Anyone who’s ever watched a crime show knows that the right to remain silent is a fundamental constitutional protection for those who are arrested and read their Miranda rights. But what happens when you aren’t yet in police custody but are nonetheless being questioned by police? In a 5-4 decision along ideological lines, the U.S. Supreme Court held Monday that a man questioned before police custody and not yet read his rights had not invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, when he simply did not answer a police question and remained silent.

The ruling means that prosecutors were entitled to use Genovevo Salinas’ silence against him during a murder trial to argue that jurors should infer guilt from his silent reaction to a police question, even though Genovevo was not present at trial and couldn’t counter this assertion. Salinas had voluntarily answered several other police questions before falling silent on the question of whether shell casings found at the crime scene would match his gun.

While Justice Samuel Alito held for the court that Salinas would have had to explicitly “assert the privilege” by referring to his right to remain silent, the dissent found that defendants cannot be expected to utter particular code words, as the Supreme Court has long said there is “no ritualistic formula” necessary to invoke the privilege.

Justice Stephen Breyer explains in his dissent:

To permit a prosecutor to comment on a defendant’s constitutionally protected silence would put that defendant in an impossible predicament. He must either answer the question or remain silent. If he answers the question, he may well reveal, for example, prejudicial facts, disreputable associates, or suspicious circumstances—even if he is innocent.

If he remains silent, the prosecutor may well use that silence to suggest a consciousness of guilt. And if the defendant then takes the witness stand in order to explain either his speech or his silence, the prosecution may introduce, say for impeachment purposes, a prior conviction that the law would otherwise make inadmissible. Thus, where the Fifth Amendment is at issue, to allow comment on silence directly or indirectly can compel an individual to act as “a witness against himself”—very much what the Fifth Amendment forbids. And that is similarly so whether the questioned individual, as part of his decision to remain silent, invokes the Fifth Amendment explicitly or implicitly, through words, through deeds, or through reference to surrounding circumstances.

The majority dodged answering the question outright of whether anyone not yet in police custody has a right to remain silent, meaning those who have read the ruling are on notice that they should explicitly invoke their Fifth Amendment right, and those who haven’t talk to police voluntarily at their own peril.

The spirit of John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina U.S. senator who nearly triggered a civil war in the 1830s, lives in South Carolina’s house — which passed a bill that would transform Obamacare into a mechanism to destroy much of the state’s health insurance system last April. Earlier this week, however, Calhoun’s spirit quietly died in the state senate. The senate adjourned Thursday without taking action on this bill.

Labeled a “nullification” bill because it declares that “provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 grossly exceed the powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution” and then offers several measures intended to undermine this federal law, the bill is part of a larger trend of conservative state lawmakers claiming that their state can simply wipe away federal laws that they disagree with. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) recently signed a bill purporting to nullify various federal gun laws, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) relied on a nullification bill as part of his lawsuit challenging Obamacare (the federal appeals court that heard his case did not bite).

Nullification also conflicts with the unambiguous language of the Constitution, which provides that duly enacted federal laws “shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” Yet, despite clear constitutional language and Supreme Court precedents stretching as far back as 1819 establishing that states cannot enforce laws contrary to federal laws, nullification bills began to spring up shortly after a conservative writer named Tom Woods published a 2010 book entitled “Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.” Some lawmakers have even openly cited Woods’ book to justify their views.

Woods is an odd source for lawmakers to rely upon. Among other things, he once published an article entitled “Christendom’s Last Stand,” which claims that the Civil War was a battle between “atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.” In Woods’ words, “[t]he real watershed from which we can trace many of the destructive trends that continue to ravage our civilization today, was the defeat of the Confederate States of America in 1865.”

The Confederacy was defeated, and the vision of states rights that drove that act of treason shares many of the same roots as the nullification bills under consideration today. But America’s rejection of nullification has roots far deeper than Lincoln’s triumph over slave holders and traitors. If South Carolina has the power to nullify the Affordable Care Act, then it also has the power to nullify federal taxes, or to forbid military recruitment within its borders during war time. Similar fears that the United States Congress could not collect taxes or provide for an army drove America’s rejection of the Articles of Confederation, and eventually led to the much stronger Constitution we live under today.

