The Obama administration will take a half step back from its drive to transform the U.S. from a constitutional republic into an entitlement state by amending the free-birth-control regulation to follow with the so-called Hawaii Rule, in other words, the objecting employer will not have to pay for the birth-control coverage but will be required to tell employees where and how they can obtain it. The Left will object, halfheartedly — after all, there is an election to be won. And I believe the firestorm set off by the administration will abate. Time will tell whether voters remember their anger in November.
But let us not forget the bigger picture here. The free-birth-control rule brouhaha shows (among other actions and advocacies) that:
1. The Obama administration is antithetical to religion being exercised in the public square and seeks to shrink “freedom of religion” into “freedom of worship.”
2. Obamacare has centralized tremendous powers into the hands of the executive, and the law is now a tool for forcing the private sector to pay for entitlements wanted by favored Obama constituency groups with the funds of the private sector.
3. This is just the beginning of the outrages Obamacare will unleash. Wait until the IPAB and cost/benefit boards kick into high gear and the utilitarian bean counters start picking winners and losers in the health-care system.
On the positive side, I believe that the U.S. Supreme Court may have watched this. There can no longer be any doubt that the administration intends to use the concentration of power it obtained in the Affordable Care Act in an arrogant and hubristic manner. If the Supreme Court finds Obamacare unconstitutional, it might be because this brief political explosion woke the justices up to the real and present dangers posed to American liberty by Obamacare.
— Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and a legal consultant for the Patients Rights Council.