Al Sharpton, tax scofflaw

Remember when Al Sharpton ran for president? I know, it seems like a fantasy, but he did and got to participate in the debates and pretend he was the leader of the nation's African Americans. Mostly what he is is a major fraud who has made a very nice living doing whatever it is that he does. What he doesn't do is pay taxes on those earnings.

Sharpton owes $359,973 to the IRS for 2009 personal income tax, according to documents on file with the city.

Public records show he owes a total of $3.7 million in city, state and federal taxes, including penalties, dating to 2002. But Sharpton's spokeswoman, Rachel Noerdlinger, said that he had paid back "well over seven figures" as part of agreements with the state and IRS and that the liens remained on the books as "a matter of bureaucracy."

Sharpton made $250,000 as head of the nonprofit National Action Network in 2009, a year that ended with the group owing $1.1 million in taxes and having just $36,397 cash on hand.

The organization also pays for first-class or charter travel for Sharpton and other NAN staff, according to its 2009 tax return. Noerdlinger declined to say for whom.

Yeah, I hate it too when a "matter of bureaucracy" prevents me from paying the money I owe the government. But I'm sure that Sharpton would be the first in line calling for more federal spending to be paid by taxpayers other than himself.

About that Chrysler Super Bowl ad

You might have noticed that very long Chrysler ad that seemed to be an ad for Detroit and how tough it is. Only at the end do you see Eminem get out of the car and realize that it's really an ad for Chrysler. My first thought was - did US taxpayers just shell out the money for the longest ad in Super Bowl history to pay for a commercial to tell us how tough Detroit is? Is that really how Chrysler plans to come back? Yup.

J. P. Freire has the back story.

Chrysler turns to America to say that because Detroit has been "through hell and back" it has endured the "hottest fires which makes the hardest steel," and that the reason people don't know that is because newspaper reporters "don't know what [people in Detroit] are capable of."

Yeah, Detroit's problems are due to those biased reporters. And showing a few shots of the better parts of the city is proof that it's back and now made of the hardest steel. Sure.

How about these pictures of "Detroit in ruins." Is that the image of a city that has come back?

As Freire points out, there are a few things left out of the ad.

One: Chrysler didn't go through the hottest fires. Unless, of course, "hottest fires" means "skipping bankruptcy" and asking for a handout to protect union pensions, which it got. And when Fiat was able to take control of Chrysler, it was because of a heavily politicized deal facilitated by the president's auto task force. It even got $6.6 billion in exit financing by Uncle Sam. Most failing businesses have trouble finding buyers. Not Chrysler.

Two: Detroit may have been through a self-imposed over-taxed, over-regulated hell, but it certainly hasn't come back. Budget numbers still show Detroit's books in the red, despite Mayor Dave Bing's best efforts to rein in spending. And Pew reveals that Detroit residents spend more for their municipal legislature than any other major city in the U.S. Heck, even its library is facing a dire fiscal crisis.

Three: We know what Detroit is capable of because we saw it in the 1960s. We still see potential, too -- Michigan economist David Littman told The Examiner last year that there was plenty of reason to be optimistic:

"We're not even on the map," Littman notes. But the opportunity is there. "We have bargain basement prices on everything -- from water properties, which are a hallmark of growth, to infrastructure. And this is tied together with a large and progressive highway system. We also have the largest underground gas reserves in the nation."

Chrysler must have found the investment worthwhile, using the opportunity of the new Chrysler model to plug Detroit's tough "know-how." Fox was charging approximately $2.8 to $3 million per 30-second slot.

This ad doesn't reveal how tough and competent Detroit is. It shows how the federal government picks winners and losers. Guess which part the taxpayers play?

And Chrysler is now complaining about the interest rates that Chrysler is obligated to pay for its $15 billion bailout calling those rates "shyster rates." So the U.S. taxpayers who funded that bailout are now "shysters" in the Chrysler CEO's view. And he's hoping to get another government loan in order to get better rates for private financing. Yup, that shows that Detroit is back and now made of the hardest steel.

Maybe that will convince all those who look to buy their next car from Eminem.

Cruising the Web

Paul Ryan is being criticized for cutting too much in his budget proposals and then not cutting enough.

Mitch Daniels puts forth a proposal for how the states should be allowed to manage the requirements put upon them by Obamacare. It makes sense which means that Sebelius and Obama won't go for it.

One mother tells what the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program did for her daughter. Here is one program that accomplished all that it attempted to do. And that is why the Democrats cut it.

