Category Archives: Point/Counterpoint

How far we have fallen…

Civil Liberties, Commerce Clause, Constitution, Culture, Democracy, Government Incompetence, Government Regulation, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Legal, Point/Counterpoint, Politics, Socialism, Supreme Court, The Welfare State, Theory and Ideas

Reading the point/counterpoint posts on the question of how the supreme court would decide on Obamacares constitutionality, was quite disturbing to me in several ways.

On the one hand I was heartened, because clearly both Brad and Doug are sane and rational folks with a reasonably solid background in both law and politics, and a foundational understanding of the constitution…

Of course, that only highlights how many people in this country are not.

Any reading of the constitution… of the very intent of the founding of this nation… makes it clear that our federal government is meant to be one of of limited and enumerated powers. If the government can mandate this, they can mandate anything. This is the fundamental argument about the necessity for a limiting principle to any government act.

And anyone who doesn’t want unlimited, unconstrained government can see that. Sadly, it seems that the idea of unlimited, unconstrained government is quite popular in some quarters… even with some supreme court justices.

The basic liberal/progressive/leftist argument for socialized medicine is “we should do this even if it IS illegal and unconstitutional, because it’s the right thing to do so the supreme court should uphold it”.

I.E. “It’s good because we want it, and therefore it should be legal because it is good; and we need to get rid of this whole “limited government” thing, because it gets in the way of us doing what is right and good.”

What I also find heartening is that both Brad and Doug both seem to have a good sense of all of this…

But that is also disturbing…

Because both of them seem to share the same actual opinion:

Both believe that Obamacare is ACTUALLY unconstitutional, and should be struck down…

…It’s just that Brad is cynical enough about the supreme court and the political aspects of the decision that he thinks enough justices will be able to argue themselves into ignoring the constitution and doing what they want to do, rather than what is right.

… and Doug believes that there’s a good possibility of that as well; he just has a bit more hope that they won’t.

… and if you look around the commentariat, that’s pretty much the split of positions that every other knowledgable observer has as well.

And if that isn’t disturbing to you, then you really have no idea what is going on, do you?

Chris Byrne
I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

http://anarchangel.blogspot.com

Counterpoint: The Supreme Court Will Find The Individual Mandate Unconstitutional

Commerce Clause, Constitution, Point/Counterpoint, Separation Of Powers

Earlier this week, Brad Warbiany started out the latest in our occasional series of Point-Counterpoint exchanges by arguing that the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the Constitutionality of the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. I’ll start off by saying that this is not an all implausible. Indeed, I’ve argued myself in the past that the odds were quite good that the Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of the mandate. Moreover, as Brad notes, the history of the Supreme Court’s Commerce Clause jurisprudence has been one where the Court has essentially been nearly completely deferential to Congressional exercises of authority in this area. If one were making a bet, the safe bet would be the one that says the mandate would be upheld. Nonetheless, as I argue below I believe that the Supreme Court will in the end strike down the mandate, although the fate of the rest of the PPACA remains far from certain.

The Mandate Forces Citizens To Act In A Manner Never Before Seen In American History

Brad argues against the assertion that the mandate is unique in American history because it forces citizens to purchase a product from a private seller by pointing to examples of other things that the government forces people to do, such as the military draft and jury service. It’s correct that these programs are, at least theoretically, authorized by various provisions of Article I, Section 8. However, that’s very different from what the mandate purports to set in place, which is a requirement that every person in the United States engage in a specific commercial transaction whether they choose to or not. As more than one legal commentator has noted, this is unprecedented in American history and likely one of the main reasons that the PPACA itself has aroused the ire of such a large segment of the American public. As a general rule, Americans don’t like being told what to do by the government and, for many people, this was a bridge too far.

The question is whether it is authorized under the Constitution, and I think the case in favor of it is far stronger than the supporters of the law have been willing to admit up until last week’s hearings.

