(National Review)
The Affordable Care Act is a clumsy, clunky, ill-begotten legislative program.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
‘Sabotage,” Paul Krugman calls it. Funny word, that.
Perhaps Professor Krugman, like so many progressives at the moment, has Russia on the brain.
In the penal code of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that crime — вредительство, “causing damage” — was sometimes referred to as “wrecking,” “diversion,” or “counter-revolutionary sabotage.” The secret police were always on the hunt for the “Trotskyite wreckers” who were, apparently, hiding under every bushel of rotted beets.
They were sent to the gulag or shot in the head. Some of the early Bolsheviks had wanted to abolish capital punishment, considering it emblematic of czarist high-handedness. “Nonsense,” said V. I. Lenin. “How can you make a revolution without executions?”
The subject here is not the failure of the potato crop in the Voronezh region. It is the failure of the Affordable Care Act. And it may be the case that the ACA was a victim of вредительство — but not at the hands of Republicans, and still less at the hands of the federal judge who recently ruled the law unconstitutional. “Sabotage” in the Soviet context generally indicated a failure to perform one’s duty, or doing it so sloppily as to undermine the smooth functioning of the Workers’ Paradise.
I do not know what to think of District Judge Reed O’Connor’s ruling, in which he cleverly (perhaps too cleverly by half) turns Chief Justice John Roberts’s argument back on itself: Roberts disappointed conservatives by performing an act of jurisprudential yoga to find that the ACA was a constitutional application of Congress’s taxing power, since the fine associated with the individual mandate would in theory produce federal revenue. Read more