As I digest the daily news and read the very republican book  The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater (with The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman soon to follow) I find myself pondering the Constitution.  The piece of the Constitution’s wisdom which it has been most heralded for is the system of checks and balances it presents.  The founding fathers wrote the document out of a deep seated distrust of  government infringing on their freedoms.  So, to avoid these infringements, they did a few things 1. Divided power among three branches of government, 2. Gave each branch interlocking powers so as to force them to interact and check the interests of these bodies, and 3. Limited the scope of the national power, directly listing those items which rightly should be overseen by the federal government and giving, in the 10th Amendment, all powers not delineated in the Constitution to the States.

In thinking through those ideas a couple of things have weighed heavily upon my mind,

1. How are the powers of the government construed to include some of the things that are presently under Federal law and administration?  It seems to me that the Federal government the Constitution sets out would not be the largest creditor, lender, employer, et cetera in the world, as is presently the case.  How have we gotten so far away from an the idea of government limited enough in its scope that the founders deemed it necessary to specify that the Congress had to meet at least once a year?

2. As the judicial branch, the Supreme Court interprets and fleshes out the meaning of the laws.  If what the Court is to base its decisions off of is a limited number of laws why, in the varied and specific nature of the cases it tries, has it not had a habit of saying “We don’t know” or “There is no relevant law applicable to this situation”?  Maybe they do and I am simply not as aware of the presence of these instances in light of the vast amount of opinion papers.

3. The check for the legislative branch is the Veto.  The check for the executive branch is the legislative override and legislative appropriation of funds.  The check for the judicial branch is laws in most cases.  However, in a case where they make a ruling based in a certain interpretation of the Constitution, the court’s only check is the amendment process, something purposely laborious.  If you ask me these lifetime appointees, with the difficult process of law making and the even more difficult process of amendment enacting being their only checks, have an easy job and one in which your opinion has such a sweeping that any sense of messiah complex would be free to run amok.  Maybe it has?

It seems to me that the idea of unity with nature is based on an assumption, namely that we are currently at odds with nature. This assumption fits neatly into an evangelical mindset within the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Genesis 2:17-19 reads, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground…” This edict presumably has an impact on the entire animal kingdom along with the precedent set immediately after the quote in which God strikes down an animal to clothe Adam and Eve. From then on the animal kingdom and the ground together are at odds with humanity.

The evolutionist seems to assume from the start that the universe is adversarial to life (yet, despite this assumes life to be the stronger force). I draw this assumption from the popularized evolutionary saying “the survival of the fittest.” It is assumed that life is hard and therefore only those strongest, most able to fight against nature, are those that achieve the triumph of surviving and passing on their genetics to the next generation.

Buddhist philosophy is the most direct, seemingly, to address the antagonism of the world to life in the first noble truth or Dukkha. It is from this that we must escape and against which we must struggle.

(Of course I leave out many points of view in this truncated summary of worldviews towards the issue but my assumption is that most readers of mine are either Christian or Atheists. Buddhism and eastern philosophy make their appearances chiefly because of the strong correlation to the topic.)

So, there seems to be dogma (or assumed truth’s) to describe or explain the underlying assumption of this idea of unity of mankind with the universe in three major worldviews I have addressed.

A coworker of mine is of the rather simple vein of Christianity, thinking outside of his Pastor’s message only minimally and certainly not in an overly critical way towards the message itself.  From my conversations with him come statements that stick to my mind.  “There is no bad day for the believer,” is one of them.  My response to his statements is to grunt or nod a bit, unaffectedly, mostly to avoid positioning myself on this notion of the ever smiling Christian.

The truth is in my Christian experience I generally hold an existential outlook where underlying melancholy bear down my indefatigably happy personality.  By this i mean to say that I, as a person, generally have the ability to move through life with a smile on my face from the sheer force of my personality.  When I pause to think about my life, however, a more somber wave of experience washes over my thoughts.  My mother died at a young age before she saw my marriage, before she was able to watch me succeed as a man.  My father has been far from the righteous exemplar I wish him to be.  My own habitual sin weighs upon my soul like a battleship’s anchor on a small skiff.  What do I have to be happy about?

Now, I do not need lectured about the glory of the new day, the wonder of the next breath, etc.  These are things that I am aware of.  I am also aware that my parents are not perfect, that my mother is in heaven, and that God saved my soul from the weight it still tries to bear.  These things are reason to praise.  How, on the other hand, are we to be carried through life without experiencing the sorrow of imperfection, the heartache of loss, and the pain of broken hopes?  These are inherent to the human experience and do not disappear when we pray for salvation.  Are we as Christians to deny these things, to ignore them and focus on the final state of sinless bliss, standing before Christ with all things made to praise he who sits on the throne?  There must be room for us to experience the here and now, if for no other reason to be able to communicate with our fellow men who do not know or do not share the hope that we have.  Was it not Christ himself who was said to be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief?

The scriptures seem to be about hope, being less emphatic about suffering and grief because these need not be emphasized to humans living with suffering and grief every day.  Scripture focuses on the hope that it has to give to the grief stricken race of men.  However, it is of note that the vast majority of the Psalms do not focus on the hope of God but on the suffering of man, with a reminder at the end of most of them that God is still there.

So, there must be balance in the midst of it all, between the pain of the human experience and the hope of the Lord’s return.  Where that balance is, that is the question.

Having just watched the current Speaker of the House’s remarks concerning the President’s veto of the S-CHIP legislation it seems that the democratic leadership wishes to place the idea of universal health care in the realm of a moral imperative.  Paraphrasing the Speaker, “Veto means ‘I forbid’ and that is what the President is saying to America’s children by vetoing this legislation.”  I believe it is safe to say that from the rhetoric out of the democratic candidates and leaders that this is an accurate representation of their party’s position on all health care, taking the S-CHIP program as a drop in the larger bucket.  The ability for Americans to obtain life saving medical services is a moral issue, this is not a question.  Whether those medical services ought or ought not to be on the public dime however is a question of both legal, specifically constitutional ramifications.  Books worth of commentary are available online and in print about this issue so I will only emphasize my two most significant points.

The first is a question of where the money is going to come from if we universalize health care?  Currently as the Clinton Health Care Plan and the National Coalition on Health Care claims there are 47 million uninsured Americans. If we as a country are already spending way more than other countries (16% of GDP according to the NCHC report cited above) how is the government going to spend so much on insuring even half of the 47 million uninsured?  This is especially poignant in light of the oppressively bad state of another government program, social security.  If we cannot afford to support social security how are we to afford both social security and universal health care?

The second is what is the consitutional authority on which the idea of universal health care is resting?  The only possible phrase I could consider is the catchall of “promoting the general welfare.”  I see no place where it is allowed for congress or any other branch to provide for the health services of American citizens.