Then you haven't been paying attention to either health care in general, or the health care effort in specific.

The health care bill was effectively implemented as a tax bill. The entire structure of the bill is a set of rules and initiatives set up to encourage businesses and individuals to get or provide health insurance through a series of tax raises and tax cuts.

The tax code is the mechanism through which this policy is implemented. I'd love to hear what other mechanism you'd prefer for implementing a health care plan. (And copping out by saying "it shouldn't have been implemented" isn't gonna fly)

Of course it shouldn't have been implemented.

If they were going to actually try to implement national health care it should be done as constitutional amendment.

If the Air Force wasn't a big enough deal to require an amendment, neither is health care.

Except that defending the nation is all over the constitution, whereas giving people health care for free isn't anywhere. Specifically in the preamble, when referring to the "common defense" the framers used the terminology "provide"; when referring to the "general welfare" the term promote was used instead. Air Forces didn't exist then, but health care certainly did.

Article 1, Section 8: The Congress shall have Power To [...] raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

Are you seriously going to argue that "Armies" doesn't include the Air Force?

Specifically, I meant that the constitution explicitly gives each of the Army and the Navy cabinet-level power and responsibility. The Air Force was given the same power and responsibility, without amending the constitution.

That's not a very good example. The Cabinet consists of the heads of various Departments, whichever ones the President wants to hear from at any given moment. The Departments are created by Congress.

An Amendment wasn't required to create the Air Force any more than it was required to create the DHS, or is required to create any other Federal agency. Congress has the power to create, destroy, and reorganize Federal agencies as it wants to. So in 1947, Congress created the Department of Defense as a Federal Department, which the Constitution allows them to do, and put the Army, Navy, and Air Force (new) under it. There wasn't anything even vaguely unconstitutional about it, even taking a really uncharitable reading.

Congress creates new Departments fairly regularly; there wasn't a need to go through the amendment process for the DoD any more than there was to create the Departments of State, Transportation, Energy, Labor, Education... etc. All it takes to create one is the same process to pass any other piece of legislation.

I would personally not be against requiring an amendment to create new agencies, just on the grounds of controlling governmental scope creep, but that's not the way things are set up. Congress has been creating Departments since the ink was barely dry on the Constitution itself.

Actually, I think I agree with you. They should change the org-chart and put the AF back under the Army.

I still don't understand your comparison to Obamacare. Are you asserting that the constitution would authorize Obamacare with some tweaks to heirerarchy? Please explain.

Nope, I was just comparing the magnitude of the changes, not really the structure.

How is the magnitude comparable? Obamacare is not authorized by the constitution at all - to become constitutional, it would need to be eliminated. To become constitutional, the Air Force would need one arrow in the org chart to be changed.

I don't see the changes as being remotely comparable in magnitude.

That's the strangest example I can imagine.

We don't live in a true Democracy. We live in Republic which is significantly different. We elect representatives on our behalf that we entrust to read and digest multi-thousand page bills and vote on our behalf.

But realistically it's not in the realm of humanly possible things for elected officials to read all those documents so we should be blaming the assistants and clerks for not reading them right ;p

Right, maybe I should have said the republic is still working well...