Missouri voters reject Obamacare almost 3 to 1

From The Hill:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs flatly dismissed Missouri's vote Tuesday rejecting a key part of the healthcare law.

Gibbs said Missouri’s vote approving a ballot initiative to exempt residents from the new law requiring individuals to buy health insurance was “of no legal significance.”

Asked what it means that voters in Missouri would vote against the federal mandate, Gibbs said: "Nothing.”

You sorta wonder if he'd say the same thing after the 20th or 30th such vote in other states. (Not really--he's paid to lie.)

Gibbs is correct that the Missouri vote doesn’t trump federal law, but it has given a boost to those calling on Congress to repeal the healthcare law.

Not so fast, Sparky. The idea that federal law overrides state law is a common "term of art" error. That is, it's a common phrase that relies on some crucial, unmentioned assumptions.

It's true that the Constitution contains a so-called "supremacy principle" that says when there's a conflict between federal and state law, the feds win. But *implicit in that principle* is the assumption that the federal law in question is *within the Constitutionally allowed powers of the federal gubmint.*

In the past it wasn't considered necessary to point this out because until about 50 years ago everyone thought the Constitution's tenth amendment meant what it said: That all powers not explicitly granted to the feds by the Constitution were reserved to the People, or to the States.

For the first 110 years of our republic, no one seems to have even *imagined* that the feds would try to do something not explicitly allowed by the document usually described as the "supreme law of the land." But gradually, this vital piece of our mechanism has been corroded, weakened and disregarded by congresses and presidents who wanted to accomplish some supposed greater good, and didn't think *their* small insult to the Constitution would be of any consequence--if indeed they thought about such things at all.