Next week the Affordable Care Act is before the Supreme Court for oral arguments. Tomorrow, the law turns two. Today, of course, is the Illinois primary, where we will again see if individual mandate father Mitt Romney can skate by on this issue or whether enough right-wingers are enraged by Santorum’s invoking Obamneycare to give him a black eye.
Health care reform is in the dock.
But so are the natural rights that our founders espoused in the Declaration of Independence. When basic issues of rights and the constitution are up for debate it is the right these days that presents itself as the defender of our founding principles. We all know their interpretation of our founding documents is highly selective, narrow and ideologically perverse. But, that doesn’t stop them acting as if they alone can commune with Jefferson and Madison.
On health care, the constitutional debate will focus on the commerce and necessary and proper clauses. But at a deeper level this is a debate about the balance of natural rights espoused in the Declaration – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
What right-wingers always seem to overlook in the Declaration is the bit about “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men…” Further selectivity means they only point to freedom and liberty as the rights that must be secured and therefore see the health care law as an infringement on those rights. But what about life and the pursuit of happiness? Is not the health care law a clear imperative for a government that wants to secure life and the pursuit of happiness for all? When looked at in that light, whatever constraints are imposed on individual liberty under the individual mandate are justified to secure the other two natural rights our founders deemed inalienable.
The Declaration was not just a call for freedom from despotism but a justification for the foundation of a government of the people that would play a necessary role in balancing liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness. That is just what the ACA does. So as it is debated this week and into the fall, good if we liberals defended it; not simply as constitutional but also as an expression of our founding principles. We can’t commune with Jefferson but our interpretation of founding intent is every bit as valid and certainly more true and modern than the right’s.