The Commerce Clause

As I noted above, the Supreme Court has, at least since the New Deal Era, been very deferential to Congressional assertions of authority under the Commerce Clause. This started, as Brad notes, with the case of Wickard v. Filburn in which the Court upheld a provision of the Agricultural Adjustment Act that allowed Federal authorities to bar a farmer from growing “excess” wheat even though he would not be selling it and would solely be using it for personal use on his farm. The Court reasoned that this was acceptable because the farmer’s actions had an impact on Interstate Commerce, even though it might only be a small one. It’s a decision that has always aroused the ire of advocates of limited government and it’s implications are wide ranging. Thanks to Wickard, the Court spent some 50 years rubber stamping Federal assertions of authority under the Commerce Clause. Indeed, after the New Deal Era there were very few challenges to such laws that even made it to the Supreme Court.

Then, in the late 90s things took a surprising change. In Morrison v. United States, the Court struck down several provisions of the Violence Against Women Act which purported to make domestic violence a matter for federal law enforcement under certain circumstances. The Court held that there was no evidence that domestic violence had any connection at all to interstate commerce that would justify giving the Feds police authority that is properly the authority of state governments. Several years later, in Lopez v. United States, the Court struck down the Gun Free School Zones Act on the ground that there was not a sufficient nexus with interstate commerce. Suddenly, it seemed, the Court was finding limits to the Commerce power. There seemed to be a setback when the Court upheld Federal drug charges against a California medical marijuana dealer in Gonalez v. Raich, but there’s a good argument to be made that this case is distinguishable based on the fact that it dealt with illegal drugs and that the Court was unwilling to issue a ruling that would have thrown every single Federal drug law into Constitutional doubt. Had Gonzalez dealt with any other commodity, it’s quite conceivable that it would have gone the other way.

It’s been said by PPACA advocates that striking down the mandate would require the Court to overrule 70 years of Commerce Clause precedent, but Morrison, Lopez and even Raich, show that this isn’t necessarily true. Each of the courts that have struck down the mandate have held that the problem with the mandate isn’t that the Courts have been wrong for the past three-quarters of a century about the Commerce Clause, but that even those precedents do not authorize what Congress wishes to do in this particular case. Indeed, it is perfectly easy to distinguish Wickard and its progeny from the PPACA mandate in a way that preserves precedent and yet compels the conclusion that the mandate is a Constitutional bridge too far.

This is what I expect the Supreme Court to do when it issues its opinion in June. Much to the relief of liberals and the chagrin of conservatives, striking down the individual mandate will not mean that the New Deal will be rolled back. What it will mean, though, is that, as in Lopez and Morrison, the Court will be drawing a line and saying that Congress cannot cross it because it does not have the Constitutional authority to do so. It will, in other words, further articulate a limiting principle for the Commerce Clause.

Which brings me to the next part of Brad’s argument I need to address.

Limiting Principles

Brad is correct that the Court could construct a limiting principle if it ends up saying that the mandate is Constitutional. Perhaps this is what it will end up doing. However, it is worth understanding the importance of the failure of the Government to articulate a limiting principle when asked for one by the Court. For one thing, this isn’t the first time that the Court has failed to do so. Reviewing the transcripts of oral argument in many of the lower court proceedings, one runs into other occasions when Judges inquired of the attorneys for the Government whether they believed that there was any limit on the Commerce Power given their arguments in favor of the mandate. In no case were the attorneys willing or able to do so. In some cases, this was cited by Judges as a reason that the mandate cannot be upheld, in others it wasn’t (athough it is worth noting that lower Court judges are bound by precedent from the Supreme Court in a manner that Supreme Court Justices are not).

As a purely tactical matter, it strikes me that an attorney who is unable to provide an answer when a Judge asks “If I rule in your favor, what guarantee is there that I won’t be establishing a precedent to do X” is potentially damaging their case. Most judges are not, by their nature, radicals.Meaning that if they can avoid issuing an opinion that could have far reaching consequences they are likely to do so. It was quite evident from the questioning during last week’s oral argument over the individual mandate that the Court, and specifically Justice Kennedy, has some concerns about the future implications of issuing an opinion upholding the mandate. The Solicitor General’s failure to provide an answer may end up being fatal to the Government’s case.

The Necessary And Proper Clause

This is perhaps the strongest argument that Brad raises. Under the broadest interpretation of the Supreme Court precedents on this case, anything that is necessary for Congress to carry out one of it’s authorized powers is Constitutional. Indeed, this is pretty much what the Supreme Court said when it authorized the creation of the First Bank Of  The United States in McCullough v. Maryland. For that reason alone, it’s interesting that there was so little discussion of the necessary and proper clause during the oral argument last week. Partly, this may be because the law here is pretty much settled and has been for nearly two centuries but one would have thought that Paul Clement, the attorney for the states would have been subjected to some strong questioning on this topic by the Justices on this issue. He really wasn’t, although there was some discussion about whether the health care market was “unique” in some way that made this mandate permissible.

