The Nazis had no ***right ***to exterminate 6 million Jews, yet they did so anyway. A theoretical and moral right, and the ability to protect that right from being violated, are two different things.
They had a legal right to kill Jews; they changed the law, and killed them according to the law. So, they had a legal right. But it still was not a nice thing to do.
Empathy, cultural conditioning and my being a member of a communal living primate species. Certainly it isn’t written in the fiber of space-time.
The founding documents also mention a creator, and there probably isn’t one. They assert things. That doesn’t make self-evident rights sudden appear and have any sort of tangible meaning.
If you think natural rights exist you should be able to provide evidence for them. Such evidence is utterly lacking, so casting that position as having equal certainty as them not existing isn’t persuasive at all.
By that standard, since there is no evidence for vampires, they are just as likely to exist as not exist.
You know what’s funny? That liberals are going to whine if ACA subsidies in federal exchanges get struck down even though they seem pretty comfortable admitting now that they lied to sell the law.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/bs-megyn-kelly-slams-dem-pollsters-defense-obamacare/
Democrats think SCOTUS will lose legitimacy if they severely damage ACA this way. How? The people who originally passed the law, a whole bunch of them(nearly half of Senators) are no longer in office. The President doesn’t have any political capital whatsoever. THe law is polling as badly as it always has. If they do rule against the administration, who is going to denounce them and more importantly, who will actually care what they have to say?
C’mon adaher, cut the crap. You’re trying to incite rage from the same party that sold us the fuckin’ Iraq War.
I think if this latest Gruber unearthing is indicative of anything, it’s that the guy is supremely amenable to gaffes. Here’s a nice retort to this latest round of nonsense.
The people who brought you the phony arithmetic of the Bush tax cuts and Medicare Part D and the self-financing Iraq war are upset about the ACA, which is genuinely fiscally sound.
And for the umpteenth time, yes, the Supreme Court will no longer be a legitimate institution if it rules against the administration in the subsidy case. It would henceforth forever be seen as nothing more than the judicial arm of the Republican Party.
To add to this, what the Hell is up with the obsession with Gruber anyway?
The man didn’t write the law, he didn’t vote on it; all he did was consult and offer projections on how it would function. Whatever he says has no legal merit, as opposed to the actual drafters of the legislation who have been resoundingly up-front about the subsidy lawsuit bullshit.
Your source is Megyn Fucking Kelly? Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?
Actually, my source is the Democrat she was interviewing.
In whose eyes? The law itself barely has any democratic legitimacy. It wouldn’t pass today and likely wouldn’t pass in any iteration of Congress in the next 20 years or the previous 20 years. It passed during a tiny window of opportunity with Democrats lying the entire way about what was in it(which most of them didn’t even really know what was in it in the first place).
Elections have consequences, and one of the consequences of this election is that there isn’t anybody left to criticize the Supreme court decision on the Democratic side who anyone is likely to pay attention to who isn’t already a loyal Democrat.
And, uh, the fact that at least 5 million people would instantly lose health coverage in the wake of a stupid SCOTUS ruling is pretty damn telling. People like this man will die.
I think it’s safe to say that at least SOME of those millions of people will speak out against the newly-illegitimate SCOTUS.
Yes, elections do have consequences, and Obama was elected in the first place under the promise of enacting health reform. He was REELECTED - by a landslide - after it passed under the promise of completely enacting it.
Barely any democratic legitimacy? :smack: Again, c’mon, cut the crap.
The law was debated for a year and a half in Congress, passed both the Senate & the House with votes by duly elected representatives, signed into law by the duly elected president, upheld (the first time) by a GOP-led Supreme Court, and reaffirmed by Obama’s reelection.
Cut. The. Crap.
It was passed only because they lied about new taxes and lied about people being able to keep their health insurance. It’s a mockery of democratic legitimacy and it would be sweet justice for it to be damaged because they couldn’t agree on a rather important issue. And don’t carry water for even more Democratic lies by claiming they always intended to have federal exchanges have subsidies. We’ve got two people who waded deep into the law’s intricacies who said it didn’t and the IRS itself read the law at first to only allow subsidies in state exchanges. Political conformity was imposed once it became a hill Democrats had to stand or die on.
And 5 million people losing their health insurance? Probably won’t even be close to that, but even if it is, the law will be fixed. Republicans aren’t going to just let that happen. The law will be repaired, and in exchange the Democrats will be forced to keep the promises they made to pass the law: You will forever be allowed to keep your health insurance if that’s what you and the insurance company want, and the taxes Democrats denied were there will be repealed.
The fact that you’re buying into the cult-like Halbig Trutherism is evidence of your ignorance.
Also, good to know that you’re gung-hoe for eliminating the mechanisms that finance the ACA. For somebody as fiscally conservative as yourself - don’t forget, not too long ago you were decrying the law for adding to the deficit even though every CBO analysis has said otherwise - it’s good to know that you’d be perfectly fine with, y’know, not paying for all the nice stuff that the ACA does.
This entire argument is so Gawddamned stupid that I feel certifiably dumber for doing this.
Dude, here is contemporaneous FUCKING EVIDENCE that the Halbig argument is horse-shit.
Arguing that the ACA framers didn’t intend for universal subsidies is so stupid. It doesn’t even deserve the legitimacy that this Court has granted it, yet here we are.
Why didn’t they tell the IRS? Or Gruber? Or Jonathon Cohn? Because they had a different interpretation,at least back when it was assumed that the states would just do the federal government’s bidding.
This is just the next phase in their deception campaign.
So in your world a regime - say North Korea or one of any number on African, Middle East or *.stan kleptocracies - can do any thing they want and nobody can say boo because, well, they’re a state? Judgments of these states are our inbred racism?
Let’s reverse Lobohan’s question. If there are no natural rights, why did we establish governments in the first place? What’s the point of a government? Free stuff?
To protect the weak from the strong. No natural rights necessary. We do it because we might be weak someday; it is enlightened self-interest.
That doesn’t really make much sense. A government that does not recognize rights is just a very strong entity that bullies people much more efficiently than individuals.
Bullies deserve to be bullied.