Republican members of Congress are racing to pass the tax reform bill so that they can get home in time for Christmas, and it looks like it is actually going to happen. The key is the Senate, and at this point it looks like there will be enough votes, but we have seen surprises before. As I have stated previously, I would have voted for this bill, but nobody should pretend that this fixes our tax system. The tax code is still going to be more than two million words long, the regulations are still going to be more than seven million words long, and Americans are still going to spend billions of hours and tens of billions of dollars complying with the most complicated tax system on the entire planet. (Read More...)
Law School
Obamacare Travesty: The Supreme Court Continues To Make Stuff Up Out Of Thin Air
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s willingness to make stuff up, Obamacare has been saved once again. In order to save Obamacare from utter disaster, Chief Justice Roberts essentially rewrote the law. If you are thinking that the Supreme Court is not supposed to do that, you would be right. But this is what our judicial system has devolved into. When I was in law school, I was horrified to discover that most judges in our country just do whatever they feel like doing. Instead of applying the law to the facts and coming to a fair and unbiased judgment, most judges in America just do whatever they want to do and then search for some law or case precedent that they can use to justify their decision. If there is no law or case precedent, some federal judges even go outside of the country to find justification for their absolutely ridiculous rulings. There have been instances where international law or international standards of morality have been cited as authority for a decision in a federal case. We have become a lawless land where the letter of the law no longer holds any real meaning, and where tyrannical judges just make stuff up out of thin air in order to advance their own personal political agendas. (Read More...)
By Unilaterally Changing Obamacare, Obama Is Making A Mockery Of The Constitution
Since when can a president change a law all by himself? By unilaterally declaring that certain provisions of Obamacare will not be enforced, Barack Obama is making a mockery of the U.S. Constitution. For those that have not read it, the U.S. Constitution says that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed“. So when Obama declares that he will not enforce certain provisions of Obamacare for a year, he is directly violating the Constitution. And as Stanford Law School Professor Michael McConnell wrote back in July, the Office of Legal Counsel for the Justice Department “has always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to ‘refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons.’” This is an open and shut case. If the U.S. Congress still had a shred of respect for the Constitution, they would immediately demand that Obama enforce the law as written. If Obama refused, they should immediately impeach him. We are a country that is run by the rule of law, and just because Obama’s new law completely screws up one-sixth of the economy does not mean that he can unilaterally change it. In our system, Congress makes the laws and the president enforces them. If we allow any president to unilaterally change laws whenever he does not like them, then that puts us dangerously close to having a dictator in the White House. (Read More...)