Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist just rips to shreds the Obamacare contraceptive mandate. In the course of doing so, she points to an overarching problem: The establishment of the administrative state, in which Constitutional government is replaced by administrative agencies, which have the power to make laws, enforce them, and judge and punish those who do not comply. That is to say, we now have bureaucracies that have legislative, executive, and judicial power.
From Mollie Hemingway, White House Tries To Reignite Birth Control Wars Because YOLO, in the Federalist:
The administrative state is what happens when you get rid of Constitutional governance on the sly and put all the powers into a single agency. Congress sets up administrative agencies and then gives them the power to issue law-like rules called regulations, enforce these rigorous regulations and judge infractions. Why would Congress give up all its power? Why not? They love the administrative state. They can get the administrative state to grow the government dramatically without ever having to be held accountable for the individual rules limiting liberty. Heck, we have hardly a clue about the regulations pouring out of these (increasingly militarized) agencies every day. The better question is why the people have gone along with it. But we’ll leave that question aside for now.
A great example of this administrative state in action, among the many great examples of this, is the Health and Human Services Department mandate requiring employers to provide birth control for free, including some forms of birth control that can work by ending human life after it’s begun. This was not in the original legislation passed by Congress over the vociferous objections of the people. This was something that came out of an administrative state set-up — a packed panel that was given authority to recommend certain things that employers would be forced to provide insurance plan coverage of. HHS issued regulations with the requirement and included a religious exemption so minor that Jesus himself wouldn’t have been exempted.
This mandate has been presented by a slavish and servile media as being necessary to address a crisis of inadequate “access” to contraceptives in the country. I know that the most important thing many Americans can think of right now is how to make sure women are either deluged with hormones to keep their wombs barren or have surgery in the event they are, in the President’s own words, “punished with a child.” But the notion that generally inexpensive and beyond-widely available products must be provided by employers at no cost to employees would be silly even if many employers didn’t have serious religious objections. The idea that four abortion-inducing drugs must be covered at no cost to employees but not glasses, insulin, growth hormones or eleventy billion other things is bizarre. Of course, the administrative state probably will get to that point, but for now the contraceptives, sterilization and abortion drugs are just the beginning. And they were the beginning, in all likelihood, because of the political advantage of manufacturing the much-needed War on Women silliness that helped obscure reality in the 2012 election.
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