George Will profiles the job facing new Ohio governor John Kasich. I've always liked Kasich from his days as the chairman of the House Budget Committee working to balance the budget. He has a lot of exciting ideas of how to turn Ohio around and is one of the new GOP governors whose policies will be the model of what Republican governance can mean.

The numbers and examples that President Obama likes to tout just belie the idea that green jobs are what are going to bring our economy back. It's a pipe dream, but he refuses to admit it.

Richard Epstein explains that the strength of Ronald Reagan was that he knew that, as Sam sang in Casablanca, "the fundamental things apply."

Geez, couldn't Christina Aguilera bother to learn the lyrics of the national anthem?

Don't forget how and why the Democrats put in the 1099 provisions in the health care bill

Kimberley Strassel reminds us of the history of the 1099 tax reporting requirement that the Senate Democrats just jumped on the bandwagon for repeal. Today they're pretending that they were always against it and that it just appeared in a virgin birth into their health care bill. Let's not forget that they wrote it for a reason, supported it, opposed efforts to repeal it, and then finally surrendered to its repeal while pretending that they were against it all along. What hogwash!

The White House and Democrats have worked hard in recent weeks to suggest that this first casualty of their signature legislative achievement was no big deal. President Obama went so far as to make the idea his own in his State of the Union address, offering up the end of 1099 as an example of his willingness to "improve" his health legislation. And the death of 1099 was indeed overshadowed by this week's headlines that the Senate GOP had failed to repeal the larger bill.

It is nonetheless worth recalling the 1099 saga. The entire arc of this tale—from Democrats' initial defense of the provision, to this week's full-scale rout—is an example of how dramatically politics has shifted. It has also starkly laid out the real threat that the White House faces over ObamaCare in the coming year. It's not full repeal. With 1099, Republicans have shown they intend to rip it up piece by piece.

The 1099 provision was a new requirement that businesses report to the IRS annual purchases from any contractor above $600. The provision targeted 40 million businesses and other organizations, crushing them under a costly bookkeeping mandate. But hey, desperate Democrats needed funds to pay for their $1 trillion healthathon. By closing this "loophole," they claimed, the IRS could commandeer a whole $17 billion in previously uncollected taxes.

This was symbolic of the entire slapdash process and rotten substance of ObamaCare. Like so many provisions, it mysteriously appeared in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's 2,000-plus page bill; to this day, no Democrat has claimed authorship.

Like so many provisions, it received no due diligence, and no attention until after it became law. Only then did National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, a federal employee, explain that its giant costs would likely outweigh any new tax compliance. The requirement, it turns out, doesn't just crush businesses—it also crushes churches, charities and municipalities.

So as soon as people realized what a disaster this would be for small businesses, Republicans tried to repeal it. Nebraska Senator Mike Johanns and California Dan Lungren wrote a bill for repeal, but the Democrats were so concerned that any one aspect of their mammoth bill that would be removed could set a pattern for further cancellations of their bill. So they banded together to stop the repeal of the 1099 provision.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a vote on a House bill that would have repealed 1099 but also imposed costly new taxes on multinationals. She knew Republicans wouldn't vote for it (they didn't), which allowed her to keep 1099 while blaming the GOP.

Senate Democrats flat-out defended the provision. When Mr. Johanns got a September vote on repeal, he lured just seven Democrats—not enough for passage. In truth, many Democrats simply liked the provision, as evidenced by their votes for Florida Democrat Bill Nelson's amendment to keep 1099 but to raise the threshold to $5,000. (That, too, failed.) The White House remained opposed to repeal.

And now suddenly, they're on the bandwagon to repeal the 1099 provision. They're pretending that they were for its repeal all along. As if.

Only after their November rout did vulnerable senators begin to jump to Mr. Johanns. Yet Mr. Reid obstructed. In late November, Mr. Johanns marshaled 61 votes for repeal—including 21 Democrats—but Mr. Reid set the rules so that he needed 67. As for the nay votes, they were now balking at cutting even $17 billion from unused government money.

By January, the pendulum had swung. The White House, eager to put on a centrist smile, adopted 1099 repeal as its own. Senate Democrats followed this week. Mr. Reid, knowing he'd be hard-pressed to stop another vote, deputized Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow (who needs some re-election help) to steal Mr. Johanns's bill.

She changed five words and offered it as her own amendment to the Federal Aviation Authority reauthorization bill. Mr. Reid then allowed a vote on her amendment, while blocking Mr. Johanns's.

