Good news from Sheila Jackson Lee: The Constitution implies a right to health care and education

Loading

Allahpundit @ Hot Air:

Laugh if you must but it’s no goofier than the idea that “due process” implies a substantive right to kill a baby in the womb but not five minutes later, after it’s emerged.

Besides, Jackson Lee’s been consistent on this. Back in January 2011, right after the new Republican House majority was sworn in, she started arguing that repealing O-Care would amount to adeprivation of due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. There’s a certain ruthless logic in her reaching for the Constitution right after the Democrats’ hold on power began to slip in hopes of putting her favored programs beyond the new majority’s grasp. And now she’s doing it again, conveniently just as the media’s filling up with stories about ObamaCare’s implementation maybe turning into a “train wreck.”

Speaking on the House floor, Jackson Lee said the right to these services can be read into the Declaration of Independence, which preserves the rights of Americans to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“One might argue that education and healthcare fall into those provisions of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” she said. Jackson Lee also praised President Obama for fighting for these rights.

“I think that what should be continuously emphasized is the President’s leadership on one single point: that although healthcare was not listed per se in the Constitution, it should be a constitutional right,” she said.

How many Democrats at this point have been forced to resort to the Declaration of Independence for quasi-constitutional arguments to support O-Care because the actual Constitution doesn’t do much for them? Pelosi’s the most famous example, but John Lewis once went there too. It makes me nostalgic for the elegant simplicity of the “Commerce Clause lets us do anything we want, wingnuts” arguments before the Supreme Court ruling on the mandate last year. Friendly advice to Pelosi et al.: You can justify literally any policy, left or right, on grounds that it’s designed to enable the citizen’s “pursuit of happiness.” We should repeal Social Security and Medicare right now because eliminating payroll taxes and easing the debt burden on the public will make it easier for them to pursue their happiness.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
6 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Where?
In what clause?
How’s that again?
I can equally easily read into the Constitution my right to representatives who are familiar with our founding documents, and do not insist on reading into them rights which are not there.
These rights are not in The Federalist Papers. If a supposed right is not listed “per se,” then said right is not there.
A constitution such as the one Ms Lee is able to find would never have been enacted.
Go away, Ms Lee, and take your inability to read with you.

Sheila Jackson Lee is partially right: The U.S. Constitution does give us the right to SEAK our own health care, and to SEAK our own education.

Isn’t it amazing how many things that ARE in the Constitution the liberals want to ban, and how many things that AREN’T in the Constitution they want us to ASS/U/ME are? Until they find that lamp and rub it, their wishing isn’t going to do anything.

One thing people miss about this whole healthcare debate is that, making it a ”right” will stifle innovation and medical progress.
(We already are seeing this with the medical device tax.)
So, in a few years we will start seeing the bad consequences of our present healthcare practices costing more and more lives.
Just today, on the transgenders and sports thread, I recalled a teenage boy who failed to grow after puberty.
By 15 he was only 5’1”.
The doctors of the time (late 1950’s) gave him a series of human growth hormone shots.
He grew.
Problem solved, so it seemed.
Eight years later he was diagnosed with bone cancer (a direct result of the shots).
Within 3 months of his diagnoses he had died.

Now, we all see commercials for legal help if you took Yaz or have a pelvic mesh or other medical things.
Who are you going to call under ObamaCare?
What companies will be following up on supposedly safe medications and procedures?

Ms. Lee is imploring that the Constitution, with help from the Declaration, includes a “right” of people to healthcare.

I agree. But before you go condemning this agreement, let me explain further.

We, as citizens of this country, and the States in which we reside, have natural rights to all sorts of things that are not explicitly listed within the Constitution. That much is agreed upon by nearly all of the founding fathers, including the three persons who undertook the writings found within The Federalist Papers. And many of those natural rights are talked about within the Declaration itself, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What we don’t have a right to, and what Ms. Lee and her contemporaries suggest that we do, is to co-opt others into “supplying” those rights, or funding them, or otherwise being forced to enable those rights.

I have a right to engage in healthcare for my own health, as well as those I care about or wish to help. What I DO NOT have a right to is forcing my neighbor to help fund that engagement. Or my employer. Or my community, state, or country. And that is where Ms. Lee and her co-horts get it wrong.

When you demand that your rights be enabled by the positive action of others, it changes from being a right into being a privilege. If more people understood this, they would demand less of others and do more for themselves, because when a right becomes a privilege, it can just as easily be taken away as it was granted in the first place. Much better to suggest that it’s a right and that the government should step out of the way of engaging in that right.

So, with all these “implied rights,” why are Dems like her so blind that they can’t see those 2nd Amendment rights?

@Ditto: #5
Our RIGHTS keep getting in the way of their WANTS.

Just because I WANT something, doesn’t mean I have the RIGHT to have it.