As James Madison once warned, nullification will “speedily put an end to the Union itself.” The United States of America cannot function if each individual state can exempt itself and its citizens from any law they do not feel like following by passing a bill declaring that law unconstitutional.

Earlier this week, several civil rights groups filed an official complaint against Judge Edith Jones, a former chief judge of the powerful United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, alleging that she claimed that African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed towards violent crime and that the death penalty is a public service because it allows inmates to “make peace with God.” Though these allegations will need to be proven during the formal ethics process, they are entirely in line with Jones’ past record. Here are some other facts you should know about Judge Edith Jones:

1. Edith Jones Waved Off Horrific Sexual Harassment

A paper mill worker named Susan Waltman’s supervisor told her to have sex with a co-worker, “pinched her buttocks with pliers and tried to put his hands in her back pockets,” and fellow employees hung used tampons from their lockers. When she complained to a manager, she was told she should “expect this type of behavior working with men.” After she complained, an employee of another company that worked in the mill grabbed her arm while she was carrying a vial of hot liquid, and another worker stuck his tongue in her ear. One of her co-workers told her “he would cut off her breast and shove it down her throat.” He later dangled her over a stairwell thirty feet above the floor. Though she met with senior managers about these incidents, the harassment continued. At one point, a co-worker “grabbed Waltman’s breasts and directed a high pressure hose at her crotch.”

Judge Jones wrote a dissenting opinion claiming that this woman’s sexual harassment suit should be thrown out.

2. Edith Jones Thinks Victims Of Employment Discrimination Should ‘”Take A Better Second Job Instead Of Bringing Suit”

In a speech at the University of Texas, Jones claimed that employment discrimination suits “seldom turn on evidence of race- or sex-based discrimination” and generally involve “petty interoffice disputes, recrimination, second-guessing and suspicion.” She advised workers claiming discrimination to “[t]ake a better second job instead of bringing suit,” according to the Houston Chronicle.

3. Edith Jones Thinks A Man Whose Lawyer Slept Through Much Of His Trial Should Be Executed

Judge Jones joined an opinion holding that a capital defendant could be executed despite the fact that his lawyer slept through much of his trial. Though that opinion was eventually reversed by the full Fifth Circuit, Jones dissented from that reversal.

4. Edith Jones Would Allow Porn Bans And Bans On “the ‘F’ word in public venues”

Jones once accused the Supreme Court of “overstepping its bounds” when it decided “pornography cases [and] the cases involving free speech that included those where people were allowed to spout the ‘F’ word in public venues.”

5. Edith Jones Told A Fellow Judge To “Shut Up” During A Court Hearing

While she was the Fifth Circuit’s chief judge, the full court heard a case involving a criminal defendant’s drug conviction, and her more liberal colleague Judge James Dennis posed a series of skeptical questions to the prosecution. Jones objected so strenuously to Dennis’ continued questioning, which she claims was preventing other judges from asking questions, that she slammed her hand down on the table, pointed towards the door, and asked Dennis if he would like to leave the courtroom. When Dennis asked her to repeat herself, she said that she wants Dennis to “shut up.”

6. Edith Jones Urged The Supreme Court To “Re-Evaluate Roe“

In a case attempting to reopen Roe v. Wade, Jones wrote an opinion claiming that “the Court’s constitutional decision making leaves our nation in a position of willful blindness to evolving knowledge should trouble any dispassionate observer not only about the abortion decisions, but about a number of other areas in which the Court unhesitatingly steps into the realm of social policy under the guise of constitutional adjudication.” She urged the Supreme Court to “re-evaluate Roe.”

7. Edith Jones is A Big Fan Of “Junkets For Judges”

Jones ranks fourth, according to a 2010 report by the Alliance for Justice, among judges who have accepted free junkets paid for by conservative groups. These kinds of “junkets for judges” are often sponsored by groups funded by corporate donors with business before Jones’ court.