The problem with this argument that it still leaves the Court searching for a limiting principle. If Congressional power under the Commerce Clause to regulate the interstate health care/health insurance market is so broad that it can enact a law that includes a requirement that all Americans purchase insurance, then does that mean that its power to regulate the interstate automobile market is so broad that it can enact a law requiring Americans to buy only American made cars? Even if the Court were to decide that the Necessary and Proper Clause was sufficient authorization for the mandate, it would still be left with the limiting principle question. And my reading of the Court at this time is that there is a majority right now that is unwilling to issue an opinion that would essentially be an open door to Congressional intrusion in even more aspects of the economy, and an end to any hope that there could be limits imposed on Washington, D.C.

Conclusion

I could end up being totally wrong about this, of course. This case is so closely dividing the Court that it’s impossible to guess how it will turn out. I will say that I think that if the mandate is struck down we are looking at a 5-4 decision because there is just no way that I can see Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, or Kagan going over to the side of the conservatives on this issue. However, if the mandate is upheld I would not be surprised to see it be a 6-3 decision for a very specific reason. Ordinarily, the most senior Justice in the majority gets to decide who writes the majority opinion. However, if the Chief Justice is in the majority he gets to make that decision. If Kennedy ends up voting to uphold the mandate then I could see Chief Justice Roberts joining him so that he can write the opinion himself and make the precedential value of the decision as limited as possible.

However, if the Court were to strike down the mandate, I believe I’ve laid out a perfectly rational, Constitutional basis on which they would do so. That doesn’t mean there won’t be a political firestorm, of course, but there is going to be a political firestorm no matter how the Court rules. I don’t think there’s ever been a time in American history when such an important case was in the hands of the Court in the same year as a Presidential election. Especially an election where the very issue the Court is dealing with, the limitations on the authority of the state contained in the Constitution, were also the central issue in the Presidential election. It’s going to be a very interesting opinion regardless of which way it comes down.

Doug Mataconis
http://www.belowthebeltway.com

Point: How The Supreme Court Will Find The Individual Mandate Constitutional

Commerce Clause, Constitution, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Point/Counterpoint, Separation Of Powers, Supreme Court

This is part of The Liberty Papers’ continuing Point/Counterpoint series, where two contributors (or a contributor and a guest) argue competing sides of an issue. In this installment, I will argue that the Supreme Court has a realistic defensible argument to find the Individual Mandate in ObamaCare Constitutional. Tomorrow, Doug Mataconis will respond with a rebuttal. Links will be updated in each post as they appear.

UPDATE 4/4: Doug’s rebuttal is available here.

As always, we’re constantly looking for good debate topics for this series, and qualified guest posters to argue one side against one of the contributors.

————————————————

Stipulated up front — I believe that ObamaCare is a severe affront to individual rights, limited government, and the ideals upon which our Republic was founded. In my own view of Constitutional jurisprudence, overturning the law is a no brainer. But as with most things our government does, they’re not listening to me, so the question is simple:

Does the Supreme Court have enough precedent to find the individual mandate Constitutional?

I think they do. And the argument has several elements.

Forcing You To Act

One of the first points of contention is the question of regulating activity versus regulating inactivity. The question being whether or not the Congress can force you to act if you choose not to. Many claim that Congress forcing you to purchase a good from a private seller is a bridge farther than they’ve ever gone before.

But taking the question of “buying from a private seller” out of the equation, is anyone suggesting that the government can’t force you to do something under threat of fine or jail? Ever heard of the Selective Service? I’d say a government that can force me to report for military service to die for my country is asking something a fair bit more serious than demanding I have health insurance. The government in this case can COMPEL you to do something within its rightful power — the power to raise armies. Or on a subject less likely to result in ending up full of lead, there’s Federal jury service. The government can COMPEL you to do something within its rightful power — the power to raise courts and ensure defendants a fair trial judged by their peers.

