{"id":22983,"date":"2013-11-16T10:18:27","date_gmt":"2013-11-16T15:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22983"},"modified":"2013-11-16T10:19:57","modified_gmt":"2013-11-16T15:19:57","slug":"us-apparently-trying-out-new-quasi-monarchical-form-of-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/11\/16\/us-apparently-trying-out-new-quasi-monarchical-form-of-government\/","title":{"rendered":"US apparently trying out new quasi-monarchical form of government"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a British-born Canadian I’m used to the occasional ill-informed jab from American commentators about our form of government being a barbaric remnant of the dark ages, what with still having a monarch and all. If I respond at all, it’s usually to point out that we owe a lot for the longevity of our slowly evolving political system to the “Baronial brute squad of 1215<\/a>” and the fact that we’ve (for the most part) steadily moved the monarch away from the levers of power. 798 years of political evolution is not to be sneered at. In the United States, the evolution has apparently gone in the other direction: moving those levers of power toward<\/em> the monarch and away from the soi-disant<\/em> “legislative branch” of government.<\/p>\n

I haven’t seen as much fun-poking about the monarchy from my American friends lately, as they seem to have introduced a new form of non-crown-wearing, non-ermine-trimmed monarchy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It is a condition of my admission to this great land that I am not allowed to foment the overthrow of the United States government. Oh, I signed it airily enough, but you\u2019d be surprised, as the years go by, how often the urge to foment starts to rise in one\u2019s gullet. Fortunately, at least as far as constitutional government goes, the president of the United States is doing a grand job of overthrowing it all by himself.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America\u2019s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it\u2019s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered. That seems likely to work. The insurance industry had three years to prepare for the introduction of Obamacare. Now the King has given them six weeks to de-introduce Obamacare.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wonder if he has the legal authority to do this,\u201d mused former Vermont governor Howard Dean. But he\u2019s obviously some kind of right-wing wacko. Later that day, anxious to help him out, Congress offered to \u201cpass\u201d a \u201claw\u201d allowing people to keep their health plans. The same president who had unilaterally commanded that people be allowed to keep their health plans indignantly threatened to veto any such law to that effect: It only counts if he does it \u2014 geddit? As his court eunuchs at the Associated Press obligingly put it: \u201cObama Will Allow Old Plans.\u201d It\u2019s Barry\u2019s world; we just live in it.<\/p>\n

The reason for the benign Sovereign\u2019s exercise of the Royal Prerogative is that millions of his subjects \u2014 or \u201cfolks,\u201d as he prefers to call us, no fewer than 27 times during his press conference \u2014 have had their lives upended by Obamacare. Your traditional hard-core statist, surveying the mountain of human wreckage he has wrought, usually says, \u201cWell, you can\u2019t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.\u201d But Obama is the first to order that his omelet be unscrambled and the eggs put back in their original shells. Is this even doable? No. That\u2019s the point. When it doesn\u2019t work, he\u2019ll be able to give another press conference blaming the insurance companies, or the state commissioners, or George W. Bush . . . <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a British-born Canadian I’m used to the occasional ill-informed jab from American commentators about our form of government being a barbaric remnant of the dark ages, what with still having a monarch and all. If I respond at all, it’s usually to point out that we owe a lot for the longevity of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,131],"tags":[158,715,121,396,937],"class_list":["post-22983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-wine","tag-barackobama","tag-constitution","tag-insurance","tag-monarchy","tag-obamacare"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5YH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22983"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22986,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22983\/revisions\/22986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}