The lawsuit joined by twenty-six states under Florida’s
leadership reminds me that workable democracy really does require a kind of
minimal consensus in the nation. When such consensus exists, democracy is
workable. When it does not, a spectrum of dysfunction appears. It ranges from
stagnation at one end to civil war on the other. We are currently living in
such a dysfunctional era—and this lawsuit makes it easy to see it. Here is a
map of the states that oppose the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,
aka Obamacare:
If diplomacy is “war by other means,” so is litigation when
it manifests in patterns such as this. This lawsuit is a symptom of another and
more grievous condition—the loss of a national consensus. At its heart is the
claim that it is unconstitutional to require people to spend money on health
care. But of course in every state on this list, laws require individuals to
spend money on auto insurance. Unable to see a meaningful functional difference
between the two cases myself, I must conclude that this effort is at bottom political
and has nothing to do with health care.
It’s strange to live in a country that is in process of
exploding into fragments. The timescale of this explosion is very slow, but it
is real enough. As John Edwards said a few years back, there are two Americas.
They are hopelessly woven and mingled—and trying to separate. If a successful
legislative initiative, such as health care, is not allowed to stand—if it is
immediately undermined by litigation—and if such moves are indeed applied to
every legislative action by the opposing party, and always along party lines,
one is already living in the state of nature, not in a republic governed by
laws.
