Obamacare Will Follow the Fate of Prohibition

by Norman Berdichevsky (November 2013)

It may take as long, but Obamacare will certainly follow the ignominious example of Prohibition (the notorious 18th amendment that was the law of the land from 1920 to 1933) and ultimately be rescinded whether by simple legislative majorities in Congress with the approval of a sitting President or the much longer and demanding route of a constitutional amendment (the 21st which simply repealed the 18th).

Just as the wealthy and those cronies of the President today, including the big labor unions and huge corporations who support him and enjoy special benefits and dispensations regarding Obamacare, are in no danger of losing their own preferred private health plans, many of them treated Prohibition as a joke or worse. They bribed the police, stockpiled alcohol for home consumption, bought out the inventories of warehouses, saloons, club store rooms, and emptied out liquor retailers and wholesalers.

^[on December 17, 1917. The total vote was with the Democrats voting 146 in favor and 64 in opposition and Republicans 136 to 64.  Thus both houses of Congress provided the 2/3 majority necessary prior to the final ratification by the states. By the end of February 1919, forty five of the forty-eight states had ratified the amendment.  In the end, only Rhode Island and Connecticut never ratified it. Congress passed the Volstead Act, the popular name for the National Prohibition Act, over the veto of President Wilson. On October 28, 1919, it established the legal definition of intoxicating liquor, as well as penalties for producing it although the federal government and its agencies such as the Coast Guard, FBI and ATF were subsequently unprepared to enforce it.

The strong objections to Prohibition of most German-Americans were treated with contempt once Congress declared war on Germany as if they had no say in the matter because of their opposition to American participation. Farmers were even promised by Wilson that their grain formerly converted into alcohol would be shipped to war starved Europeans as food.

Popular articles in the American press during 1917 frequently cited that eighty percent of congressmen and senators drank, even though these same people were the ones who had approved prohibition. The widespread cynicism, flouting of the law and the inability to deal with more than a tiny fraction of the enormous trade in smuggling and illegal distilling, greatly damaged the image and reputation of the United States throughout the world.

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