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Jewish World Review March 29 , 2012/ 6 Nissan, 5772 A little perspective, please By Paul Greenberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
To read this week's press coverage, you'd think not just a landmark
"If the law is upheld, it fundamentally changes the social contract. It means the effective end of a government of enumerated powers -- finite, delineated powers beyond which the government may not go, beyond which lies the free realm of the people and their voluntary institutions. The new dispensation is a central government of unlimited power from which citizen and civil society struggle to carve out spheres of autonomy." If the court sides with the administration, all is lost. On the opposite but equally fervid end of the political spectrum, It may be a journalistic convention to present both sides of a legal controversy in neutral fashion, she concedes, "without the writer's thumb on the scale." But, "free of convention, and fresh from reading the main briefs in the case," Ms. Greenhouse is here to tell us that the constitutional argument against the health-care law is "so weak that it dissolves on close inspection. There's just no there there." If the court strikes down this Signature Achievement of the Obama administration, all reason is lost. Now that Justices Krauthammer and Greenhouse have weighed in on the law, it's a wonder the country needs a Only it doesn't work that way. Time, not the justices, and certainly not the pundits, will be the ultimate judge. History, contrary as ever, will deliver its own verdict. And there is no escaping its jurisdiction. The great precedents of the past may prove not so great after all. Except that it wasn't. The next year, a gawky ex-congressman, ex-Whig and -- who would've predicted it? -- future president of History had intervened. Soon enough the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword would be loosed. And another decision was reached. A new accommodation would have to be reached with destiny. Once again, the Only one justice, a Kentuckian by the name of The moral of the story: Nothing is as certain as the too-certain say it is. Whatever this court rules, its decision, too, will be appealed. Before the bar of history. And in that court, nothing is ever settled till it's settled right.
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