Rep. John Lewis Compares Obamacare Opponents And Nullification Proponents To The Civil Rights Era Of The ’50s

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Quite possibly for the first time in the history of the United States, there is an edict that has been issued by our almighty federal overlords who are camped out on the banks of the Potomac River in what I like to refer to as Mordor on the Potomac River.  For the first time, they may have actually achieved what it was that they set out to do, which was to assume some manner of control over the personal lives of all 310 million citizens.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Quite possibly for the first time in the history of the United States, there is an edict that has been issued by our almighty federal overlords who are camped out on the banks of the Potomac River in what I like to refer to as Mordor on the Potomac River.  For the first time, they may have actually achieved what it was that they set out to do, which was to assume some manner of control over the personal lives of all 310 million citizens.  Now, of course there are going to be — this is a caveat here.  This makes this even more insidious.  Of course there are going to be those that are just going to say: I’m wealthy enough that I don’t need your stupid insurance policies.  I pay cash.  I’ve got a doctor who will see me.  I throw him a hundred or two hundred every time I go.  When I have to go to the doctor, I’ve got a surety bond at my disposal.  They know I’m good for it.  If me or someone in the family has to be in the hospital, we pay for it.  We negotiate our own deal and we pay cash.

In other words, the people that passed this law who either have policies protected from this or who won’t need policies and will just pay the $1500 fine or whatever it is are not going to be affected by this.  In other words, they are shielded by virtue of their stature in life, they are shielded by this disastrous and I’d say devious effects of this.  The rest of us will not be so fortunate and will toil mightily under this.  Not only is this taking people and pushing them off their current insurance plans and causing major disruptions in the delivery of insurance services, you would have to think then, sometime in the very near future, major disruptions and alterations in the way the care is actually granted, in the way the care is actually carried out.

This is going to alter the way that medical services were formerly performed.  If you thought it was kind of dicey before, just wait until no one or few people have any price mechanism control over these services.  We were already at a point where most medical services, you weren’t going hospital to hospital shopping to see which one you were going to buy based on price, based on options, based on the same kind of considerations or concerns that you would have before you went out and bought a new car, or before you went out and bought lunch, or before you went grocery shopping, or before you went shopping for some new appliance.  You would have market-based concerns that in doing due diligence you would research and determine from whom and where you wanted to exchange the money you have earned for labor to purchase something in exchange for a health service, whether it was cardiac or internal or pediatric or whatever the case may have been.

We are already way past the point of having markets and the price mechanism play the primary and regulating role that the price mechanism plays in free markets and in industries.  Now we’re going to completely remove that.  The clip that I played from Senator Rand Paul yesterday talking about how when healthcare becomes a right, that means you have the right to conscript those that perform healthcare and that they must perform it because it’s a right. They cannot deny it to someone.  Even if you want to say no, you can’t because it’s a right.

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I have a digital media file that kind of sums this up.  This is how desperate those that want us all to live in the blob that is America.  They want us all to think the same.  They want us all to act the same.  They want us all to partake of the same kind of medical services or dental services without option, without preference, without locality, without regard to environmental concerns.  In other words, people that live in certain parts of any given landmass may have problems that are very unique to that area.  You may deal with certain kinds of bugs that carry certain kinds of diseases or sicknesses.  We don’t want that.  There is none of that.  You are an American.  We have ten things you must have and you must live under these things.

This has been the pursuit of madmen throughout the course of all recorded history, which was to try and get large populations of people to obey, to get large populations of people to become subservient, to get large populations of people to become sedentary and apathetic.  That way, whatever resources they have, you have access to them.  Whatever labor it is they’re skilled at, you have access to it.  Consequently, you then have elevated yourself to a position where you don’t have to perform or don’t have to go out and seek, through legal means and through competition or your own hard work and sweat, the things I just mentioned.  Now you can just get them by legislative fiat.

This is what this Affordable Care Act basically does for at least one-fifth of your productivity.  If the experts are correct and if the numbers are correct, and if we spend one-fifth or 20 percent of all the money we earn on medical services, we don’t have much option or control over how that one-fifth is spent.  Folks, doesn’t that then make it a tax of sorts?  It now makes it a government service.  If it’s a government service, how does government service anything?  They tax you for it.  Again, it is still what John Taylor of Caroline called a direct tax.  The reason you don’t want direct taxes is because you can’t escape them.  You cannot get away from them unless you are one of those few, rare elites.

I’m going to mention this every day until we actually find out what’s going to happen.  Here’s what I’m going to mention every day: What are the state legislatures that moved and acted to protect their citizens from this monstrosity, what are they going to do now?  What are they going to do?  Are they going to allow the implementation of the ten regulations on the insurance providers that are in their state?  Or are they going to say: You don’t have to abide by that here.  We don’t have minimum coverage standards here in Missouri.  We voted 72 to 28 against that.  We don’t have minimum coverage standards here in Georgia.  We voted and have an act of our legislature against that.  We don’t have the ten things you have to have according to Obamacare here in Louisiana because we have the Medical Services Freedom Act.  There are nearly dozens of states that have these rules.  How are they going to implement them?  How are they going to enforce them?  Are they going to enforce them?  Will the will of the ruling class on one coast of the continent, will it pull sway?  That’s the unanswered question for you people and for the rest of us.

