How FDR's Supremes enabled Obamacare

In the wake of New Deal era Supreme Court jurisprudence it has become clear that Congress has acquired the authority to regulate private economic activity in a manner near limitless in its purview.

~ professor Earl M. Maltz

In a free society, can the federal government, under the pretext of economic and wartime conditions, unilaterally expand the parameters of the Commerce Clause to dictate what crops people can plant for their own use and how much they can plant? Be careful how you answer this question, dear reader, since your answer will not be heard by the sound you make from your voice (yes or no), but by the chains future generations will hear jingling from your wrists, ankles and rattling inside your mind.

In my continuing series on justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, we now come to a justice and a case that served as the foundation President Obama believed gave him the power and authority to force hundreds of millions of otherwise free American citizens to purchase health care via an unconstitutional "mandate" – a tax originated by Obama dictating that all Americans must buy his version of universal health care or else. Obama's fascist decree is not only tyrannical, it is pure madness.

In times of universal madness, sometimes we must seek the words of a madman for redemption. "First principles, Clarice," Dr. Hannibal Lecter urged his protégée in the 1991 movie "Silence of the Lambs." "Simplicity; read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?"

Seventy years before the Obamacare mandate there was Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the unanimous Supreme Court decision written by Justice Robert Jackson that created the Nazi-like power of the federal government to regulate all private economic activity.

The U.S. government under FDR's progressive New Deal policies wanted to drive up wheat prices during the Great Depression by establishing limits on wheat production based on acreage. Farmer Roscoe Filburn was growing wheat for on-farm consumption above the limits permitted by the government Gestapo. In retaliation, the U.S. government ordered Filburn to destroy his crops and pay a fine, even though he was producing the excess wheat for his own use and had no intention of selling it either as intrastate or interstate commerce.

The Supreme Court greatly expanded the Constitution's Commerce Clause under Article I, Section 8, which permits the United States Congress "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." The Court decreed that Filburn's wheat-growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for chicken feed on the open market, and because wheat was traded nationally, Filburn's production of more wheat than he was allotted was affecting interstate commerce (in a minuscule sense). Thus, Filburn's production could be regulated by the federal government.

Throughout the ages, the cult of celebrity has doomed great nations. The combination of severe economic depression and the devastation of World War II gave FDR (a very popular president) the political cover in the Wickard case to exploit his fascist policies that would be the envy of a Stalin, a Hitler or a Mao Zedong. In other words, FDR was so hellbent on controlling every aspect of the lives of American citizens that he took this case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court whose unanimous opinion under Justice Robert Jackson (and an FDR-packed judiciary) decreed to Mr. Filburn an emphatic "NO" to the liberty question, "In America can I grow enough food to feed my own family without government interference?"

I cited the Wickard case in the context of my analysis of Obamacare because, as Dr. Lector urged Clarice to understand a thing, we must always return to is "first principles." The Obamacare tax mandate is only one of many hundreds of thousands of rules and regulations that are giving Leviathan government increasing control over every aspect of our lives – from the cradle to the grave. Obamacare descended directly from the fascist presumptions of the Wickard v. Filburn case.

Was the argument the FDR Court made to expand the Commerce Clause illogical? Did existing and future tyrants learn from FDR's fascist socialist policies? Indeed they did; for example, Mao Zedong, in a genocidal expansion of FDR's New Deal food-rationing program demonstrated in the Wickard case, forced his own version of agricultural collectivization upon the Chinese people called, The Great Leap Forward. By decree Mao nationalized all farming in China from 1958-62. The results? Over 45 million people (largely peasants) died of starvation while they worked like slaves to deliver their crop to China's megalopolis cities and, of course, to the ruling Communist Party bosses.

FDR's New Deal established European-style socialism in America, Keynesian deficit spending economic policy, the deconstruction of the Supreme Court and the permanent establishment of the Imperial Progressive Presidency originated by America's first progressive president and cousin of FDR, Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09).

Long after the end of the Great Depression and World War II, the treason of the Wickard case over seven decades would metastasize like a virus or a cancer in the history of American constitutional jurisprudence, leading inevitably to Obamacare. Under that monstrosity, the federal government can force us to buy only the products it considers healthy in order to reduce health-care costs, including the grotesque paradox of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius officially declaring that birth control and abortion are good because they reduce the costs of having babies.

If the American government over time gradually controls your life, your courts, your corporations, your food, your family and your health-care system, what does that make We the People? Like the proverbial frog unwittingly being boiled alive in a cauldron of lukewarm water, we have become slaves to a Fabian Socialist government.