In an interview on “60 Minutes” last year, Obama modestly ranked his accomplishments ahead of “any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln.” Perhaps that explains how he could so easily ignore the admonition of a lesser leader, Thomas Jefferson: “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.”
By JONATHAN GURWITZ
San Antonio Express-News
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said Congress had to pass President Obama’s health reform plan so people could find out what was in it.
To help ram it through the legislative process before the public fully understood the consequences of Obamacare, the White House and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill had to resort to some chicanery.
There was the Cornhusker Kickback, a $100 million bribe to win over Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., by exempting his state from Medicaid costs that every other state must pay. There was the Louisiana Purchase, a $300 million sweetener to buy the vote of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. There were goodies to lure the support of pharmaceutical makers, insurance companies, labor unions, the American Medical Association and AARP.
Then there was the conscience clause bait — a vow to wavering Catholics that in the vast overhaul of the health insurance system, Catholic institutions would not have to pay for products and services that contradict articles of faith. In a press release issued in November, Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life — an anti-abortion group — defended Obamacare by explaining, “The administration has no intention of forcing Catholic institutions to provide insurance coverage for services that are directly in opposition to their moral beliefs.”
Not exactly. In late January, Day finally found out what’s in the bill when the Obama administration promulgated new rules that would have required Catholic schools, hospitals and other institutions to include in their health care plans coverage for contraception, sterilization procedures and drugs that induce abortion.
You don’t have to be a member of the Catholic Church to understand why so many Catholics — even those who don’t follow church doctrine on contraception — felt so betrayed by the Obama administration’s about-face on matters of conscience. You don’t have to support the Catholic Church’s position on procreation to recognize the ominous precedent the administration created.
The fact that the president deceptively tried to walk back this egregious mandate on Friday is of little consolation. The fundamental defect of Obamacare is that it gives the government an arbitrary power of compulsion over individuals and private entities, which the president’s purely political conciliation only served to confirm.
The conscience clause was always supposed to lead to a compromise, one that presumably would have allowed enrollees to directly access contraceptive services from their insurance company without Catholic institutions having to pay for them. The notion that people would have been denied vital reproductive health services is a canard, as is the fraud that anything is free.
This administration’s idea of a compromise — like its definition of a “right” — is whatever it says it is. If the government can force individuals to buy a specified form of health insurance, then it can also force providers to pay for specified services — even if it tramples on the free exercise of religion, an authentic constitutional right.
The government has temporarily relieved Catholic institutions of choosing between serving Mammon and serving their own interests. But the ease with which the administration issued, then revised, its edict only underscores the capricious nature of the health care law’s powers over religious groups, businesses and individuals.
In an interview on “60 Minutes” last year, Obama modestly ranked his accomplishments ahead of “any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln.” Perhaps that explains how he could so easily ignore the admonition of a lesser leader, Thomas Jefferson: “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.”