Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [95]
However, in 2009, with Barack Obama as president and a supermajority Democratic Congress, the utopian counterrevolution reached a new pinnacle, for there were no legislative obstacles and few remaining constitutional impediments to stop or even slow its advance. The utopians seized the opportunity they had long craved to centralize and consolidate control over the entire health-care system. Late on March 22, 2010, despite much arm-twisting, deal-making, and secret negotiating, the Democratic-controlled House barely passed the nearly three-thousand-page-long “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA) by a margin of 219 to 212. As with the initial adoption of Social Security and Medicare, there was no great clamor for the PPACA when it was adopted. Indeed, it was opposed by the public. A few days before its passage, Gallup found that “more Americans believe the new legislation will make things worse rather than better for the U.S. as a whole, as well as for them personally,” and its latest poll was “consistent with previous Gallup polls showing a slight negative tilt when Americans are asked if they support the new plan.”69
Most in Congress who voted for the bill had not read it, not only because of its length and complexity, but because the final version had not been made available to them, or the public, until shortly before it was voted on in the House. As intended, its concealment prevented critical scrutiny of its particulars. As then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, just a few weeks prior to the vote, told the Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.…”70
In a letter to his close friend James Madison after the Constitutional Convention adopted the Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification, Thomas Jefferson warned of the diabolical nature of this kind of legislating, which has as its purpose to keep both the diligent representative and the citizen in the dark. He told Madison, “The instability of our laws is really an immense evil. I think it would be well to provide in our constitutions that there shall always be a twelvemonth between the ingrossing a bill and passing it: that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word; and that if circumstances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two thirds of both houses instead of a bare majority.”71
But the particulars were less important to the utopian lawmakers and the president than the universality of the law. Its size and reach, in all its iterations, were known to be enormous. As former president Bill Clinton insisted, “It’s not important to be perfect here. It’s important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling. There will be amendments to this effort, whatever they pass, next year and the year after and the year after, and there should be. It’s a big, complicated, organic thing. But the worst thing to do is nothing.”72 In other words, it was important to exploit the recent election to diminish the outcome of the next one, should it be lost to the opposition, and install a universal health-care scheme as quickly as possible. It was left to favored “experts” and special-interest third parties to work out most of the details. The routine is a familiar one: temporary politicians establishing permanent