The question isn’t whether or not the government can force you to do something — Republicans, Democrats, Presidents, and Supreme Court Justices have all agreed that it can. The question is whether or not forcing you to buy health insurance falls within the power of what they can force you to do.

The Commerce Clause

Most of the debate so far has centered around whether the mandate — a regulation of inactivity, not of activity, is within Congress’ commerce clause power. We’ve had cases like Wickard v. Filburn, where the Court has ruled that someones activity can be regulated whether or not it directly engages in interstate commerce, because the act of growing your own wheat [and not buying it from the market] may have an affect on interstate commerce. We’ve even had Gonzales v. Raich, where the Court has ruled that the grasp of Congress extends even to activities which affect an interstate market in goods the government would prefer have no market at all.

The Government’s lawyers in this case say that the mandate is Constitutional because not buying insurance may affect interstate commerce. The opposition states that Congress can regulate activity related to interstate commerce, but regulating inactivity is a bridge too far. Supporters of ObamaCare, however, do have a point here. It can hardly be argued that refusing to purchase health insurance means that you’re not impacting the US healthcare system. Unless you have an ironclad “do not treat” waiver stapled to your forehead at all times, I’m pretty certain that if you’re in a car wreck and unconscious, you’re going to become a participant in the healthcare market. And if you don’t have insurance, that’s likely to bankrupt you, cost the taxpayer a hefty sum, or both. In this case, your supposed inactivity really is activity.

But this isn’t the only argument. One of the key points that is not argued is whether or not the US Congress has the authority to regulate the US Healthcare market at all. And the reason that’s not being argued is that it’s flatly assumed that Congress can regulate the healthcare market. In fact, even most pro-liberty Constitutionalists agree that if Congress had simply voted for a single-payer system, current Supreme Court jurisprudence wouldn’t have any cause to overturn it. So this brings us to our next point:

The Necessary and Proper Clause

This is really the crux. The clause says that Congress has power to make all laws “necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States.” A long time ago, that limited the government significantly. In fact, in the fight over the First Bank of The United States, the Feds argued that the Bank was necessary to engage in all the things that the government legitimately and Constitutionally needed to do. The opponents argued that while the Bank may be convenient and helpful to the government to do what it needs to do, it was hardly necessary. They took a very strong view that the word “necessary” meant what it said — if you could accomplish the goal without doing X, then X didn’t meet the Constitutional requirement of necessity.

Sadly, the Necessary & Proper clause was one of the first to get ignored by the Supreme Court, as Randy Barnett (a lawyer opposing ObamaCare in this case) pointed out in his book Restoring the Lost Constitution. One of the key growths in Government power over the early days of the Republic was to grant deference to Government lawyers if they said something was necessary.

In this case, much of the oral arguments centered around whether ObamaCare could stand without the individual mandate. Both sides agreed that Congress has the power to regulate healthcare, but they didn’t agree that the individual mandate was, on its own, Constitutional. After all, if they can mandate you purchase insurance, which might help restrain the growth of healthcare costs, might they not also mandate you purchase broccoli, as the health effects thereof might help restrain the growth of healthcare costs?

Many ObamaCare opponents cheered at the lines of questioning whether ruling the mandate Unconstitutional would cause the entire law to fall. Those opponents believed that it was a way for the Court’s conservative wing to ensure that they could toss out the whole law, rather than simply severing the mandate. But looking at the argument another way, it proves that the mandate is necessary to the law.

So let’s look at the “necessary and proper” test. First is propriety — laws made by Congress are only proper if they relate to one of its Constitutional powers. While I might not think Congress has legitimate authority to make sweeping healthcare legislation, I think we’ve well established that current Court jurisprudence is untroubled by the idea that Congress has commerce clause power to regulate healthcare. So the test of propriety is cleared. The second is necessity: is the mandate necessary to fulfill Congress’ authority to regulate the interstate commerce of healthcare. And I think the oral arguments proved, regardless of what side you’re on in this debate, that the mandate is absolutely necessary to the structure of the law. Get rid of the mandate, and you might as well throw the whole thing out.

So if regulating the healthcare market is a legitimate authority of Congress, within their purview granted by the commerce clause, then the question becomes whether this mandate is necessary for them to exercise their authority. I think the answer, as shown by oral argument, is yes. So the government clears the bars of both the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper clause.

