Mark Steyn: "Swingin' Supremacists"

This is why you get such death duels about Supreme Court appointments: 

If you incline to the view that Obamacare is a transformative act, isn't there something slightly pitiful about the fact that the liberties of over 300 million people hinge on the somewhat whimsical leanings of just one man? I mean, Kennedy seems a cheery enough cove, but who died and made him the all-powerful Sultan of Swing? "It is a decision of the Supreme Court," explained Nancy Pelosi a few years back in more congenial times for the Democrats. "So this is almost as if God has spoken."

He wrote this in 2012 while the Supreme Court was debating the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

Thus, in this week's debate on whether Obamacare is merely the latest harmless evolution of the interstate-commerce clause, the most learned and highly remunerated jurists in the land chewed over the matter of whether a person, simply by virtue of being born, was participating in a "market." Had George III shown up at the Constitutional Convention to advance that argument with a straight face, the framers would have tossed aside the quill feathers and reached for their muskets.

Recall that Nancy Pelosi famously said that we have to pass it to know what's in it?

He was making a narrow argument about "severability" — about whether the Court could junk the "individual mandate" but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a "law" by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there's no equality: Instead, there's a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy. It's not just that the legislators who legislate it don't know what's in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation's most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.

Read the whole thing.