With the Senate health care legislation, America is going over that precipice Obama shouted about with such eager excitement.

From REDSTATE:

With the passage of ObamaCare, the United States may be passing the point of no return on its downward journey to becoming a middling country, shorn of the sheen and substance of Exceptionalism. It will become but another average player in a United Nations of the World where the rhetorical goal of government is to ensure that everyone has their equal share, where no one ever wants for anything, where everyone lives in perfect harmony. This is not just because the basic elements of the legislation are sufficiently onerous as to cause America to spiral into a third world country, which it is, but rather by unconstitutionally forcing citizens to purchase a “good” in order to retain their liberty, it explicitly elevates the whims of the federal government above the rights of the citizens. Now that police power of the state can be used to force citizens to pay for health care, how long will it be before those same powers are used to force citizens to pay for food that is provided at the direction of the government, to pay for clothing provided at the design of the government, to pay for transportation or leisure activities provided or approved by the government?

Madison and the Founding Fathers understood that man is prone to anger, passion, faction and hubris and that neither the Constitution nor any government could change that. What the Constitution and its resulting government could do however was provide a framework where free men could live together as equals as they pursued their individual notions of happiness and basked in the exercise of their liberties. … [Obama] believes that with ObamaCare America will parachute into a land of milk and honey. He’s wrong. There is no parachute, there is no milk and honey and there will be no soft landing. A mirage of rhetoric, fables and lies hide the gritty reality of the soon to be rusted hulk of American enterprise that for two centuries was an engine that drove the advancement of the human condition. That train spent 212 years charging over the horizon, into the great unknown, into a universe of possibilities on the rails of a U.S. Constitution that let free men create and innovate and build a better world. With ObamaCare we will see the removal of those rails and with them the essence of American Exceptionalism. As the engine that has provided so much to so many careens, buckles and lurches forward without the constraints of Madison’s Constitution, we can no doubt expect that the vices which it was constructed to contain will begin to rear their ugly heads. …

Yes, but the future of America looks even worse than that.

Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York state, lists 10 dreadful provisions in the bill. Read them all here. They take away your freedom of decision. Even if you want to and can pay for treatment the government denies you, you may not be allowed to do so. If you are old, you may not be admitted into a hospital. If you are hospitalized you will have little comfort, because the egalitarians whose ideology is now beginning to shape our lives believe that austerity is best for us (though not for themselves).

Hospital budget cuts will mean shortages of nurses, equipment and cleaning staff. The president’s chief health advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, argues that hospitals in the U.S. offer more privacy and comfort than hospitals in Europe, and this “abundance of amenities” drives up costs.

And then there is this:

Money is allocated for adult preparation activities, including lessons on positive self-esteem and relationship dynamics, friendships, dating (and) romantic involvement (Senate bill, p.612).

Let’s ponder that for a moment.

Your friendships, your love life, the way you think and feel about yourself, is the government’s business?

Nosy little bureaucrats are charged with poking into your emotions and your intimate relations?

This is super-totalitarianism. Not even Mao or Pol Pot thought of reaching that deeply into the entrails of the people they trod on to squeeze them into conformity.

Bribery has secured enough votes to pass the Senate’s unpopular health care legislation. In plain truth, the Senators who have shamelessly sold their votes to their own party are political prostitutes.

It does not matter to them that it is a bad bill. They got their price.

Among the many bad provisions there is one that may even be unconstitutional.

From Erick Erickson at REDSTATE:

[Sen. Harry] Reid has slipped a provision into the health care legislation prohibiting future Congresses from changing any regulations imposed on Americans by the Independent Medicare [note: originally referred to as “medical”] Advisory Boards, which are commonly called the “Death Panels.”…

On December 21, 2009, … Harry Reid sold out the Republic in toto. … Senators discovered section 3403 [of the health care bill]. That section changes the rules of the United States Senate.

To change the rules of the United States Senate, there must be sixty-seven votes.

Section 3403 of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment requires that “it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” The good news is that this only applies to one section of the Obamacare legislation. The bad news is that it applies to regulations imposed on doctors and patients by the Independent Medicare Advisory Boards a/k/a the Death Panels. …

Senator Jim DeMint confronted the Democrats over Reid’s language. In the past, the Senate Parliamentarian has repeatedly determined that any legislation that also changes the internal standing rules of the Senate must have a two-thirds vote to pass because to change Senate rules, a two-thirds vote is required. Today, the Senate President, acting on the advice of the Senate Parliamentarian, ruled that these rules changes are actually just procedural changes and, despite what the actual words of the legislation say, are not rules changes. Therefore, a two-thirds vote is not needed in contravention to longstanding Senate precedent.

How is that constitutional?

The Senate Democrats are ignoring the constitution, the law, and their own rules to pass Obamacare….

Erickson goes on to consider the case for secession – or is he suggesting a dissolution of the union?

To quote the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is one of those causes. When the men and women who run this nation, which is supposedly a nation of laws not men, choose to ignore the laws and bribe the men, the people cannot be blamed for wanting to dissolve political bands connecting them to that government.