With a Democratic sponsor, 1099 repeal got 34 Democrats. Thus does the leadership that wrote the offensive provision, voted for it, and defended it, now take credit for exterminating it.

One provision down. Now on to others. Either they'll be repealed or we'll get the Democrats on the record for such individual votes against common-sense repeal of unpopular measures.

Cruising the Web

Russia is worried about the demonstrations in Egypt. They don't like unrest that they didn't cause; it might give their own citizens some ideas.

Charles Krauthammer makes an argument for the Egyptian military being the best vehicle for midwifing free and fair elections. And he explains why ElBaradei's victory as the Muslim Brotherhood's stooge is such a threat.

George Melloan explains why the states cannot afford the provisions mandated on them in Obamacare.

Sister Toldjah wonders how the media would cover the anti-Koch brothers protest and the ugliness express there if that had been instead a tea party protest.

Ah, the rich hypocrisy of Henry Waxman warning against the new Republican chair of the Energy and Commerce committee Fred Upton from pursuing investigations of the Obama administration. Waxman has made his career on frivolous investigations of Republicans.

Charting the different impacts of Reagan's policies in the 1981 recession with Obama's (and Bush's) policies in the present one.'

Senators Lieberman and Collins have released a Senate report on how political correctness paved the way for Major Hasan's promotions and prevented any action being taken that could have averted the Fort Hoot Shootings.

President Obama is ignoring quite a few of his own Cabinet appointees while basically consulting only a small circle of his political advisers. That's not the management style of a man who knows how to run any mid-sized organization, much less the federal government.

How many crimes does a criminal have to commit in Scotland in order to be sent to prison? Hint: it's more than 30 for many of them.

As we gear up for all the remembrances for Ronald Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth, Jonah Goldberg reminds us of how the only conservatives that liberals like are dead ones. When those same people are alive - not so much.

Senator Bill Nelson of Florida demonstrates again that he didn't read the Obamacare bill that he voted for and hasn't even read the news summaries of Judge Vinson's decision. Yet he'll go on ABC and pretend to actually know what he's talking about.

Ignoring what customers want - the Obama way

Guess what? People just don't seem to want to buy electric cars and there seems little hope that the market would survive without the federal government's support.

President Barack Obama's goal of putting 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015 could run into a huge roadblock -- the American consumer.

According to a report released Wednesday by researchers at Indiana University, automakers are unlikely to manufacture enough cars to reach the president's goal because of a potential lack of buyer demand.

Nissan and General Motors, makers of the Leaf and Volt, respectively, already have the capacity to produce enough cars to meet the goal. Serious questions remain, however, about the level of desire among potential buyers worried about cost, ease of use and likely resale value.

"After the early adopters, what is going to motivate the mainstream people to buy the vehicles?" asked Gurminder Bedi, a retired Ford Motor Co. executive and one of the authors of the report.

"Buying an electric vehicle just by itself, because it's better for gas mileaa think? ge, will be a good factor. But that's not going to be sufficient."

Do you mean to say that people might actually consider other questions such as "cost, ease of use and likely resale value" when making a major purchase? Who knew?

The importance of a legal system

The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto writes today in the WSJ about how the lack of a real legal system in Egypt explains so much of why Egyptians cannot improve their own situations. De Soto has participated in a study of the Egyptian economy ordered by one member of the government earlier in the decade. Unfortunately, nothing came of his report's recommendations. But the results are telling for Egypt and so many other countries.

Today, when the streets are filled with so many Egyptians calling for change, it is worth noting some of the key facts uncovered by our investigation and reported in 2004:

• Egypt's underground economy was the nation's biggest employer. The legal private sector employed 6.8 million people and the public sector employed 5.9 million, while 9.6 million people worked in the extralegal sector.

• As far as real estate is concerned, 92% of Egyptians hold their property without normal legal title.

• We estimated the value of all these extralegal businesses and property, rural as well as urban, to be $248 billion—30 times greater than the market value of the companies registered on the Cairo Stock Exchange and 55 times greater than the value of foreign direct investment in Egypt since Napoleon invaded—including the financing of the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. (Those same extralegal assets would be worth more than $400 billion in today's dollars.)

So what does it mean to have so much of Egypt's economic activity to be done off the books?

The entrepreneurs who operate outside the legal system are held back. They do not have access to the business organizational forms (partnerships, joint stock companies, corporations, etc.) that would enable them to grow the way legal enterprises do. Because such enterprises are not tied to standard contractual and enforcement rules, outsiders cannot trust that their owners can be held to their promises or contracts. This makes it difficult or impossible to employ the best technicians and professional managers—and the owners of these businesses cannot issue bonds or IOUs to obtain credit.

