Restoring the Sacred

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Death Panels by Fiat: Thomas Sowell


Dr. Thomas Sowell writes today on National Review Online about "Political End-Runs." The Constitution of the United States begins with the words “We the people.” But neither the Constitution nor “we the people” will mean anything if politicians and judges can continue to do end-runs around both.

Bills passed too fast for anyone to read them are blatant examples of these end-runs. But last week, another end-run appeared in a different institution when the medical “end of life consultations” rejected by Congress were quietly enacted by administrators of Medicare through bureaucratic fiat...

The denigration of the Constitution began during the Progressive era of the early 20th century, led by such luminaries as Princeton scholar and future president Woodrow Wilson, future Harvard Law School dean Roscoe Pound, and future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis.

As a professor at Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson wrote condescendingly of “the simple days of 1787” when the Constitution was written and how, in our presumably more complex times, “each generation of statesmen looks to the Supreme Court to supply the interpretation which will serve the needs of the day.”

One is anxious to inquire: Just whose "needs of the day" did Wilson (and his Progressive progeny) have in mind?

You can read Dr. Sowell's essay by clicking on the link below.

Political End-Runs - Thomas Sowell - National Review Online

And for more on Death Panels, go here and here.

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