This would then take some act or form of nullification or interposition, which has been pooh-poohed.  It has been made fun of.  It’s been, [mocking] “It never worked before.  It’s illegal anyway.”  It wasn’t illegal when Wisconsin did it to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act, was it?  It wasn’t illegal when states were moving to nullify an amendment to the Constitution called prohibition until the Congress went: Okay, all right, we get it.  We’ll repeal it.  We’ll repeal it!  Hold no, man, hold on.  When the State of Virginia and other states were trying to escape out from under the tyranny of the alien and sedition acts, it was viewed as: Yeah, that’s exactly how it ought to work.

Yesterday in the hallowed halls of Congress, the hearing that I was referring to earlier that I watched, one of the members of Congress that was on this particular panel, John Lewis of Georgia, actually compared any effort to try and stop the Affordable Care Act’s implementation to the bigoted and racist efforts of Jim Crow.  Folks, I’m not making this up.  As a matter of fact, I think I was actually watching the Senate version of this yesterday.  I received two emails within about five minutes of each other.  Some of you out there were actually watching this and had seen Lewis say what he said and had alerted me: Dude, you gotta turn it on.  If you’re not watching this, you’ve got to see John Lewis just compared opposition by Southern governors to the Affordable Care Act to Jim Crow.  I thought I’d let the clip speak for itself.  You be the judge of that.

[start audio clip]

Representative John Lewis:  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.  Thank you, Madam Administrator for being here.  Thank you for all your hard work and for your years of service.  I happen to believe that healthcare is a right and not a privilege, that it’s not just for the fortunate few but for all citizens of America.  Now, the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land.  It was passed by the Congress, signed into law by the President of the United States, and held by the United States Supreme Court.  There have been more than forty attempts to repeal the act and it did not succeed.  By attempting to repeal it, members of this body, members on the other side of the aisle, closed down this government and threatened the economy of the United States, costed us more than $24 billion.

This reminds me of another period in our history not so long ago.  During the ‘50s, many Southern senators signed a Southern Manifesto after the Supreme Court decision of 1954.  Those senators, along with many Southern governors, subscribed to the doctrine of interposition and nullification.  Some even massed a resistance.  That’s what we saw on the part of the Republican members of the House and some of the Republicans in the Senate.

The Affordable Care Act is working.  It has happened to make healthcare affordable and accessible to hundreds, thousands, and millions of our citizens who never had it before.  When I was growing up . . .

[end audio clip]

Mike:  The demagoguery here is just — that is quite shocking, but coming from Congressman Lewis, not shocking.  Let me see if I understand this.  So, first of all, Brown v. Board of Education has to be one of the worst, I mean one of the most convoluted — they used a doll.  I’m not making this up.  Go read the decision.  They used a doll to help render this opinion here.  This is one of the cases that made necessary the emergence of and the creation of what ultimately becomes the Federalist Society to try and educate judges that you can’t just go in there and make things up because you think it’s popular.  We do have this thing called the Constitution.  You’re supposed to defer — that’s the law of the land.  Congressman Lewis, that’s the law of the land.  But to compare the efforts of — notice it was all Southern governors there.  So it was a bunch of racist, hick hayseeds that are out here trying to stop a bunch of people who had no access to healthcare.

I have to ask the question of Congressman Lewis: What were they doing yesterday?  What were they doing on September the 29^th?  Were they dying?  Were they being denied?  Were they living or seeking care inside the little clinics that happen in the discarded boxes that once held Maytag refrigerators underneath overpasses without sanitary supplies and electricity?  Is that where they were?  This is ridiculous to even imply that there weren’t services that were available.  They may not have been the same services that the “elites” can participate in.  Neither are the cars that are driven or the class that you may sit inside in an airplane when taking a trip.  That is some of the demagoguery that is prevalent and is out there today overall.  In other words, this isn’t the law of the land.  You better shut up, pipe down, and accept it, pal.  We won; you lost; game over.

I’m going to make one final analogy on this.  This is pretty much a very similar circumstance that existed in the United States all the way up until the year that was 1864.  That was the Constitution of the United States had made legal the slave trade.  Because it was consecrated in the Constitution and not by definition banned or outlawed by it, it existed.  Not only did it exist, it proliferated.  Now, there were those groups of people who were called abolitionists.  These people would be called radicals today but they were called abolitionists.  The abolitionist cause, you could say, was begun by Ben Franklin in the Federal Convention of 1787, because it was Franklin who was one of the delegates as they were drafting the Constitution that said: Either you ban it or you’re not going to get the support of me or many others here.  Of course, a compromise was struck between Rutledge and Sherman and Elbridge Gerry.  You can read more about this in the notes on the convention.

You could say that the abolitionists were the progeny of Ben Franklin.  We go from 1787 — there were even people that said this — there were members of the Continental Congress in 1776 that opposed states that had slavery and slavery itself, but just use Ben Franklin as the model here.  That’s 13 years plus 63.  That’s almost 75 years abolitionists toiled to try and eliminate and make illegal the scourge that was the slave trade.  To say now, [mocking] “This is the law of the land.  Y’all need to shut up and take it.”  I wonder if the same thing would have been said to the abolitionists in 1787 and 1865.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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