Must Read George Will Column

Sometimes George Will gets on my nerves with his penchant for establishment Republicanism.  But make no mistake, he is fundamentally, a conservative voice, and in Friday column in the Washington Post, he cuts through the Obamacare debate like a laser into one of the greatest dangers that the country faces in those 2000+ pages of legislative wordiness.  Will's column is a must read. The problem is that not enough Americans yet care about the implications of his point.

In it Will, makes the following observation;

The PPACA repeatedly refers to any IPAB proposal as a “legislative proposal” and speaks of “the legislation introduced” by the IPAB. Each proposal automatically becomes law unless Congress passes — with a three-fifths supermajority required in the Senate — a measure cutting medical spending as much as the IPAB proposal would.

This is a travesty of constitutional lawmaking: An executive branch agency makes laws unless Congress enacts legislation to achieve the executive agency’s aim.

And it gets worse. Any resolution to abolish the IPAB must pass both houses of Congress. And no such resolution can be introduced before 2017 or after Feb. 1, 2017, and must be enacted by Aug. 15 of that year. And if passed, it cannot take effect until 2020. Defenders of all this audaciously call it a “fast track” process for considering termination of IPAB. It is, however, transparently designed to permanently entrench IPAB — never mind the principle that one Congress cannot by statute bind another Congress from altering that statute.

Go read the whole post by Will. It's important, and it's worth it.  

The abdication of responsibility by the Congress to the Executive is a mortal danger to the Constitutional operation of government in the United States. It's a step towards dictatorial centralization of powers. What makes America unique, something the President clearly eschews, is it's decentralization of powers in order to subvert the natural tendency towards that form of government.

The problem is that for most people, in their day-to-day lives, this is a 'meh' discussion.  Who cares if Congress or some Agency runs some specific portion of government that I deal with on an infrequent basis?  That's the real essence of the problem.  Whether the Congress is deliberately centralizing powers with the Executive or else is simply being lazy, the public is certainly being both disinterested and lazy.  This is pillar of society stuff and it's up to the people to not let this pass.  While it may not matter much today, like compound interest the implications down the road are far bigger (and worse) if it isn't dealt with now.

As I tweeted yesterday,

"...rise of Fascism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies ~Hayek"

[shortened slightly to fit the Twitter 140 character limit].

George Will can irritate me sometimes but I'll give him this, when he's right, he's right.