Rule ‘O Law
by digby
Of course. If it’s Thursday it must be time for armed revolution:
The former spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party sent out an email that said armed rebellion was justified over the Supreme Court ruling upholding Obamacare.
Matthew Davis, an attorney in Lansing, sent the email moments after the Supreme Court ruling to numerous new media outlets and limited government activists with the headline: “Is Armed Rebellion Now Justified?”
Davis added his own personal note saying, “… here’s my response. And yes, I mean it.”
“There are times government has to do things to get what it wants and holds a gun to your head,” Davis said. “I’m saying at some point, we have to ask the question when do we turn that gun around and say no and resist.
“Was the American Revolution justified?”
When contacted, Davis said the key word was “justified.” He compared armed rebellion to a situation where the government cannot get your money by way of liens or seizure of bank accounts is coming to arrest you for not paying an unconstitutional tax.
“You can’t have people walking with lattes and signs and think the object of your opposition is going to take you seriously,” Davis said. “Armed rebellion is the end point of that physical confrontation.”
Fergawdsdakes. This “tax” is about the lamest, most unenforceable “tax” you can possibly think of:
What if your failure to obtain health insurance means you owe the penalty but you nonetheless refuse to pay it? That’s where things get tricky. The IRS can’t throw you in jail, because the health reform law explicitly states (on Page 336): “In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure.”
Nor can the IRS seize your property, because the law states (also on Page 336) that the health and human services secretary may not “file notice of lien with respect to any property of a taxpayer by reason of any failure to pay the penalty … or levy on any such property with respect to such failure.”
As Jost pointed out on the New England Journal of Medicine’s Web site, these restrictions would appear to pose a greater threat to enforcing the individual mandate than any nullification attempts by the states. “Compliance,” Jost wrote, “will … belargely voluntary (although the IRS can still make a tax resister’s life miserable, whether or not it can ultimately collect).” State legal challenges, though unlikely to sway federal courts, might nonetheless “be seen as invitations to civil disobedience that counsel state citizens to ‘violate the federal law, wave this statute in their face, and dare them to come after you.’ ”
Which, in this instance, the IRS can’t do.
Seriously wingnuts, get a grip. You can put on your little costumes and strap on your six guns and pretend you are being oppressed, but the truth is that this just isn’t that big of a deal.
If they really want to stand-up-fer-freedom, you’d think these guys would suit up and defend the legal pot growers who are having all of their assets seized by the federal government on a daily basis. That seems like something worth getting up in arms over.
Update: Oy Vey
Mike Vanderboegh, the ex-militia blogger who calls himself one of the “midwives” of the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, recently predicted that if the Supreme Court declared the health care reform bill to be constitutional, it would lead to violent insurrection against “government tyranny.”
[…]
In the excerpts Vanderboegh posted on his blog “which deal with the decision today,” he says of a then-potential decision upholding the health care law, “You may call tyranny a mandate or you may call it a tax, but it still is tyranny and invites the same response.” He further predicts the response of his ilk: “If we refuse to obey, we will be fined. If we refuse to pay the fine, we will in time be jailed. If we refuse to report meekly to jail, we will be sent for by armed men. And if we refuse their violent invitation at the doorsteps of our own homes we will be killed — unless we kill them first. … I am on record as advocating the right of defensive violence against a tyrannical regime.”