Nor can such enterprises benefit from the economies of scale available to those who can operate in the entire Egyptian market. The owners of extralegal enterprises are limited to employing their kin to produce for confined circles of customers.

Without clear legal title to their assets and real estate, in short, these entrepreneurs own what I have called "dead capital"—property that cannot be leveraged as collateral for loans, to obtain investment capital, or as security for long-term contractual deals. And so the majority of these Egyptian enterprises remain small and relatively poor. The only thing that can emancipate them is legal reform. And only the political leadership of Egypt can pull this off. Too many technocrats have been trained not to expand the rule of law, but to defend it as they find it. Emancipating people from bad law and devising strategies to overcome the inertia of the status quo is a political job.

The key question to be asked is why most Egyptians choose to remain outside the legal economy? The answer is that, as in most developing countries, Egypt's legal institutions fail the majority of the people. Due to burdensome, discriminatory and just plain bad laws, it is impossible for most people to legalize their property and businesses, no matter how well intentioned they might be.

The examples are legion. To open a small bakery, our investigators found, would take more than 500 days. To get legal title to a vacant piece of land would take more than 10 years of dealing with red tape. To do business in Egypt, an aspiring poor entrepreneur would have to deal with 56 government agencies and repetitive government inspections.

All this helps explain who so many ordinary Egyptians have been "smoldering" for decades. Despite hard work and savings, they can do little to improve their lives.

What Egypt needs is an enlightened government that would devise a legal system to address this situation. That is the only way for its economy to grow - for people to have hope to build better lives while also building the nation's economy. The fact that Egypt has not had such a legal system put in place in the past sixty years is deeply telling. And what are the chances the ElBaradei and his Muslim Brotherhood supporters would address such institutional problems? About as slim as the chances are that Hamas would do the same in Gaza.

Obama's return to yesteryear

Michael Barone makes a rather counter-intuitive point about Barack Obama's State of the Union - the President's view is "oddly antique and disturbingly static."

"This is our generation's Sputnik moment," he said. But Sputnik and America's supposedly less advanced rocket programs of 1957 were government projects, at a time when government defense spending, like the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, drove technology.

But today, as Obama noted a few sentences before, "our free enterprise system is what drives innovation." Private firms develop software faster than government can procure it.

Undaunted, Obama calls for more government spending on "biomedical research, information technology and especially clean energy technology." Government has some role in biotech, though a subsidiary one, but IT development is almost exclusively a private-sector function and clean energy technology that is not private-sector-driven is almost inevitably uneconomic.

And then there is transportation. "Within 25 years," Obama said, "our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you," he said breathlessly, "to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying."

Wow! There's some advanced technology. Except that France inaugurated service on its TGV high-speed rail from Paris to Lyon in 1981. That's 30 years ago. It's as if President Eisenhower was inspired by Sputnik to promote the technology of 30 years before, Charles Lindbergh's single-engine propeller plane the Spirit of St. Louis. It's as antique as the Tomorrowland of the original Disneyland.

In fact government high-speed rail projects in Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida wouldn't approach the speeds of France's TGV or Japan's bullet train and would not beat autos in door-to-door travel. And they could never match the low fares of the free enterprise bus lines that have competed successfully with the Acela for budget-minded travelers.

Meanwhile, he won't look to the future for reforming our entitlement programs. There he stays stuck on the past.

If you put together Obama's resistance to just about any serious changes in entitlement spending with his antique vision of technological progress, what you see is an America where the public sector permanently consumes a larger part of the economy than in the past and squanders the proceeds on white elephants like faux high-speed rail lines and political payoffs to the teacher and other public-sector unions. Private-sector innovation gets squeezed out by regulations like the Obama FCC's net neutrality rules. It's a plan for a static rather than dynamic economy.

We just can't stand having a static economy for much longer. But Barone is exactly right that that is about the best we can hope for from Obama's policies.

When Democrats oppose choice

There is indeed a difference between right-to-work states and forced-union states. Guess which one experiences more economic growth?

Right-to-work states outperform forced-union states in almost every measurable category of worker well-being. A new study in the Cato Journal by economist Richard Vedder finds that from 2000 to 2008 some 4.7 million Americans moved from forced-union to right-to-work states.