Limiting Principles

A final argument by the opponents has been that if the mandate stands, it grants Congress ultimate power, which the Court will not allow to happen. And they’ve been encouraged by some lines of questioning in oral argument, where the “broccoli test” showed that the Government’s lawyers were unable to articulate a limiting principle of their argument.

But as loath as I am to agree with Kevin Drum on something (or whoever he borrowed the argument from), the Government doesn’t need to articulate a limiting principle. It’s up to the Court to determine whether THIS action is Constitutional. And they could very easily craft a limiting principle that allows the individual insurance mandate but doesn’t allow for an individual broccoli mandate.

How simple is it?

Q. Is the individual insurance mandate absolutely necessary to the very structure of Obamacare?
A. Yes.
Q. Is the hypothetical broccoli mandate absolutely necessary to the very structure of Obamacare?
A. No. Are you f’ing serious?

The Court already has the “necessary & proper” clause as its limiting principle. If they accept the basic structure of ObamaCare as Constitutional, extending to Congress a provision that might be Unconstitutional on its own, but necessary as part of a wider power, would not be a shock.

Conclusion

I’m not going to claim that the above argument suggests that the Court will find ObamaCare Constitutional. I’m a firm believer in the idea that the Justices often decide — like people in all other walks of life — what they want to do and rationalize an argument into it afterwards. And I think we have a pretty decent idea how 8 of the 9 Justices will decide in this case, a 4-4 tie broken by Anthony Kennedy.

Should Kennedy vote to overturn the mandate, I expect the majority opinion to fall to one of the solid conservative justices. Should Kennedy vote to uphold, he very well might pen the majority opinion. For Kennedy to accept the mandate, I think he has to see a legitimate limiting principle — and the necessary & proper clause provides both the grounds for upholding the mandate and the inklings of a limiting principle in one fell swoop. Oh, and in case you followed the oral arguments, Kennedy was *very* interested in the concept of severability and seemed to assume, whether he votes to keep it or toss it, that the mandate was necessary to the structure.

I don’t know which way this thing’s gonna go, but I’m not as confident as other libertarians, conservatives, and small-government Constitutionalists. I see a very plausible rationale for upholding it, and thus I think we’re hoping that one oft-flighty Justice happens to come down on our side of the vote.

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

Counterpoint: Democracy Doesn’t Mean Collective Responsibility

Foreign Affairs, Point/Counterpoint, War on Terror

This is part of The Liberty Papers’ continued Point/Counterpoint feature. Specifically, this Counterpoint is the response to Jeff Molby’s post yesterday suggesting moral equivalency between Arabs cheering in the streets after 9/11 and Americans cheering Sunday night at the killing of Osama bin Laden.

————————————————

A lot of what Jeff said yesterday made sense. We have been intervening militarily in the Middle East for many decades. I’m not going to give a Rudy Giuliani response and act as if blowback doesn’t exist, nor that his charge that it’s a long line in the “Hatfield-McCoy” ongoing feud between cultures is incorrect. I’ve become a non-interventionist over the years not because I think other countries are behaving well in the world or to their own citizens, but rather because I don’t trust government to actually accomplish what they intend on the world stage.

In short, while I doubt that the long-term safety of Americans from terrorist acts is meaningful affected by the death of Osama bin Laden, I found myself filled with an internal cheer on Sunday night. I’ve never been the type to go jump up and down in a crowd over such things, but I had much of the same motivation in my heart that I believe they do. And I don’t consider the response to be rationalizing away a bad emotion — I believe the emotion is justified. Further, and to the point, I believe the emotion is justified in a way that those in the Middle East cheering after 9/11 cannot claim.

Jeff’s essay contains what I consider to be a fundamental error of collectivization, and it was on that basis only that I worked with him when he submitted his post to make it a Point/Counterpoint. The response is too much for the comments section.

It is never moral to cheer the deaths of innocent people. I think we can all stipulate that Osama bin Laden appears to have full guilt as the mastermind of Al Qaeda for perpetrating 9/11, and that anyone working to continue to keep him hidden in that compound was complicit in the guilt as well. We’re not talking about a collateral damage problem here.

So we’re left answering a question on which Jeff and I disagree:

So were the 9/11 victims innocent?

