OK. Enough of this “good will toward men” stuff. Back to pounding progressives. This week’s dumbest post award goes, once again, to the Washington Post’s most oblivious blogger, Ezra Klein.
His post defending the indefensible Nelson bribe shows Klein to be generally clueless concerning how the Medicaid program works, but this is just garden-variety naïveté for a progressive blogger.
What earned Klein the dumbest post prize is his ridiculous assertion that the Senatorial skulduggery committed by Reid and Nelson was somehow necessitated by our constitutional form of government:
That doesn’t mean it’s not galling that Nebraska got such a sweet deal. But this is the consequence of organizing our legislature around states.
In Klein’s muddled understanding of our system, the Nelson payoff was a necessary evil forced on Reid because the founders didn’t have the foresiight to invest the central government with imperial power.
In reality, that the framers limited Congress to certain “enumerated powers” is the very thing that will probably cause the Nelson bribe to fail. In fact, it’s the basis for a constitutional objection by various state AGs:
The ‘Nebraska compromise,’ which permanently exempts Nebraska from paying Medicaid costs that Texas and all other 49 states must pay, may violate the United States Constitution.
Regardless of how that challenge by the state AGs works out, Klein’s weird notion that a system which puts important limitations on the central authority somehow necessitates bribery and corruption is … well … dumb.
Post a Comment