The study also found that from 1977 through 2007 there was "a very strong and highly statistically significant relationship between right-to-work laws and economic growth." Right-to-work states experienced a 23% faster rise in per capita income over that period. The two regions that have lost the most jobs in recent years, the once-industrial Northeast and Midwest, are mostly forced-union states.

Shouldn't people have the choice as to whether or not they want to join a union?

Contrary to much union rhetoric, right-to-work laws don't ban or bust unions. They simply grant individual workers the right to join or not to join, even once a workplace is organized by a union. Workers who decline to join the union can't be forced to have dues taken out of their paycheck and thus used to finance union political campaigns. Most right-to-work states are in the South and West, and only Oklahoma has adopted this freedom to choose in the last 20 years.

Even if it would mean more economic growth for the state, here's one type of choice that liberals don't want people to have.

Cruising the Web

Perhaps we should be drinking more.

The Obama administration regards the crisis in Egypt as a distraction. Sorry, foreign policy crises are part of the job, not a distraction from issues he'd rather focus on or from the good PR he'd prefer to be lapping up from his supposed political turnaround.

Charlie Cook doesn't see 2012 as another wave election.


The Republicans have been doing well in recruiting candidates to challenge some of the weaker Democrats facing reelection.
Orrin Hatch may be facing the same kind of roadblock to his political future as Robert Bennett faced in last year's election. Somehow, having a convention to choose a state's nominee seems so outdated. But Utah prefers the old ways.

One more company is moving its headquarters from California to Texas.

Marco Rubio is displaying once again how smart he is. He's taking a low profile since the election, turning down hundreds of invitations to speak or for interviews. He's focusing on learning his new job. Good idea.

Hmmm. Claire McCaskill just didn't think it was a good idea for the Democratic convention to be held in her own state even though the Denver convention resulted in a lot of money for that city. We'll see if Governor Perdue of North Carolina will be helped at all in her reelection bid in 2012 by having the Democrats gather in Charlotte.

As the media gets ready to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, don't be fooled by the new love that the media now have for Reagan. The MRC has compiled a report reminding us of how viciously the media regarded him while he was president. Those of us who are old enough to remember those days know that the media was antagonistic to Reagan from the beginning.

Why shouldn't people be able to decide which type of light bulbs they prefer?

Lou Cannon reminisces about his experiences covering Ronald Reagan since Reagan's days campaigning for governor of California.

Howard Kurtz makes fun of MSNBC complaining about CNN airing Michele Bachmann's response to the State of the Union and then spending several days talking more about Bachmann than about Paul Ryan's official GOP response. Ridiculing Bachmann is much easier and more entertaining to the people at MSNBC than actually tackling the issues raised in Ryan's speech. Perhaps MSNBC needs to add Michelle Bachmann to Dana Milbank's desire for a Palin-free February.

Harry Reid's chooses demagoguery over seriousness

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has put forward his marker on what he is willing to do about our nation's entitlement crisis - absolutely nothing.

Cuts to Social Security are “off the table,” Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a video being circulated by a liberal activist group, making Mr. Reid one of the most high profile Democrats to take a stand on the issue.

Of course, his remarks imply that a major revamping of Social Security was actually on the table.

“As long as I’m the majority leader, I’m going to do everything within my legislative powers to prevent privatizing or eliminating Social Security,” Mr. Reid said in the video for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Simply say, ‘It’s off the table.’ We’re not going to balance the budget on the backs of senior citizens.”

Reid simply denied that there is any problem.

Mr. Reid described the fund as the “most successful social program in the history of the world.”

“They’re using scare tactics saying the program is in crisis and on the verge of bankruptcy,” he said. “That is simply not true.”

The Congressional Budget Office predicted last week that Social Security will post $600 billion in deficits during the next decade. If nothing changes, the fund will be bankrupt by 2037, according to the CBO.

This is what the CBO said just last week about the state of Social Security.

Social Security will post nearly $600 billion in deficits over the next decade as the economy struggles to recover and millions of baby boomers stand at the brink of retirement, according to new congressional projections.

This year alone, Social Security is projected to collect $45 billion less in payroll taxes than it pays out in retirement, disability and survivor benefits, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. That figure swells to $130 billion when a new one-year cut in payroll taxes is included, though Congress has promised to repay any lost revenue from the tax cut.

Last year, Social Security posted its first deficit since the program was last overhauled in the 1980s. The CBO said at the time that Social Security would post surpluses for a few more years before permanently slipping into deficits in 2016.

But the new projections show nothing but red ink until the Social Security trust funds are exhausted in 2037.

Analysts often say that fixing Social Security is easy compared to the problems in Medicare. But not if Harry Reid has anything to say about it.

