Has the Democratic Party ever enacted a law as atrocious as its government takeover of the American people’s healthcare? Has the Democratic Party ever enacted a law so unpopular? Yes and Yes.
In 1854, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency. Their top priority was to repeal the Missouri Compromise prohibition of slavery in the northern territories. The author of this infamous legislation, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was Stephen Douglas, a Democrat Senator from Illinois and owner of a slave plantation in Mississippi.
Senator Douglas claimed the law would be a final solution to the slavery question, so that Congress could move on to other issues. In fact, the Kansas-Nebraska Act sparked a political firestorm. Opponents of slavery – and the police state and economic stagnation that went with it – understood that, if unchecked, the slave system would expand throughout the territories and then the entire nation.
As the Democrat-controlled Supreme Court would soon prove with its 7-2 Dred Scott decision (both Republicans dissenting), pro-freedom Americans feared that the judiciary would uphold the expansion of slavery. Many Democrats were already touting slavery (not for themselves, of course) for poor whites, too. “Free Society!” declared a prominent Democrat newspaper, “We sicken at the name!”
Every American was forced to choose sides. One was either for the free market system or against it; there was no middle ground.
As Alexis De Tocqueville observed: “Socialism is a new form of slavery.” Today’s congressional Democrats who voted to impose socialized medicine on the nation while exempting themselves should bear in mind Abraham Lincoln’s words: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
Denouncing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln warned against submitting to political masters:
“If there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity, of their own liberties, and institutions.
This article was also posted in March on the Big Government website: http://biggovernment.com/mzak/2010/03/13/the-healthcare-bill-would-be-obamas-enabling-act
Michael Zak is a popular speaker to Republican organizations around the country. Back to Basics for the Republican Party is his acclaimed history of the GOP, cited by Clarence Thomas in a Supreme Court decision. He is also the author of the 2005 Republican Freedom Calendar. His Grand Old Partisan website celebrates more than fifteen decades of Republican heroes and heroics. See www.grandoldpartisan.com for more information.
