And the results are in

[unixronin]

First of all, my congratulations to Barack Obama.  Not just for winning the election; it shouldn't matter to us that he is the first African-American to be elected President, yet it does, and to the extent that it does, that too is an achievement.  Still, that race is closer in many ways than it seems; that huge 202-point lead in the electoral college translates to only a 6% lead in the popular vote, with 48 of 50 states reporting.

So, after the longest and most expensive US Presidential campaign in history, the Democratic Party controls — or will control, come January — the White House and both houses of Congress.  Their control is not strong enough that they can completely ignore the other side of the aisle, though in the House they came close, 39 seats short of a two-thirds majority.

"Audacity won", the AP reported.  "Now Barack Obama must validate the hope and deliver the change he promised."  In the next four years, we'll see whether the Democratic Party actually does have any better answers, and whether the hope and change were just campaign talk.  I, personally, will be hoping the Democrats have the restraint not to use their almost-complete control of the government to punish or take revenge on the conservative side of the political spectrum.  (And, if truth be told, I won't be in the least surprised if we see a more-or-less-immediate flood of new draconian gun-control laws.  It would be terribly ironic, given the racist origins of gun control laws in the US.  I can but hope that the Democratic Party has learned, and internalized, the lesson that gun control cost them Congress and the Presidency eight years ago.)

And you know what?  I hope we've heard the last of the near-hysterical chorus of "OMGOMGOMGOMG BE AFRAID BE AFRAID BE AFRAID" that's been coming out of Washington for the last seven years.  But I'm definitely not holding my breath on that one.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think in the next four years, Obama will be held responsible for every ambitious promise he can't keep and everything that went wrong.

Oh, I haven't the least doubt of it. President of the United States has to be a pretty thankless job in that regard. Congress screws the pooch, and the President gets the blame.

Every Libertarian whose [sic] explained their overall philosophy (and few are shy about it), have said the federal government should do nothing or do nothing but maintain a police force and an army. Health care should be private or (as religious Libertarians explain it) the responsibility of the church.

Well, as with every other political grouping, there's idealists and realists. :) Even the strictest constitutional interpretation gives the Federal Government a fairly clearly defined non-empty list of duties, and "police" isn't on it. Strict literalists argue that while the Constitution empowers Congress to raise and maintain a Navy, the Constitution does not authorize the maintenance of the US Air Force, for example, though most realists will have to agree that (1) we cannot realistically dispense with the Air Force, and (2) the Air Force cannot realistically be privately maintained.

I'll willingly grant there is no explicit Constitutional authority for health care, though I'm sure some kind of strained rationale through the commerce clause could be derived. A possible rationale might be established through the Privileges and Immunities clause of Article IV, Section 2, for the Federal government to ensure that health care provisions are more or less uniform throughout the States, inasmuch as a citizen who has the privilege of effective and affordable healthcare in their own home state should have the expectation of the same when travelling to any other state.

But to me, it seems that for the simplest and clearest source of Constitutional authority to regulate health care and make sure it is generally and uniformly available, one need look no further than the General Welfare clause right up front in the Preamble. How the hell can you have "general welfare" if getting sick means you choose between dying or going into debt for the rest of your life?