8. Edith Jones Went To Bat For The NRA

A little over a month ago, Jones authored an opinion saying the court should have struck down a federal law restricting handgun sales to people under the age of 21. According to Jones, “the panel’s approval of banning young adults from the commercial and federally regulated market for ‘the quintessential self-defense weapon’ is class-based invidious discrimination. . . .”

9. Edith Jones Think People File Bankruptcy Because They Lack “Personal Shame”

In an article co-authored with conservative law professor Todd Zywicki, Jones argued that a major reason for increased bankruptcy filings is “a decline in the level of personal shame and societal stigma that previously deterred individuals from filing bankruptcy.” In reality, the primary driver of personal bankruptcies is medical costs. One study found that “62.1% of all bankruptcies have a medical cause,” and the number of bankruptcies attributable to medical expenses increased 50 percent from 2001 to 2007.

10. Edith Jones Could Have Been On The Supreme Court

When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the Supreme Court, Jones was widely reported as being on the “short list” of potential nominees. President Bush eventually gave the seat to Chief Justice John Roberts.

“There’s just not a natural constituency to go to,” said Baltimore’s state’s attorney to explain why a pro-death penalty petition drive in Maryland failed. A conservative group that succeeded in delaying marriage equality in Maryland by forcing a ballot referendum on the issue hoped to replicate that success and trigger a similar referendum on the state’s new law repealing the death penalty. Instead, they fell about 3000 signatures short of the 18,579 they needed.

The failure of this ballot referendum lends additional support to arguments that the death penalty is unconstitutional. The Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishments.” So as a particular punishment becomes more “unusual” — or, in the Supreme Court’s words, as it ceases to be consistent with “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” — it become increasingly more difficult to justify under the Constitution. The Baltimore prosecutor’s admission that there is no “natural constituency” for the death penalty in Maryland is evidence that we are moving towards the point where state-sponsored executions can no longer exist under the Constitution.

Lest there be any doubt, Maryland is not alone in moving away from executions. To the contrary, Maryland is the sixth state in as many years to repeat its death penalty. Sixty percent of U.S. counties ceased seeking the death penalty altogether, and between 2004 and 2009 just 10 percent returned a single death sentence. At a national level, the death penalty has largely been isolated to a small number of mostly southern jurisdictions. This does not bode well for its constitutionality.

Six years ago, German police searched a U.S. Army staff sergeant’s apartment and discovered video of the solider having sex with a woman while another man “physically participat[ed] in the sexual activity.” Although the sex was consensual, a court-martial convicted the soldier of “committing an indecent act with another.” Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces affirmed this conviction.

Had the participants in this video been civilians, there is little question that their actions would have been protected by the Constitution under the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which prohibits criminalizing private, non-commercial sexual activity involving consenting adults. The court explained, however, that service members rights under Lawrence are not as broad as the rights of civilians:

No one disagrees that wholly private and consensual sexual activity, without more, falls within Lawrence. But that does not answer the altogether different question whether permitting a third party to observe and memorialize one’s sexual activity on videotape is categorically protected as “wholly private and consensual sexual activity” where the trier of fact has deemed the conduct to be prejudicial to good order and discipline in the armed forces and service discrediting. We hold that, under the circumstances of this case, it is not.

This case presents fairly unusual facts — most people do not videotape themselves engaged in threesomes — and the court’s reasoning is closely tied to the unusual facts of the case. Nevertheless, it does provide a warning to Americans in the military that their sexual liberties under the Constitution are less robust than the rights of civilians.

(HT: Howard Bashman)

Alaska Republican U.S. Senate Candidate Joe Miller is a throwback to the extravagant youth of the Tea Party. He embodies the era when conservative Republicans, drunk with the opportunity to bludgeon Democrats with a weak economy, turned off their filters and began proudly touting their most radical plans to change the country. Indeed, at the height of the conservative movement’s wildest excesses, Joe Miller was the Tea Party’s Bluto Blutarsky — the 2010 Senate candidate most willing to offend and least concerned with how his actions would impact other people. He also lost to a woman whose name wasn’t even on the ballot.

