The ‘Oprahfication’ Of America

When asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 what the Founders had wrought, Benjamin Franklin famously said, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

That question might also be put to the five Supreme Court justices who voted last week to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, which mandates health insurance for most Americans, based on twisted logic that it is a tax and thus within the power of the Congress to impose on an already overtaxed people.

Even better than the question of what the court has allowed government to do is what its ruling says about us?

Rugged individualists founded and helped preserve America through many challenges. They believed we should first take care of ourselves and help our neighbors with government intervening only as a last resort. Today we are rapidly becoming a collective in which government penalizes achievement and subsidizes failure, thus producing less of the former and more of the latter. Apparently promoting the “general welfare” has come to mean welfare. Food stamp ads run on the radio. The USDA pays for the ads, which encourage more people to apply for the program.

Among the avalanche of postmortems delivered by “experts” and pundits to the court ruling, one may have gotten closest to answering the question about what was in the mind of Chief Justice John Roberts and how it reflects on what our nation is becoming.

Paul Rothstein, a professor at Georgetown Law School, taught Roberts when he was a student. In an interview with Washington, D.C., radio station WTOP, Rothstein said it was empathy for the uninsured and disdain for partisanship that swayed Roberts, making his the decisive vote.

“It’s a very odd decision,” said Rothstein. “The conservative guy went liberal.”

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