republics.