On the brink

I haven't posted in quite some time. I think that's because I have been (figuratively speaking, of course) holding my breath. Or maybe I’ve been paddling rapidly upstream on the river of denial. I guess I was thinking, “Surely they won’t really do this, will they?” Seriously, passing legislation that affects 17% of the nation’s economy without a SINGLE Republican vote – nobody would be that stupid, would they? As it happens, they would, they could, and in the next few hours we will find out that they did. They’ll rationalize it every which way but loose. They’ll tell us it’s for our own good. They’ll say that they did it because it needed to be done. They will say all sorts of things. And in the end, we will see a fundamental change in the way our country works. For the first time (and I will predict right now that it won’t be the last time), you and I are going to be compelled by force of law to purchase goods and services. Maybe not quite at gunpoint, but when the compeller is the United States government, that doesn’t matter much, now does it?

So – I have to wonder what we can do now. Obviously, a big part of it will come down to money. The only way to vote the scoundrels out is to get out the message that we don’t want this, and that we will not under any circumstances allow the insulated “majority” in Washington to fundamentally change our nation without the consent of the governed. This is going to require time, effort and money. The National Republican Congressional Committee is a good place to start. We need to fund true reformers that will vote to repeal this travesty of a “law”. We need to put on notice those who have ignored our voices. We need to let them know that their jobs will go away in November. We need to target every single Democrat that voted for this in the House and Senate. Let’s get ‘em, guys. If we let them take away this bit of freedom, what is next? Do we really want to be the people that someday tell our grandkids that there used to be a thing called the Constitution of the United States of America that actually meant something, but we let that slip away from us?

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." – 10th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America