Lest anyone try to twist my words, let me be absolutely clear that the responsibility for the 9/11 attacks lies entirely with the perpetrators of those attacks. That does not make us innocent bystanders, though. We choose our representatives and give them a ton of money with which to do our bidding. We are responsible for the countless civilian deaths that our government has caused over the decades. You. Me. The 9/11 victims. Every American old enough to work and vote. It takes hundreds of millions people working together to great the largest killing machine the world has ever known. We did it together and most of us were proud of it every step of the way. Many of you are probably furious with me right now because you’re still proud of the weapon we’ve created.

The fact that America is a representative democracy does not make us all complicit in everything our government does. This is true for multiple reasons:

  1. Electoral party politics are a package deal. One cannot vote for a specific basket of political positions. One must pick and choose which are most important, and every-day domestic concerns will always drive decisions more than abstract foreign policy.
  2. Jeff mentions that the last President & Congress to NOT engage in foreign war was Hoover. It seems that the non-interventionist position was not exactly on the table.
  3. One can claim that the non-interventionist position WAS on the table. Yet George W Bush was voted in on a policy that he wasn’t interested in nation-building. Obama was voted in as an ALTERNATIVE to GWB — Hope and Change. Yet he’s doubled down in both Iraq and Afghanistan and embarked on a whole new war in Libya.
  4. The people who voted for the policies 20, 40, or 60 years ago are not the same voters today.
  5. Some of victims didn’t vote for the winners, they actually voted *for* the [losing] anti-war candidates, or their candidates won but were outvoted in Congress.

Democracy doesn’t mean that Americans are all the same, nor that we are all complicit in the guilt for a history of Hatfield-McCoyism. Some of those killed on 9/11 were undoubtedly in favor of the military-industrial complex. Many were not. Some were Americans who had voted for politicians embarking on those policies. Many had voted for the losers in each of those elections. Some of those killed on 9/11 were Americans. Many were not — meaning they had no ability to influence American foreign policy.

Americans cheering at the killing of Osama bin Laden were cheering for a specific, concrete act of retribution against someone who was a stated enemy of us as a collective [the Great Satan] and as individuals [infidels]. It would be the same as Muslims cheering at the killing of specific Americans who suggest that we should wipe Mecca off the map because Islam itself as a religion of death. Both are be acts against individuals who had proven their desire to kill high numbers of people.

But that’s the minority. Most Americans and most Muslims are peaceful people trying to make their way through the world, working towards a better life for themselves and their families. At the end of the day the questions aren’t really who to vote for, the questions are how to budget for college and get the kids braces, how to put food on the table and afford the rent or mortgage.

Americans know, for the most part, that they have almost zero control over their government, and act accordingly. While Jeff tries to paint the brush that “the government is us”, Americans have internalized that what “those guys in Washington” do is not exactly “us”. Muslims watch their governments (who they have much less control over than even Americans) oppress the people, and throw up their hands in despair while they try to live. They get tarred with the “Osama bin Laden is a Muslim, therefore all Muslims support terror” brush too often, and I don’t believe it’s much appreciated.

I’m not saying we’re the Bad Guys. I’m just saying we’re not the Good Guys either. We’re simply active participants in a Hatfield-McCoy-esque feud whose root cause is long since forgotten. We’re wrapped up in a nasty affair with enough blood to cover everyone’s hands.

American politicians and the leaders of the Muslim world are engaged in this feud. Regular Americans and Muslims are distant cousins who left the county decades ago and look upon those Hatfields and McCoys with opprobrium. The fact that these politicians were voted into office over the years doesn’t mean a majority of Americans support the specific foreign policy measures that made this a Hatfield/McCoy event, much as the rebels in Libya today are not responsible for Gadhafi’s terrorist attack on American interests 30 years ago. We even see today that there appears to be internal disagreement within Pakistan’s government (the civil government vs. the Pakistani military) over the hiding of bin Laden. It is quite possible that the military or ISI knew of his existence but was keeping it a secret from the rest of the government. Is all of Pakistan responsible for those internal interests that were working to hide Pakistan?

