On Tuesday (8/13/13), Neil Cavuto spent the first 20 minutes of Your World interviewing “one of my favorite people,” hate monger Mark Levin. Cavuto was so serious during the interview it was as if he was speaking to a politician or a head of state. Even though it was pretty clear Cavuto disagreed with several of Levin’s extremist views.
Levin was there to talk “killing” the Affordable Care Act and to promote his new book about “restoring the American republic.”
Cavuto’s first question: “I’m wondering, as I finished reading this book, whether it’s already too late?”
Levin said, “I hope it’s not too late. …We need to breathe life back into the Constitution. I agree, we’re in a post-Constitutional period for the most part. This is evidence of it. Obamacare was passed unconstitutionally. Congress didn’t have the power to do this. It was signed by the President who didn’t have the power to sign this into law, and the Supreme Court twisted the Constitution and amended the Constitution to give its imprimatur to this. And now you see 2700 pages, 20,000 pages of regulations. Pelosi said pass it and we’ll know what’s in it, we pass it and we still don’t know what’s in it.”
Cavuto posited a baseless conspiracy theory. “You think they actually did know what was in it, and they just weren’t going to share it?”
No, Levin didn't think so. He said, “I think they did this massive law written by all these special interests and so forth and ideologues and they figured as time went on they would manipulate it just as they are now. And if it falls, then they’ll push their single payer plan. …They changed the law on the run, which is utterly unconstitutional. …This is rewriting a statute, which of course the President doesn’t have the power to do.”
Levin continued, “They tried to ram this through under an unconstitutional rule called the Slaughter Rule. …I threatened to sue them among others. Then they used a budget process to pass this statute. The President signs it into law. The Chief Justice of the United States turns the Constitution on its head to impose this law on us.”
Cavuto said, “You really save some particular vitriol for him(Chief Justice Roberts)."
Levin said it was “venom” that he had for Roberts. “What he did was he said that the penalty provisions under Obamacare are taxes. …They’re not taxes. …So the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court rewrites the bill and changes the meaning of the bill in order to uphold the bill.”
After the two agreed that the likely intent of the law was to put insurance companies out of business, Cavuto asked about term limits for Supreme Court Justices.
Levin said, “Yeah, 12-year term limits for Supreme Court Justices for a very simple reason. If you understand the history of the Republic and what the framers had in mind, they never ever, ever, ever would have believed that five lawyers - and by the way, one switches sides all of a sudden the Constitution’s different than it was the day before – that five lawyers could have such an impact on society as to matters of policy.”
But as Jonathan Cohn wrote in the New Republic, “The vast majority of legal experts have said, all along, that the law is constitutional under any reasonable reading of past decisions. The only way to overturn the law would have been to rewrite decades of constitutional law, if not more, and to overturn in economic regulatory legislation in a way the Court has not done in nearly a century.”
Not that Cavuto mentioned anything like that. Instead, the two went on to debate Levin’s radical desire to shut down the government and put it in the hands of the Tea Party extremists.
I do wish someone would remind not only Cavuto but also Levin that “Obamacare” was based—almost verbatim—on the (right-wingnut) Heritage Foundation’s health care plan designed to oppose “Hillarycare.”