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CNN Poll: 59% of Americans Glad That Federalism Is Dead
Posted By Michael van der Galien On July 1, 2015 @ 6:19 am In Obamacare,Politics,Regulation | 26 Comments
According to a new CNN poll, majorities support both SCOTUS’ ObamaCare and its gay marriage decision:
According to a new CNN/ORC poll, 63% support the Court’s ruling upholding government assistance for lower-income Americans buying health insurance through both state-operated and federally-run health insurance exchanges. Slightly fewer, 59%, say they back the ruling which made same-sex marriages legal in all 50 states.
It’s not surprising that a majority of voters like free money — which is undoubtedly what they think about ObamaCare subsidies — or that they support legalizing gay marriage. Previous polls showed that already. No, what’s shocking here is that they’re apparently willing to throw federalism in the dust bin to achieve these goals. Because that’s what happened here — in both cases. With regards to ObamaCare Congress was basically circumvented and “the state” suddenly means “Washington, D.C.” And, while many people might be happy that same-sex marriage is now legal everywhere, the Supreme Court was only able to do this by taking away the power of individual states to define marriage — an issue clearly left to them according to the Constitution.
In other words, Americans are a-okay with power grabs as long as they support the issues the judicial coups are meant to defend.
Or not? Hot Air explains that the average voter may not even realize what just happened — and CNN, of course, conveniently forgot to explain it to them. Especially the question about ObamaCare was questionable if not downright deceptive:
The question in King v. Burwell wasn’t whether giving subsidies to poorer Americans to pay their health insurance is legal in the abstract, as that question seems to imply. The question was whether the text of the ObamaCare statute itself authorized those subsidies for consumers on the federal exchange. You could have rephrased this question to ask, “If a law passed by Congress authorizing health-care subsidies is unclear, should clarifying it be a job for Congress or the Supreme Court?” Imagine the numbers you’d have gotten for that one. But then, that question’s not really fair either. The core issue in King for 99 percent of the public is, “Should the government keep the free money flowing to people who’ve come to depend on it?” The legal niceties of that, whether subsidies are legal or illegal given the way the law was drafted and which branch of government should be responsible for cleaning up this mess, are probably just that — niceties.
In other words, the poll results can be interpreted in two different ways: the first one is that Americans no longer support federalism; the second option is that they’re too uneducated to understand what’s going on.
Whichever may be the case the result is the same: a Supreme Court or a president run amok will get away with it as long as they hold positions a majority of Americans support. This means that while federalism has been stabbed in its heart by SCOTUS, the American people are the ones who have officially declared it dead.
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