At the end of the day, Arabs who cheered the 9/11 attacks on the WTC were cheering against the deaths of individual innocent people who had no direct relationship to the long history of warfare and strife between the American government and governments/terrorist groups of the Middle East. Americans who cheered for the death of Osama bin Laden were cheering for retribution against someone who was directly involved in planning, funding, and organizing the event that killed innocent people.

To claim that representative democracy makes those situations morally equivalent is a false application of collectivism, and it deserves not to remain unchallenged.

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

Point: You Cheering In The Streets Is No Different Than When They Do It

Culture, Democracy, Foreign Affairs, Point/Counterpoint, War on Terror

The following is a continuation of The Liberty Papers’ “Point/Counterpoint” series. In this feature, two contributors (or, as in this case, a contributor and a guest) of semi-like mind debate a specific point of view. Today’s Point is provided by regular reader and commenter Jeff Molby, who wrote in response to a friend and offered to submit it here as well. Tomorrow Brad Warbiany will present a Counterpoint (now available here).

————————————————

After posting a Facebook link to this article which disapproves of the American jubilation in response to the news of Osama’s death, a friend of mine made the following comment:

“There is a BIG difference between groups cheering when innocent Americans have been killed and cheering when the person responsible for killing those same innocent Americans has been killed.”

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I don’t condone any of the violent acts by either side. I condemn our efforts to install and arm puppet governments. I condemn the terrorist attacks. Both have been going on so long that I don’t even give a damn which one “started it”. Like a couple of pissed-off five year-olds, you either have to send them both to their rooms or step back and let them duke it out.

Personally, I think we’re way overdue for some de-escalation. I understand that many others think we need to do just the opposite, but for the purposes of this conversation, we can just agree to disagree on that point.

My only point in all of this is that this is an old, nasty conflict and there’s a ton of blood on everybody’s hands. It’s been many decades since we’ve had any sort of moral high ground when it comes to our involvement in the Middle East. 9/11 could have changed that if we had responded magnanimously, but instead we resorted with the same base reactions that we condemn our enemies for.

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t acknowledged that the civilians killed in the towers were “innocent” and therefore different. In a way, they were. In a way, they weren’t. You can call them innocent because most of them never touched a gun in their lives and wished no harm on anyone. At the same time, though, our government has done much harm in our name and here is the double-edged sword of democracy: we elect our government and we are responsible for its actions.

Do you know who was the last President that didn’t engage in overseas warfare? Hoover. The last 13 Presidents and 44 Congresses — with every permutation of Republicans and Democrats you can imagine — have all steadily cultivated the military-industrial complex that has shed the blood of innumerable innocent individuals that we blithely refer to as “collateral damage”.

At every step, we rationalize it. It’s easy to do and we have to do it; we’d be unable to consider ourselves human if we didn’t. “We do our best to minimize ‘collateral damage’, but it’s impossible to avoid it completely and we have to kill them before they kill us.”

It sounds good and logical until you confront the fact that our enemies use the same rationalizations. They look to their lost fathers and mothers and seek vengeance just as we do. They look upon the deaths of enemy non-combatants with the same feelings of righteous self-defense and inevitability. They feel they have to kill us to protect themselves.

And so we swim in the bloodiest of whirlpools.

So were the 9/11 victims innocent?

Lest anyone try to twist my words, let me be absolutely clear that the responsibility for the 9/11 attacks lies entirely with the perpetrators of those attacks. That does not make us innocent bystanders, though. We choose our representatives and give them a ton of money with which to do our bidding. We are responsible for the countless civilian deaths that our government has caused over the decades. You. Me. The 9/11 victims. Every American old enough to work and vote. It takes hundreds of millions people working together to great the largest killing machine the world has ever known. We did it together and most of us were proud of it every step of the way. Many of you are probably furious with me right now because you’re still proud of the weapon we’ve created.

I’m not saying we’re the Bad Guys. I’m just saying we’re not the Good Guys either. We’re simply active participants in a Hatfield-McCoy-esque feud whose root cause is long since forgotten. We’re wrapped up in a nasty affair with enough blood to cover everyone’s hands.

As I said earlier, I think it’s past time for the violence to come down, so I can’t share in the celebration of another death. For those of you that disagree, I understand your viewpoint and I won’t begrudge you your victory celebration. I just want you to realize that it’s no different from the celebrations your enemies hold when they win a battle.

Guest Poster
http://
1 2 3 4 5