-By Warner Todd Huston
CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin is aghast that Republicans would try to defund Obamacare and she is sure that the founding fathers would support Obama’s signature healthcare law because, well, “it’s a law.”
During a September 19 segment of CNN Newsroom, Baldwin said, “Congress passes a law, in this case Obamacare, and then some of its members turn around and essentially try to sabotage it. Again, I repeat, it’s a law. Certainly not the way the Founding Fathers maybe drew this thing up.”
So, the founders would not oppose Obamacare because it is a foregone conclusion since it is already a law?
Baldwin needs to do a bit of reading. The very founders that she claimed would never have opposed something that had already became law are the same founders that generated one of our Republic’s earliest Constitutional crises when the John Adams administration (our second president and a founding father) passed the Alien and Sedition laws that made it illegal to oppose the government and Thomas Jefferson (our third president and a founding father) opposed Adams, used it as a central theme in his run against Adams and won the presidency where upon he repealed the offensive law.
If Baldwin was right in her characterization of the founders, Jefferson would have just shrugged and allowed the Alien and Sedition Law to stand because “it’s a law.”
The CNN host was also misleading to say “Congress passed” Obamacare. “Congress” did not pass Obamacare in anything like a bipartisan move. Not one single Republican voted in favor of Obamacare so it is not out of character at all for Republicans to continue to oppose the President’s takeover of our healthcare system, “law” or no.
Further, one of the powers that the founders gave the House of Representatives was to be able to have a large amount of control over the budget. The founders took the power of drafting the budget away from the president so that he would not be able to fully control policy.
So, the Republicans are simply exercising the very power that those founders of whom Baldwin was speaking had given them.
It appears that CNN’s Brooke Baldwin needs to learn a bit about the history of the U.S. before she spouts off about policy and history.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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