Heritage senior fellows Brian Walsh and Hans von Spakovsky have a new article out at NRO on the jail time provisions that exist in both the House and Senate bills. Read the whole thing, but here are some key graphs:
By transforming a refusal or failure to comply with a government mandate into a federal tax violation, the “progressives” are using the brute force of criminal law to engage in social engineering. This represents an oppressive, absolutist view of government power.
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The idea of imprisoning or fining Americans who don’t knuckle under to an unprecedented government mandate to purchase a particular insurance product should outrage anyone who believes in the exceptional promises and opportunities afforded by our basic American freedoms. The idea isn’t progressive but highly regressive, the equivalent of reinstituting debtors’ prisons, a punishment Americans eliminated 160 years ago.
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Many of the Americans who will surely ignore the government health-insurance mandate may not wind up in prison. But if noncompliance becomes too widespread, any one of us could become the example the feds prosecute to make sure the iron hand of the new Washington is clearly visible to other potential “criminals.”
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Unless this paternalistic juggernaut is stopped, Americans will lose some of their most fundamental freedoms, and the power of the federal government to impose novel requirements in every facet of our personal lives will have become virtually unlimited.