Please join PLF at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas next week. I’ll be speaking on Thursday, July 10, about the Constitution in The Age of Mandates: Obamacare, executive orders, and other threats to freedom.
The theme of Freedom Fest this year is “Is Big Brother Here?” I’ll explain that, while the answer is still no, we are taking steps in the wrong direction—and in particular, one crucial step: changing from a society in which the law prevents you from doing bad things, to one in which the law tries to force you to do “good” things. “Lawfulness sets limitations to actions, but does not inspire them,” wrote Hannah Arendt, among the greatest scholars on the subject of totalitarianism. “The greatness, but also the perplexity of laws in free societies is that they only tell what one should not, but never what one should do.” But in our Age of Mandates, government is increasingly crossing the line into commanding that citizens do what political elites think they ought to do. Combined with the increasingly unrestrained power of the President to alter how laws apply by executive fiat, Obamacare and laws like it represent a fatal conceit, indeed. But as I’ll explain, the fight goes on: we are now waiting on a decision from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in our constitutional challenge to Obamacare, argued in May.
I’ll be joined at the podium by my wife, Goldwater Institute attorney Christina Sandefur, who argued another Obamacare lawsuit in the Ninth Circuit last month. (PLF filed a brief in support of that case, as well.)
And please drop by Pacific Legal Foundation’s booth to meet some of our staff and learn more about the many ways we’re fighting to rescue liberty from coast to coast.