A paean to limited government

There is a lot that Americans can learn from the debate about whether or not the individualized mandate is constitutional. Federal Judge Vinson's decision yesterday that it was not and thus all of Obamacare is unconstitutional is a magnificent learning moment for everyone about what our government is all about. Over our nation's history, the role of the federal government has grown far beyond what was originally understood by our Founding Fathers. Much of what the Antifederalists warned about has now come to pass. They warned that the "Necessary and Proper" and Commerce Clauses could be stretched to mean anything that an expansive government wanted them to mean.

But finally there seems to be a point beyond which the government may not be able to stretch. Despite Nancy Pelosi's derisive dismissal of any question of whether or not their health care bill was constitutional, there is clearly a massive problem with their bill.

The WSJ's editorial on Judge Vinson's decision summarizes the argument that opponents of the health care bill as well as Judge Vinson were making.

'If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

Federal Judge Roger Vinson opens his decision declaring ObamaCare unconstitutional with that citation from Federalist No. 51, written by James Madison in 1788. His exhaustive and erudite opinion is an important moment for American liberty, and yesterday may well stand as the moment the political branches were obliged to return to the government of limited and enumerated powers that the framers envisioned.

As Judge Vinson took pains to emphasize, the case is not really about health care at all, or the wisdom—we would argue the destructiveness—of the newest entitlement. Rather, the Florida case goes to the core of the architecture of the American system, and whether there are any remaining limits on federal control. Judge Vinson's 78-page ruling in favor of 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business, among others, is by far the best legal vindication to date of Constitutional principles that form the outer boundaries of federal power.

At the heart of the states' lawsuit is the individual mandate, which requires everyone to purchase health insurance or be penalized for not doing so. "Never before has Congress required that everyone buy a product from a private company (essentially for life) just for being alive and residing in the United States," Judge Vinson writes.

Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration justified this coercion under the Commerce Clause, so it is fitting that Judge Vinson conducts a deep investigation into its history and intent, including Madison's notes at the Constitutional Convention and the jurisprudence of the first Chief Justice, John Marshall. The original purpose of the Commerce Clause was to eliminate the interstate trade barriers that prevailed under the Articles of Confederation—among the major national problems that gave rise to the Constitution.

This was the clear understanding of the Commerce Clause up until the New Deal when the Court ruled that basically any activity one might indulge in for one's personal use could be considered part of interstate commerce. But not purchasing health insurance is not commerce.

Yet even in its most elastic interpretations, the Commerce Clause applied only to "clear and inarguable activity," Judge Vinson writes, the emphasis his. It never applied to inactivity like not buying health insurance, which has "no impact whatsoever" on interstate commerce. He argues that breaching this frontier converts the clause into a general police power of the kind that the Constitution reserves to the states. As the High Court put it in Lopez, obliterating this distinction would "create a completely centralized government."

The Administration contends that not purchasing insurance—inactivity—is really activity, because everyone will eventually need medical care and their costs will be transferred to the insured. But Judge Vinson dissects that as a "radical departure" from the Constitution and U.S. case law. It is "not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted," he writes. "Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended."

He notes that no one can opt out of eating any more than they can from the medical system, so return to the Wickard example of wheat: "Congress could more directly raise too-low wheat prices merely by increasing demand through mandating that every adult purchase and consume wheat bread daily, rationalized on the grounds that because everyone must participate in the market for food, non-consumers of wheat bread adversely affect prices in the wheat market."

Unlike Judge Henry Hudson in Virginia, who also found ObamaCare to be unconstitutional, Judge Vinson addresses the Administration's fallback argument that the Constitution's Necessary and Proper Clause justifies the law even if the Commerce Clause doesn't. He writes that this clause "is not an independent source of federal power" and "would vitiate the enumerated powers principle." In other words, the clause can't justify inherently unconstitutional actions.

And now the administration is caught in a trap of their own making. They deliberately left out a "severability" clause to maintain the entire bill even if part of it was struck down. They were afraid that small parts of it would be repealed and that would bring down the entire edifice so they wanted to keep it all intact. And that is an Achilles Heel for them leading the judge to strike down the entire law. The administration kept insisting that the individual mandate was essential to the bill. They need all those uninsured young people to buy insurance in order to fund the expanded insurance being offered. And so the Democrats have created their own logic for why the entire bill must be struck down.

How refreshing to have laid out for all to see why we have limited government. This will go on and it will all probably come down to what Justice Kennedy decides.