The repugnance of ACA (Obamacare)
John Locke, the most important political theorist of the American Founding era, described laws as a community’s “standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties.” None of these elements are to be found in the Affordable Care Act. As Charles Kesler noted in the Claremont Review of Books, such laws
start not from equal rights but from equal (and often unequal) privileges, the favors or benefits that government may bestow on or withhold from its clients. The whole point is to empower government officials, usually unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, to bless or curse your petitions as they see fit, guided, of course, by their expertness in a law so vast, so intricate, and so capricious that it could justify a hundred different outcomes in the same case. When law ceases to be a common standard of right and wrong and a common measure to decide all controversies, then the rule of law ceases to be republican and becomes despotic. Freedom itself ceases to be a right and becomes a gift, or the fruit of a corrupt bargain, because in such degraded regimes those who are close to and connected with the ruling class have special privileges.
In summary, Congress has become a major player in the administrative state precisely by surrendering its constitutional purpose and ceasing to defend limited government. As a result, the administrative state has grown dramatically since 1965, and it only continues to defend and expand its turf. Political opposition occasionally arises in the White House or in Congress, but thus far with little effect.
John Marini, The Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, Hillsdale College, Imprimis, October 2013, Volume 42, Number 10
