The cover story of the new issue of Regulation is my article, co-authored with Goldwater Institute attorney Christina Sandefur, on how Obamacare is doing violence to the basic principle of the rule of law. We argue that from the Supreme Court’s decision to recharacterize the law as a “tax,” to the violation of the constitutional provisions for enacting taxes, to the legislation-by-press-conference alterations to the law, to the creation of the “Platonic Guardians” of IPAB, to the efforts by state officials to subvert their own state constitutions in Obamacare’s service, the PPACA has been a rolling blackout of the principles of lawfulness at the heart of our constitutional order.
“In the pursuit of progressive goals,” we write, “the Obama administration and its congressional allies have done long-lasting damage to a constitutional order that was meant to preserve individual liberty by cabining government power along clear, predictable, and democratically accountable lines.”
What’s striking is, we wrote this at the end of October–before most of the Administration’s tinkering, delays, and rewrites had yet happened.