David Michael Green: It's Just Parchment, Get Over It!

Last week America engaged in one of its perennial paroxysms of constitutional cogitation, this time over the Obama health care bill, with mostly predictable results. Four of the great legal priests on our High Temple's Council of Scriptural Interpretation said that, yes, the Affordable Care Act was within the boundaries of what a small collection of men riding horseback to a meeting in Philadelphia one summer two and a quarter centuries ago allow us today as a continent wide superpower society of 300 million people in the age of atom bombs, space travel, heart transplants and genetic engineering. George and John and Thomas say it's okay, we can have health care. Whew, That's a relief. But then the other priests insisted, "Oh, no, this is fundamentally not allowed. Not at all." And one apparently went both ways, voting against it before he was for it. Such, in "the greatest country in the world" as regressives, doing their national equivalent of Allahu Akbar, seek to assuage their insecurities and reassure themselves by constantly shouting at the rest of us, is the way we determine whether tens of millions of children will or will not receive pediatric care.