In the recent column of The Great Will (TGW) ‘The case for engaged justices’, December 5, 2010 uses a case argued in February 2008 before the Supreme Court of Texas as his starting point for his argument that the recent health care law is unconstitutional, and that this case is a relevant starting point for a legal action pursuant to its nullification. The case is identified as No. 06-0714 Barbara Robison v. Crown Cork and Seal Co.-this decision is linked to the article and I challenge any lay person to decipher this thicket of argument and ‘legal reasoning’ and come to some, even remote, notion of understanding!  This is the territory of the legal adept, surly not any territory that I nor TGW can claim! I consulted the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, edited by the estimable Mr. Kermit L. Hall, for the entry on Marbury V. Madison, which led to The Federalist #78 By Hamilton. Although Amsterdam and Bruner’s Minding the Law would be the appropriate place to begin our analytical quest, if time and analytical rigor were in question. I think, given TGW’s ideological/political motivation, we can safely say that this is just the opening gambit, for his legal argument against the health care law. The quote from Marbury v. Madison can also be considered as pertinent, legitimizing garnish.

TGW represents the intellectual intersection of several stains of thought: an intense Calvinism, predicated on the notion of the elect, the fallen estate of man and the sovereignty of authority (God). Add to this the deep commitment of Republican thinkers to a pernicious variant of Social Darwinism, a bastardized version, expressing a simple social prejudice against the lower social orders: the adoption of the Neo-Burkian political personae might then be considered an absolutely necessary fulfillment of this. In sum my argument would be that TGW thinks of the potential recipients of this state largess, this socialism are undeserving, morally and politically. Not to speak of his philosophical commitment to that branch of American Political Romanticism known as Originalism and its commitment to a Counter-Enlightenment interpretation of the Founders.