When a "Law" is not a Law

To the extent that anyone can read the tea leaves that are the individual justice's questions, non-questions, word choices, pauses, coughs, facial tics, etc., conservatives were heartened just a bit by what transpired before the Supreme Court this past week where it appeared at least that a majority, albeit a narrow one, of the justices were predisposed to rule against the constitutionality of  Obamacare.

Which only makes me ask once again, who are we kidding?  Has our innate and reflexive understanding of and jealousy for our self-evident liberty been so eroded that we are seriously willing to surrender it to the opinion of nine men and women, wait, make that five, no, if it is a 5-4 ruling, make it just one?

You cannot call what is happening before the Court a charade because it's all unfolding in such earnest.  But it can hardly be called deliberation as the core subject is so fundamentally absurd.  It's more a spectacle, but a revealing one at that.  As always, we can rely on Mark Steyn to notice what really needs to be noticed:

A 2,700-page law is not a “law” by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy. It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.