David McElroy

Conservatives have been fighting ObamaCare in one way or another since 2009. Republicans in Congress lost the battle and Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law in 2010. The battle didn’t end there. With the law’s key provisions going into effect in slightly more than 90 days, some Republicans still haven’t given up on the fantasy that they can stop it.

The best chance to stop the law was when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to its constitutionality. Because of Chief Justice John Roberts’ bizarre defection from the conservative bloc of the court, most of ObamaCare was upheld on a 5-4 vote. The only other real chance to stop the law from being implemented was the 2012 presidential election. Even though Mitt Romney had championed a similar plan when he was governor of Massachusetts, he campaigned against the law because … well … that’s what conservatives wanted him to do.

Romney was an uninspiring candidate and lost badly. The chief sponsor of ObamaCare was re-elected. The battle was over.

But some conservatives are obsessed with the fantasy that they can stop the law by withholding the funding for it. The U.S. House passed a bill last week that would keep the government operating past the end of September, but Republicans didn’t include money to fund ObamaCare in their bill. The Democratic-controlled Senate obviously won’t pass the bill, so there’s something of a deadlock.

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I was out getting my mail one day not long ago when I noticed several of my neighbors in the street talking. I stepped across the street to be neighborly and see what the neighborhood gossip might be.

“Hey, let me tell you about the new idea we’ve been talking about,” said Karl. He’s sort of the intellectual in our neighborhood. I’m not sure what he does, but he spends a lot of time at the library working on a book. “We’ve decided that we need a neighborhood swimming pool for our street. I figure we can have it ready to go by the time it’s warm enough next spring.”

“Sounds great, Karl,” I said, “but wouldn’t that be pretty expensive?”

“None of us can afford it alone,” Karl said, “but if we put our resources together, it shouldn’t be so bad.”

The other folks all seemed to think it was a good idea, so I told him I might be interested if the price was right. They told me they’d let me know what they figured out, and I went back home.

A few days later, there was a knock at my door. It was Karl and a couple of his friends.

“I have great news,” Karl said. “We took a vote and decided to move ahead with the community swimming pool project. We’ll be letting you know how much you owe as soon as we have the figures all put together. Isn’t that great?”

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Do journalists have more rights than you do? Do you even know for sure what makes someone a journalist? And does the U.S. government have any business defining who’s a journalist and who’s not?

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has just inserted language into a bill that would limit who gets privileges as a journalist under the First Amendment. It would declare that those who get paid to report on the news are journalists, but those who don’t get paid for it aren’t journalists. She thinks that being a journalist is a special privilege (video). Under her rules, bloggers and “citizen journalists” aren’t journalists at all. This is wrong for journalism. It’s wrong for the law. But most importantly, it’s wrong for the average American.

How did we get to this point? Is Feinstein just an evil fascist, as Matt Drudge suggested about her on this issue? I don’t think so. She’s wrong, but it helps to understand what the underlying issues are.

In this country, we have freedom of the press because it’s mentioned in the First Amendment to the Constitution. (I’m not even going to get into the fact that we should have the right even without it being mentioned, because the government is given no power to taken that freedom away. I’m ignoring that because dealing with what the Constitution originally meant has nothing to do with how the law currently works here.) Because the First Amendment specifically says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…,” the media in this country have traditionally enjoyed a wide degree of freedom.

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