An open etter from James Madison, Founding Father:
Joe Hart knows exactly how I think the Constitution should apply two-hundred years after my death. Obviously, health insurance mandates do not count as “Commerce among the several states,” even though it’s commerce that happens among several states, because we didn’t have Blue Cross in 1789, so I couldn’t possibly have been talking about that.
It’s well known that we Founding Fathers were the smartest people ever, but there’s something important that most people don’t know about us. We were also visited by the goddess Minerva who bestowed us with a DeLorean that travels through all of American history. We sampled every age to see if a minimal, lassiez faire interpretation of our abstractly worded document works to make a more perfect union, and it totally does.
I saw that whole Industrial Revolution. I saw the Gilded Age, with its rise in paternal wage slavery and an industrial economy that allowed for over one percent of all America’s wealth to be enjoyed by a single man. I saw the Great Depression, and the rise of postwar consumerism that put large corporations at the forefront of people’s lives and livelihood. I saw the switch to a financial economy and the digital age, and I totally get globalism.
Guys, we covered all of that. Joe Hart knows all of this, because I told him when he sprinkled gypsy tears into a cauldron.
We meant tariffs, and that’s it. For all eternity, just deal with tariffs. What’s with all these regulations on anything besides tariffs? What’s all the federalist hullabaloo over “hedge funds” and “requiring publicly traded companies to disclose their finances,” and “dangerous diet pills,” and “harmful children’s toys,” and “false advertising” and “people murdering innocent people by blowing up federal buildings?”
Those did not come directly from us, so they couldn’t possibly be rational endeavors. Who needs this “health insurance” so much, anyway? How much could it possibly cost to throw snakes and leeches on a writhing body and call it the old college try?
Look, I’m no anti-federalist kook. I understand the occasional need for central government to put its foot down. It was me who recognized that the weakness of the Articles of Confederacy was its inability to tax states for revenue.
Now Uncle Sam can tax, as I so eloquently put it, for “the general welfare.” Pretty vague, I know. Sorry. So, I guess if the government wanted to alter people’s economic behavior, they could rightly insert a tax as a penalty for not buying … I digress.
We covered all possible problems when we wrote the thing. Yes, there were mistakes. Like that one clause that, in 1841, resulted in mass confusion over who the hell was president. And we’re sorry about that “civil war” and the “systematic disenfranchisement of millions of people.” But we totally did all those mistakes on purpose so you’d have to deal with them. It builds character.
See, when it comes to the legal history of the U.S., the Constitution isn’t the most important thing – it’s the only thing.
I’m flipping through all your legal history … yawn … something about the necessity of regulating intrastate goods, because they inevitably effect supply and demand of interstate goods … snooze. Something about distinguishing between the production of a good and the marketing of it, the latter of which would obviously best describe buying insurance … snore. Look, we took care of all of this for you two hundred years ago.
Stop worrying your post-industrial little heads about this stuff and do as we say, as we laid it out for you in Federalist 45, which pretty much is what kind of runs this country. Your entire legal mores should basically be a Founding Fathers RPG game. Put down that book by Mr. Oliver Wendell Whatever, and start channeling Hamilton, you crazy posterity, you.
Josh Veazey is an alumnus of the University of Alabama.
