The camel’s nose …

There’s an old story about an Arab camped in the desert on a cold night.  Readying for sleep he sees his camel’s nose under the tent flap. The camel says: “Master, it is so cold out.  Might I just put my nose into the warmth of your tent?” The Arab agrees. A little later the camel says: “Might I just also warm my forelegs in your tent?” Again, the Arab agrees. Finally, incremental step by step, the camel has inched his whole body into the tent, stands up, refuses to budge, and displaces the Arab entirely who is now forced to sleep outside in the cold.

Why do I tell you this story? Because it’s the playbook of today’s progressives.

They establish a beachhead by whatever means necessary – including lies and deception if required.  Once established they keep expanding that beachhead until challenged.  If that happens, their defense is what they’re doing now is just logically fulfilling the original “intent,” if not the actual wording, of what everyone once agreed to. 

Nothing to see here.  Just move along.

That strategy has been playing out, successfully, for years. The soft and fuzzy “intent” provides a lot of wiggle room for all kinds of legislative and regulatory sleight of hand.

It's how assistance to help poor families feed their children expanded exponentially into bloated programs that now provide payments to as many as 47 million people – few of them actually “poor” – today. And it’s how that same idea spawned school lunch programs, that grew into school breakfast and lunch programs, school breakfast, lunch and dinner programs, and now also school meal programs for kids when school is closed for weekends, holidays and summer vacation.

Now many of those programs serve as gateways to a wide range of other seemingly unrelated giveaways – like free phones and phone service; if you qualify for one, you automatically qualify for them all.   

The argument is, well, you intended to help poor people, right?  This is just another way of fulfilling your intentions.  And it just keeps going and going. 

Now, unfortunately, it’s also permeated the Supreme Court – the one branch of government citizens once could rely on to be impartial and by the book. After all, the Supreme Court was designed to be the ultimate, final authority on laws, and whose members were granted lifetime tenure to insulate them from the whims of politicians and public opinion. 

There are two ideological camps in today’s Supreme Court. One side relies on what is actually written in the Constitution and laws passed by Congress; the other prefers to divine the “intent” of what was written in much broader, more philosophical terms, despite the actual wording,

The latter is a subterfuge to make up rights and affirm badly written laws based on philosophy rather than the actual text.  And right now the Court is increasingly doing that, with Chief Justice Roberts joining Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer in issuing rulings that are simply not justified within a strict interpretation of the rule of law or even on the facts presented. 

We had a perfect example of this the other day. In a 6-3 opinion, the Court affirmed the actions of the IRS and the Obama Administration in extending subsidies to millions of recipients in states that did not set up their own exchanges. 

This is despite specific wording in the ACA that subsidies were only to be given to those who signed up through exchanges “established by the state” as opposed to Federal exchanges. This is also despite knowledge and documentation that Congressional Democrats clearly intended to pressure states to set up their own exchanges rather than rely on the Federal exchange.

The subsidies were the carrot – if states set up their own exchanges, their enrollees got subsidies. If they didn’t set those up, their enrollees didn’t get the subsidies – the stick.   

This should have been a slam dunk. But magically, a majority of the Court somehow found a different meaning of not only those specific words, but also the definition of “the state” in the ACA itself – a meaning that ignored Congressional Democrats’ original intent and replaced it with a much broader intent fashioned out of whole cloth and based on nothing tangible. 

It’s much the same way the individual mandate penalties of the ACA were upheld by the Robert’s Court.  The Administration argued passionately and repeatedly before the Court that the mandate penalties were not a  tax. Yet to save the ACA, Roberts himself, out of left field and despite the Administration’s arguments, determined that these were a tax, and as such permissible.  

Even liberals were stunned by Roberts’ jump through hoops to get this outcome. 

Why he did it is unknown. Perhaps he wanted to polish up his legacy or merely bend to perceived public opinion.  Regardless, his decision on the mandates made no legal sense. 

And perhaps now that the camel’s nose was already in the tent from that decision, it helps explain the latest decision.  After all, now that the ACA has been somewhat legitimized, it’s only logical to keep letting it get more and more entrenched.

That’s the strategy. And it’s working. Millions of people already get subsidies they shouldn’t, but since they already do, it is next to impossible to claw those back.

So here’s what’s coming next.  I predict that when the millions of people getting heavily subsidized insurance try to use it, they’ll discover that having insurance can differ greatly from having good coverage.

When they find their doctor won’t accept their insurance, when they find their hospital isn’t covered, when their procedure isn’t covered, and when they learn that they have to spend thousands of their own money before their coverage kicks in, they’ll be pissed. Then they’ll want the rest of us to pick up the tab for their deductibles, and better coverage for them. 

Their argument will be simple:  since the ACA’s already on the books as settled law,  what’s the problem with making some tweaks to make it better?     

Shouldn’t we just subsidize more of the deductibles for low-income families, and cover more doctors, hospitals, procedures and drugs? 

Then, since we have the mechanism in place already, shouldn’t we just tweak it to expand the ACA to cover even more people?  Haven’t we established that cheap yet high-quality healthcare is a “right” for everyone?  Let’s help the middle-class, too. 

Soon thereafter just about everyone – but “the rich” of course – will have subsidies to offset ever-increasing plan costs, whether though the exchanges or private insurers, as what gets covered continues to grow to placate providers of everything from aromatherapy to yoga, and surgical procedures from hair plugs to gender reassignment.

As costs soar, people and businesses will abandon their plans, making them subject to ever-increasing mandate penalties. However, under pressure from voters and the business community, the mandate penalties ultimately will be waived because so many can't afford the plans even with subsidies, or the penalties.

That’s when progressives and liberal Democrats step in and set up single payer. 

The ACA is just the camel’s nose. The recent Court rulings are simply letting more of the camel into the tent until there's no room for anything else. 

It's the proven pattern for gaining just about anything progressives have ever desired. 

Because it works, they'll use it again and again. So don't be surprised.