Yesterday, Politico reported that Miller filed papers to run for Senate again. If his latest Senate campaign bears any resemblance to his first, it should be a window into an earlier time when conservative Republicans believed they could reveal pretty much anything about their core beliefs and still get elected to high office. Here, for example, are five things Miller called unconstitutional when he first ran for Senate in 2010:

• Social Security: Miller believes that Social Security is something the federal government “shouldn’t have gotten into” because, in his words, it violates the “mandates of the Constitution.” As an alternative, Miller proposed an economically impossible plan where Social Security would be replaced by state retirement programs. These programs, however, could not be sustained because there is no guarantee that people will retire in the same state where they once worked and paid taxes. Thus, the retirement programs in states with a high percentage of retirees like Florida would collapse under the burden of providing benefits.
• Medicaid: Miller also believes that federally subsidized health care benefits are unconstitutional. This belief, however, did not stop him from taking Medicaid benefits himself.
• The Minimum Wage: Miller told ABCNews that “there should not be” a national minimum wage because “that is not within the scope of the powers that are given to the federal government.”
• Unemployment Benefits: In July 2010, at a time when 9.5 percent of the nation was unemployed, Miller suggested out-of-work Americans should be stripped of federal unemployment benefits because such benefits are “not constitutionally authorized.”
• Child Labor Laws: Miller also suggested to the Fairbanks, Alaska News-Miner that child labor laws exceed the federal government’s authority. A unanimous Supreme Court rejected this view more than seventy years ago.

As a bonus, Miller also believes that his own Senate race should be unconstitutional. He supports repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, which provides that voters, not state lawmakers, will elect U.S. senators.

In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, lawyers often meet their criminal defendant clients moments before they walk into the courtroom, without having visited the crime scenes or interviewed witnesses. They become, in effect, what courts have called “mere conduits for plea offers” for some clients. It’s not the quality of representation they want to provide for clients facing time behind bars. But with caseloads that are often more than double the recommended legal standard and no choice but to take almost every case they are assigned, it is the only legal representation they have time for.

To varying degrees, this problem of underfunded public defenders mandated to take on ever-growing caseloads has crippled the criminal justice system, in many cases, turning criminal courtrooms into what the U.S. Supreme Court called last year “for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.” On Thursday, Florida’s highest court called the evidence a “damning indictment of the poor quality of trial representation,” and held for the first time that public defenders may be relieved from case assignments when they are so overloaded that their representation would violate the defendant’s right to counsel. The five-justice majority wrote:

While we cannot succinctly recount the lengthy records in these two cases, we are struck by the breadth and depth of the evidence of how the excessive caseload has impacted the Public Defender’s representation of indigent defendants. For example, the number of criminal cases assigned to the Public Defender has increased by 29% since 2004, while his trial budget was reduced by 12.6% through budget cuts and holdbacks over the fiscal years 2007 – 2008 and 2008 – 2009. After the implementation of Article V revisions in July 2004, the Legislature only funded 32 of the 82 overload attorneys that Miami-Dade County had been funding. [...]

Witnesses from the Public Defender’s office described “meet and greet pleas” as being routine procedure. The assistant public defender meets the defendant for the first time at arraignment during a few minutes in the courtroom or hallway and knows nothing about the case except for the arrest form provided by the state attorney, yet is expected to counsel the defendant about the State’s plea offer. In this regard, the public defenders serve “as mere conduits for plea offers.” The witnesses also described engaging in “triage” with their cases – giving priority to the cases of defendants in custody, leaving out-of-custody defendants effectively without representation for lengthy periods subsequent to arraignment. The witnesses also testified that the attorneys almost never visited the crime scenes, were unable to properly investigate or interview witnesses themselves, often had other attorneys conduct their depositions, and were often unprepared to proceed to trial when the case was called. Thus, the circumstances presented here involve some measure of non representation and therefore a denial of the actual assistance of counsel guaranteed by Gideon [v. Wainright] and the Sixth Amendment.

