Dr. Betsy McCaughey nails Supreme Court Justice Kagan - Granite Grok

Dr. Betsy McCaughey nails Supreme Court Justice Kagan

Bravo (or do I have to be PC / Spanish correct and go Brava?)!  ‘Grok friend Betsy McCaughey is one of our favorites – former Lt. Gov. of New York, Constitutional Scholar, and one of the nation’s premier experts on Obamacare.  She goes all around the country on speaking engagements, is on the radio, a Fox News Contributor – and I keep going through her books on it.  Well, she caught Kagan in a lie from the oral arguments for the Hobby Lobby / Conestoga Obamacare case this week in her New York Sun Op-Ed (emphasis mine, reformatted):

That playbook was laid out in a brief that had been filed by 19 senators and 91 members of the House, all Democrats , supporting the Obama administration’s legal war against Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft stores that provides health insurance to all employees but refuses to cover morning-after pills such as Plan B and Ella. The owners, the Green family, try to run their business according to Biblical principles, including closing on Sunday, foregoing hauling beer even when their trucks have to run empty, and not providing abortion drugs.  Senator Murray claimed that “What’s at stake in this case before the Supreme Court is whether a CEO’s personal beliefs can trump a woman’s access to free or low-cost contraception under the Affordable Care Act.”

And we see the 3 female (and more importantly, Progressive) justices spew this same nonsense.  We see three things at play here that have never been tried to be crammed down our throats by Progressives:

  • A redefinition of “access” from can you legally purchase this low cost commodity item on your own to one of “unless somebody gives it to you free, you have no access”?
  • The Government should have complete control over how a company not only operates but also in the benefits they MUST give employees .
  • the overt play that Government’s will should trump the religious beliefs

Actually, the first one has been in play for quite some time –  but given the Power that Progressives now are wielding, it matters not what the individual believes, it is what the COLLECTIVE wants.  And if they can continue to redefine the free exercise of religion (which means where ever you are) to merely freedom of religion (only inside your house of worship), what else is next on that slippery slope.  Remember, Progressives can ONLY win via sleight of verbiage – unlike we Conservatives, they cannot be out and open about their agenda or they loose.  Back to Betsy:

Nonsense. Not one word in the Affordable Care Act guarantees health plans will cover birth control products. There is no right. President Obama and his Secretary of Health and Human Services added that requirement by regulation. Women have a constitutionally protected right to use birth control, but nothing guarantees that they can get it from an employer.

It was shocking to hear Justice Kagan make the same spurious claim — that women are entitled to employer provided contraceptives — during oral argument:

Congress has made a judgment and Congress has given a statutory entitlement and that entitlement is to women and includes contraceptive coverage.”

Wrong, Justice Kagan. Did you also forego reading the law, like most members of Congress? The distinction between a regulation and a law is no small matter. As Hobby Lobby’s lawyer stressed in his closing statement, a statute, in this case Congress’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, trumps a regulation.

And this is the battle that lots of Conservatives and Libertarians are also waging: that mere Law should not trump that of the Constitution.  Like any self-absorbed industry, the Judicial one has (literally, in court) wrapped itself up in its own arcane acronyms and specialized speech and meanings to the point where it has, in many opinions, completely covered up the plain text and spirit of the Constitution.  Remember, our Founding document was meant to be read and understood by farmers of the time (which, sadly must be imagined, may well rival the ability of our current crop of college kids).

Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993 expressly to shield believers such as the Green family from any government requirements that would impinge on their ability to practice their faith.  Justice Kagan showed little patience for that concept, and asked whether a victory for Hobby Lobby would invite employers to object to other treatments, such as blood transfusions and vaccines.  “So one religious group could opt of out this and another religious group could opt out of that and everything would be piecemeal and nothing would be uniform.” Correct, Justice Kagan. Her vision of a uniform society where all are forced to put aside their diverse beliefs and march in lockstep with the government’s mandates, sucked the oxygen out of the courtroom.

So what is wrong with piecemeal?  Stemming from individual choice?  What I don’t see here is any idea that there should be not just separation of church and State, but Public vs Private.  Instead, we see Progressives decrying both the religious “intrusion” into Obamacare public policy here yet hypocritical when the Dems appeal to church leaders to help in the effort to sign up more folks for Obamacare.  and I will use the word: Fascism – why buy the cow when you can control who gets the milk?  Progressives hate capitalism – and they have, and will continue to do, everything they can think up to further control companies until they become almost indistinguishable from being just another arm of Gooberment (as Progressives refuse to see that their policies have failed everywhere else they’ve been tried – all one has to do is look at Venezuela right now to see the abject misery Chavez & Maduro have caused).  Then she contrasts that ideological gender based attack with the male justices:

What a contrast to the six male Justices, who, despite their ideological differences, searched for a way to accommodate the administration’s goal without injuring the Greens and other employers spiritually opposed to abortion drugs.

Like a broken record, I remind you: the Constitution is there to restrict Government, NOT Individuals.  It is clear that the three females are saying “It doesn’t matter what the Individual believes” while the six males are saying “it is paramount”.

These justices called attention to the fact that these drugs are not expensive. Perhaps the government could step in and pay for them. Poor women already get help with birth-control products through Medicaid federal community health plans and Planned Parenthood.

Yes, I said a lie.  At that level of our justice system, they are RULING on the exact wording of Law.  Yes, it goes over 2,700 pages for the Law itself and last time I heard, over 20,000 pages of regulations from the “the Secretary shall” parts.  However, the point of this suit is whether or not extremely religious people who own and run companies must give up their First Amendment free expression of religion Right and bow their knees to the secular humanism religion that is now sweeping through our Government – a role reversal of Citizens that just happen to have a government instituted to protect our Rights to one where it now rules us as subjects.  All that Hobby Lobby wishes to do is to be left alone by a Government that sees it as just as an extension of it’s will.

Betsey ends with this:

Look for a likely 6-3 ruling that if you like your God, you can keep your god, even if you also have to make a living.

Progressives wanna stuff God into a box with a sign: only open on Sunday / Saturday morning or Friday evenings.

>