REPEAL THIS!

I would love to watch John Boehner go back in time and argue with John Adams about the excessive reach of government. As much as he and the Tea wing invoke the Founding Fathers in support of their agenda, one would assume they aren’t just talking out of their asses, right?

Well, it just so happens they may be talking out of their asses after all. Some intelligent person (I wish it had been me) uncovered An Act For The Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen, or as John Boehner would call it A Job Killing Act For The Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen. More details of the act can be read here, but this is the backround: Some of the very same people who drafted the Constitution rammed through Congress a health care bill that raised taxes, expanded the role of government, put health care decisions in the hands of bureaucrats, infringed on the liberty of private citizens via mandate, replaced the private sector with the public sector and probably set up death panels.

Admittedly in 1798, a large number of privately employed sailors were uninsured. While injury and disease among sailors was determined to be a threat to trade and the economy, it certainly wasn’t the government’s job to take over the health care decisions of a syphilitic sailor or one with jibwrist. That was a need that could have and should have been filled by the private sector…

Which it did not, so the government stepped in and by creating the very first payroll tax created a network of hospitals for sailors on merchant vessels*. The organization eventually became the Public Health Service for which my father once worked alongside the father of my fourth grade teacher. Small world. The Public Health Service now oversees various agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

News of this act surfaced over the past week and is beginning to spread to the point where very soon, perhaps later today, healthcare opponents will have some splaining to do. Did President Adams knowingly sign unconstitutional legislation into law? What did the Supreme Court have to say about this? Wasn’t this a government mandate?

I predict Boehner and Company will dismiss any parallels between Adamscare and Obamacare just to placate the 23-26 percent of people who want to take their country back to when socialized medicine was invented. We should expect to hear a lot of “this is different” and “this is the kind of tone we should be moving away from” and maybe even “this is that same gotcha politics from the lamestream media” in the next week.

As I’ve said before and many people know, the Constitution is not the list of laws that can and can’t be enacted. People like Michele Bachmann should know that. She’s a lawyer. But maybe she does secretly know better. She wasn’t screaming “unconstitutional” when she was sucking up farm subsidies from the taxpayer tit. Last I checked (one minute ago), the Constitution doesn’t say anything about farms or subsidies. But I’m sure John Adams would be totally cool with it?

*Not known if this coverage was extended to slave mariners.