The majority declined to effectively “apply a bandaid to a open head wound” by addressing exceedingly common claims of ineffective assistance of counsel one at a time, when it was clear that the claims were widespread and systematic. And with public defender overloads rampant around the country, this ruling may send a message to other jurisdictions that putting less money into providing a defense for the indigent while prosecuting more and more people may not be tolerated. A 2012 Brennan Center for Justice study found that public defenders often spend an average of less than six minutes per arraignment in cases where defendants plead guilty. And this problem has been exacerbated by sequester cuts that have hit public defenders much harder than prosecutors.

The case will now be sent back to the trial court, to determine whether attorneys have met the standard to withdraw from their cases. If they have, the state will be effectively forced to boost its paltry funding for public defense by appointing and compensating other private lawyers in these cases.

Bishop E.W. Jackson, the Republican nominee to be the next Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, does not believe that victims of the Oklahoma tornado should receive any federal aid to help them rebuild their lives. In video from a previous campaign first posted by Right Wing Watch, Jackson claims that federal relief to disaster victims is unconstitutional:

JACKSON: I don’t think that the federal government has much of a role at all constitutionally, at all [in disaster relief]. Now, you may make an argument that it does. You might argue that it’s a national security issue you might argue that it weakens us in the event of some sort of national military emergency. So you can make an attenuated argument. But I think that as a constitutional matter the federal government doesn’t have a whole lot to do with that. In my view, these are things that are ultimately supposed to be handled by the states. And, so, we’ve got a big Tenth Amendment problem in our country. . . . We’ve turned the federal government into a kind of god.

Watch it:

Disaster relief is not an attempt to steal power from God. To the contrary, it is the just response of a nation sensitive to the lesson of 1 John 3:17, which reads that “if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”

It is also entirely consistent with the Constitution. The Constitution gives the United States broad authority to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Ensuring that all Americans can rebuild their lives in the wake of a major national disaster is a classic example of using federal revenues to provide for the general welfare.

While Jackson’s view of the Constitution is wrong, it is not surprising giving the range of unusual views he’s expressed in the past. Jackson believes that Planned Parenthood is “more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was.” He thinks that the original Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause, which gave slave states additional representation in the U.S. House by allowing them to count 60 percent of their slave population when congressional seats were apportioned among the states, was “an anti-slavery amendment.” He accused Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) of faking his faith. And he believes that being gay “poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies; it brings the judgment of God unlike very few things that we can think of.”

Warning labels and notices are a common feature of American life. Federal law requires most groceries to display detailed information about their ingredients, calorie content, and other nutritional facts. Federal fuel economy labels inform car buyers how quickly their new vehicle will burn through gas. Surgeon general warnings inform smokers of the dangers presented by tobacco. Employers who employ workers subject to federal minimum wage law must display posters informing these workers of their rights.

And yet, under a decision handed down today by three Republican judges, all of these information labels and more are now in jeopardy.

The decision by a panel of the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit strikes down federal regulations requiring employers to display posters informing workers of their right to organize and other rights under federal labor law. Although the opinion meanders quite a bit, its analysis begins by claiming this result is required by a federal statute protecting employers’ rights to express their views to their employees. That statute provides that “[t]he expressing of any views, argument, or opinion, or the dissemination thereof, whether in written, printed, graphic, or visual form, shall not constitute or be evidence of an unfair labor practice . . . if such expression contains no threat of reprisal or force or promise of benefit.” Although this language says nothing about employers also having the right not to post information they would prefer to keep their workers ignorant of, the three Republican judges fabricate such a right through the power of a rhetorical question:

Suppose that § 8(c) prevents the Board from charging an employer with an unfair labor practice for posting a notice advising employees of their right not to join a union. Of course § 8(c) clearly does this. How then can it be an unfair labor practice for an employer to refuse to post a government notice informing employees of their right to unionize (or to refuse to)? Like the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment, § 8(c) necessarily protects—as against the Board—the right of employers (and unions) not to speak. This is why, for example, a company official giving a noncoercive speech to employees describing the disadvantages of unionization does not commit an unfair labor practice if, in his speech, the official neglects to mention the advantages of having a union.

Of course, the easy answer to this rhetorical question is that it can be illegal to punish employers who express their view of unions but not illegal to require employers to inform workers of their rights because that’s what the law says. Typically, judges begin their legal analysis with the language of the law. These Republican judges chose a different path.

