The Hand Grenade Within Pelosi's Intolerable Act.

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will vote on a 2,000 page bill to give the federal government the power to micromanage the health care of every single American. The bill will no doubt pass. It will raise your taxes, steal your freedom, invade your privacy, and ration your health care. Even the Republicans have introduced their version of Obamacare Lite. It, too, if passed, will compel employers to provide coverage, bribe the states to change their court rules, and tell insurance companies whom to insure.

We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms. Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience. The government wants you to follow the will of some faceless bureaucrat.

When I recently asked Congressman James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, to tell me "Where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to regulate everyone's healthcare--," he replied that most of what Congress does is not authorized by the Constitution, but they do it anyway. There you have it. Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights, it doesn't care about the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, it doesn't even read the laws it writes.

America, this is not an academic issue. If this health care bill becomes law, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, privacy as you have enjoyed it, will cease to be. When Congress takes away our freedoms, they will be gone forever. What will you do to prevent this from happening? -- Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News Channel's senior judicial analyst.

An excellent question.

This is why I have dubbed the Health Care bill "the Intolerable Act."

The Denver Post's David Harsanyi, writing at RealClearPolitics, suggests the only way the bill could be read and believed is with the concurrent imbibing of large quantities of alcohol:

The King James version of the Bible runs more than 600 pages and is crammed with celestial regulations. Newton's Principia Mathematica distilled many of the rules of physics in a mere 974 pages.

Neither have anything on Nancy Pelosi's new fiendishly entertaining health-care opus, which tops 1,900 pages.

So curl up by a fire with a fifth of whiskey and just dive in. But drink quickly. In the new world, your insurance choices will be tethered to decisions made by people with Orwellian titles ("1984" was only 268 pages!) like the "Health Choices Commissioner" or "Inspector General for the Health Choices Administration."

You will, of course, need to be plastered to buy Pelosi's fantastical proposition that 450,000 words of new regulations, rules, mandates, penalties, price controls, taxes and bureaucracy will have the transformative power to "provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending . . . ."

It's going to take some time to deconstruct this lengthy masterpiece, but as you flip through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word "regulation" appears 181 times. "Tax" is there 214 times. "Fees," 103 times. As we all know, nothing says "affordability" like higher taxes and fees.

The word "shall" - as in "must" or "required to" - appears over 3,000 times. The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase "mind our own freaking business." Not once.

To vote for the bill, a legislator must believe a $1 trillion price tag is "revenue neutral," or that it alleviates any of the pain higher costs bring to the average American. This would require alcohol.

Mark well that word, "shall," and mark as well the arrogance implicit in it.

But for all the lunacies and outrages in the bill, this is the hidden hand grenade in the Intolerable Act:

PELOSI: Buy a $15,000 Policy or Go to Jail

JCT Confirms Failure to Comply with Democrats’ Mandate Can Lead to 5 Years in Jail

Friday, November 06, 2009

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

In response to the JCT letter, Camp said: “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”

Key excerpts from the JCT letter appear below:

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

- - - - - - - - - -
“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…” [page 2]

- - - - - - - - - -
“Criminal penalties

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]

When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties. The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.

“The Senate Finance Committee had the good sense to eliminate the extreme penalty of incarceration. Speaker Pelosi’s decision to leave in the jail time provision is a threat to every family who cannot afford the $15,000 premium her plan creates. Fortunately, Republicans have an alternative that will lower health insurance costs without raising taxes or cutting Medicare,” said Camp.

According to the Congressional Budget Office the lowest cost family non-group plan under the Speaker’s bill would cost $15,000 in 2016.

Now, we are told by Jeffrey H. Anderson, senior fellow in health-care studies at the Pacific Research Institute, that we need not worry excessively because:

The House bill has passed — barely and belatedly — and it is now dead. Nothing like it will ever pass the Senate. The question now is whether anything will, now that the voters have spoken in New Jersey and Virginia — and now that the exceedingly narrow margin in the House will likely invite even greater scrutiny of that which is being proposed.

Greater scrutiny will not help the Democrats' efforts. In truth, their hopes for passage largely hinge on successfully hiding two plain facts from the voters: One, the House Republicans and the Congressional Budget Office have now shown that a bill costing $61 billion can lower Americans' insurance premiums, while bills costing $1.7 trillion cannot (and instead would raise them substantially). Two, the Democrats' plans would be paid for only if they follow through on plans to siphon hundreds of billions of dollars out of already-barely-solvent Medicare, and to do so just in time for the baby boomers' retirement.

Given the magnitude of the challenge of continuing to hide these plain facts from an increasingly attentive citizenry, the Democratic health-care train has a very bumpy ride ahead — as it rolls into the chamber that the American Founders thought from the beginning would ultimately decide our fate: the Senate.

Leaving aside Anderson's arguable proposition that the Founders intended the Senate to be the arbiters of our fate, the fact of the matter is that both versions of the bill, Senate and House, contain the same hand grenade: the compulsory participation of all citizens.

By what authority in the Constitution is this possible? There is no such language and they cannot credibly twist the plain words to their porposes.

This is merely the argument of force. THEY have decided that WE will ALL play their tyrannical game or WE will pay the consequences of our refusal.

Socialism enforced at the barrel of a federal gun is communism and it is tyranny. It is, in fact, the final breakdown of the Founders' system that they inserted the Second Amendment to deal with.

It does not matter if the Senate removes the incarceration clause, or reduces the fine. Whatever the final language of the bill this is certain: We WILL be compelled to participate OR ELSE.

But I do not think that these arrogant sods understand what "or else" really means.

For, as I have said many times before, when democracy turns to tyranny, those who possess firearms still get to vote.



Ironic, isn't it? That a so-called "health care bill" could lead to armed resistance, death and civil war? Yet that is the hand grenade within this Intolerable Act. They should have tried harder to disarm us first.

But they made a fundamental mistake. They thought all the real Americans of the cut of the Founders were dead and buried and all that remained was Europeanized sheep to be easily herded about.

I think they will find out to their eternal sorrow that they were dead wrong.

We return then to Judge Napolitano's question:

"When Congress takes away our freedoms, they will be gone forever. What will you do to prevent this from happening?"

Look in the mirror and ask yourself, "What will you do?"

Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com
sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com