For as long as I have read op-eds, there has been a shortlist of pundits I’ve felt obliged to read in order to know what the Manhattan-Beltway political elites are thinking and debating.
On that list is the New York Times’ David Brooks and — a relatively new addition, at least on my form — Ross Douthat, also of the Times.
Both have written estimable books in recent years. Brooks’ 2011 “The Social Animal” is an engrossing review of what the most recent social science research tells us about human development. Douthat’s new “Bad Religion” catches up a reader in a brisk review of the collapse and possible renewal of American Christian culture over the past 60 years.
Now I hope they are reading each other and that Douthat in particular stumbles over a phrase in Brooks’ Friday review of the opinion of Chief Justice Roberts in the Obamacare case.
I have already written at length why I am in the “Maybe it’s Marbury” camp when it comes to the decision, and I don’t want to slay another set of trees. But Brooks throws out a casual line in his essay that brought me to a dead stop.
Brooks believes the country has yet to tackle the really hard issues of health care.
Specifically, he wrote, “We haven’t tackled the end of life issues.”
Who, I have to ask, is “we,” and isn’t the double assumption in those eight words that the federal government has a job to do and had better get to it soon?
Calling Mr. Douthat. There is a problem down the hall.
Imagine a line that read “We haven’t tackled the newspaper issues.”
Or “We haven’t tackled the self-incrimination issues.”
Substitute any fundamental right for the phrase “end of life” and see how it sounds.
Any intimation from the president or congressional Democrats that the federal government had an agenda to accomplish in any of those areas would raise the alarm, but I doubt many readers even paused as they raced along Brooks’ assessment of the Roberts’ reasoning. Of course we have to tackle end-of-life issues, most Manhattan-Beltway elites believe, because that’s where the money is.
That’s also where the rights of conscience begin, and we have to “tackle” those first, not after the feds have issued their cost containment edicts.
People most upset with Obamacare are not the red-ink worriers or the originalists who wanted the Commerce Clause cabined with the big black lines of law that last only if burned into the books with a statutory sacrifice.
The people most disappointed, and genuinely fearful, are, first and foremost, freedom-of-conscience conservatives, the devout who believe the state is pushing, pushing, pushing against the value of every human life and of the right to believe in and worship a God who has made that value His most important commandment to His followers.
You don’t have to go to DEFCON Death Panel 1 to fret that the rationing enthusiasts dodged a bullet Thursday, and that the writ of the 15-member Independent Payment Advisory Board still runs in a direct line toward a confrontation with believers who will not bend the knee to cost containment priorities at the “end of life” anymore than they will to the Health and Human Services Department mandate that Catholic institutions violate their core beliefs.
Those HHS regs are headed to the court, and if they are struck down with specificity and forcefulness, the delay from last week to that week will have been worth it. The Constitution’s protection of conscience will then be revealed as robust and enduring, and not something that needs “to be tackled,” but rather revered.
Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput preaches in D.C.’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on Wednesday. His topic is religious liberty, and his appearance there marks the conclusion of the Catholic Conference of Bishops’ Fortnight of Freedom. Let’s hope that even if columnists and jurists cannot make the Mass, they will at least read his remarks and consider them when round two in the battle of Obamacare gets under way.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