Perhaps sensing that their reading of federal law stands on shaky ground, the judges also weave a particularly aggressive reading of the First Amendment into their opinion. Under the Supreme Court’s decision in Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, commercial actors can be required to provide “purely factual and uncontroversial information” to the people they transact with. This is why cereal boxes can be required to display accurate information about the nutritional value of Rice Chex or Froot Loops, but businesses also cannot be forced to endorse a particular political candidate or to advise their workers to join a union. Because the new posters do nothing more than inform workers about uncontroversial facts involving their rights in the workplace, they should be no more invalid than labeling on a cereal box.

Although union-related speech is sometimes treated differently than speech involving sales of goods, the court does not question its applicability to labor decisions generally. Instead, the judges read Zauderer very narrowly — so narrowly that it does not apply unless the corporation required to display information appears poised to deceive their workers or consumers. Because no one “has even suggested that the posting rule was needed because employers are misleading employees about their rights under the National Labor Relations Act,” the court concludes that Zauderer does not apply. If taken seriously, this reasoning would threaten nearly all warning or informational labels required by law. There’s little evidence, for example, that General Mills is actively deceiving consumers about the number of calories in a serving of Count Chocula. Nor are Chevy dealers only required to post fuel efficiency labels if they lie to their customers about how quickly a Suburban burns through gasoline.

If nothing else, today’s decision should be a wake up call to unions and other advocates for workers that everything they care about is threatened so long as vacancies remain on powerful, GOP-dominated courts like the DC Circuit. Today’s decision bears the same resemblance to the law that Westeros bears to New Hampshire. It writes words that simply do not exist into a federal statute, and then fabricates a constitutional right to keep workers and consumers ignorant. The only way to prevent future decisions like this one is to confirm more judges who will do a better job of adhering to the law.

Nearly two centuries ago, South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun nearly sparked a civil war when he led an unconstitutional effort to nullify a federal law his state government disagreed with. One hundred and eighty years later, South Carolina lawmakers want to do it again. Last night, the South Carolina House passed an attempt to “interpose and refuse to enforce” much of the Affordable Care Act.

The bill includes a number of attempts to undermine health reform, some of which are unconstitutional, others of which are merely unwise. The most insidious provision of the bill, however, is this:

A South Carolina resident taxpayer who is subjected to a tax by the Internal Revenue Code under 26 U.S.C. Section 5000A of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shall receive a tax deduction in the exact amount of the taxes or penalty paid the federal government pursuant to 26 U.S.C. Section 5000A. The tax deduction allowed by this section must be used in the year the federal tax or penalty is paid.

“26 U.S.C. Section 5000A” refers to the so-called individual mandate that was the primary subject of a losing attempt to convince the Supreme Court to repeal Obamacare last year. That provision works by requiring people who are not insured to pay slightly more income taxes in order to give them an incentive to buy insurance. Such an incentive is necessary because the Affordable Care Act also prohibits insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. So if people did not have a financial incentive to buy insurance before they get sick, they would wait until they got sick to buy insurance, and would eventually drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they paid virtually nothing into.

The South Carolina bill would erase this incentive by effectively having the state refund taxpayers hit with additional taxes because they did not purchase insurance. What the federal government takes, the state of South Carolina would give back. As a result, smart South Carolina residents would soon figure out that they can drop their insurance plans, save the cost of paying premiums, and then pick those plans back up the minute they are about to be hit with an expensive medical bill. Beginning in the 1990s, seven different states passed laws allowing health care consumers to behave this way, and it ended in disaster every single time. Some consumers saw their premiums rise over 350 percent. Others lost access to individual insurance plans entirely.

Beyond the fact that this bill could literally collapse the individual health insurance market in South Carolina, it is also a tribute to fiscal irresponsibility. By giving a tax deduction to South Carolinians who do not carry insurance, the state is essentially paying people to free ride. That’s money, by the way, that will not go to hiring teachers or putting cops on the streets or building schools because it is being diverted to this crusade against Obamacare.

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