This summarizes a good deal of what we’ve been saying here at the Hayride for a while now. Namely, that a sovereign default as a result of hitting the debt limit would not only be a choice by the Obama administration, but an unconstitutional choice and an impeachable offense.

McClintock doesn’t use the word impeachment, but he sure does a good job of explaining what this country faces. Particularly his assessment of where the GOP went wrong in its assumptions by choosing to fight on Obamacare…

Speaking of Hobson’s choices, that’s where we are.

Our side is made up of what the French called the bourgeoisie. Our side celebrates bourgeois values, we celebrate civil society, we celebrate the ability of individuals of good will to bargain in good faith for the goods and services which will improve their lives. We believe in compromise for the benefit of both sides, because that is what decent people do in a decent society to solve problems.

It used to be that the other side contained at least elements of bourgeois society. There were working-class Democrats who aspired to the middle-class, there were wealthy Democrats who believed that their spirit of generosity would produce better results if it was institutionalized. They were people of goodwill, and they could be bargained with in good faith. But most of those bargains were poor ones, and we are $17 trillion in debt with another $125 trillion in unfunded liabilities in the pipeline.

Our economy is sputtering with a deeply uncertain future, despite much evidence that a renaissance fueled by domestic energy could be at hand if only a different policy regime were brought to bear. Our culture is a smoking, toxic ruin. Our civil institutions hang by a thread, and the public has all but abandoned faith in them.

The bargains we’ve made have damaged us.

But what’s worse is those bourgeois elements on the other side have been routed. They no longer exist in any real sense. Sure, there are members of the Democrat Party who are decent people and can be dealt with in good faith. But those people don’t run the Democrat Party anymore. That party is now run by Alinskyite socialists who believe in the accumulation of power for its own sake.

And there is no bargain to be had with Alinskyite socialists. Because Alinskyite socialists have nothing to give. All bargains with them involve what you will give them, and never what you will get in return. They involve threats and recriminations from the Alinskyites, and those deals are cut on the basis of how much you will concede to them with nothing in consideration.

Those deals are deals made under duress.

And thus, the Hobson’s choice. Either concede to the Alinskyites, and attempt to bleed your prosperity and freedom out slowly, or fight. And know that the fight will be bloody, and bleak. That it will involve an ugly existence, and a political brutality which will return us to days thought unthinkable just a few years ago. But that the fight can be won, because our side is superior to the other – morally, intellectually, economically and in other ways we wouldn’t want to discuss here.

And while McClintock’s topic is the debt ceiling, the fight is not about whether we are $17 trillion in debt, or $18 trillion, or $19 trillion.

No. The fight is about Obamacare.

Obamacare is worse than the Stamp Act. It’s worse than the Quartering Act. Obamacare is the Intolerable Act of the 21st Century.

This is a piece of legislation which requires an individual to disclose highly personal information to the government in return for the privilege of buying uneconomic health insurance that government has dictated the individual must buy. That forced disclosure is a violation of the 4th Amendment’s prohibition against warrantless searches, and it infringes upon our right to the security of our persons and papers.

And the federal demand that we must purchase a product is a blatant violation of the Commerce Clause even in the words of a morally compromised John Roberts, who had to rewrite Obamacare as the tax the Left swore to the public it wasn’t in order to save the law from a well-deserved extinction. But as a tax, it fails under the Origination Clause because it did not originate in the House as the Constitution dictates all taxes must.

Sophistry and lies aside, this is a noxious affront to individual liberty.

But it is worse than that. Obamacare is designed to fail. This much is obvious – the reason you’re forced to disclose financial information in advance of purchasing the insurance the government demands you purchase is that Obama is terrified to show the public what over-regulated, fantasyland-economics health insurance actually costs. Instead, he wants to sugar-coat that pill with subsidies before presenting it to you. And because of that insistence on deception, the web platform for Obamacare is horribly flawed, a Rube Goldberg contraption unlikely to be fixed.

Megan McArdle games out how this will end…

If the exchanges don’t get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare — and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market. The reason that the exchanges were so important was that they were needed to attract young, healthy people into the insurance system. The worry was that if insurance is hard to buy — if you have to do your own comparison shopping and then call the insurance company, and fax in some paperwork and two years of tax returns — that the young and the healthy simply won’t do it. Sick people and old people who were getting huge subsidies — and maybe the ability to buy insurance on the private market for the first time in a long while — would overcome any obstacles, because if you’re spending $15,000 a year on health care, it’s worth a lot of your time to make sure that you have insurance. But if your biggest annual health-care expense is contact lens solution, you may just decide to skip it and pay the fine.

The administration estimates that it needs 2.7 million young healthy people on the exchange, out of the 7 million total expected to apply in the first year. If the pool is too skewed — if it’s mostly old and sick people on the exchanges — then insurers will lose money, and next year, they’ll sharply increase premiums. The healthiest people will drop out, because insurance is no longer such a good deal for them. Rinse and repeat and you have effectively destroyed the market for individual insurance policies. It’s called the “death spiral,” and the exchanges, like the mandate, were designed to keep it from happening.

Without the exchanges, the death spiral seems almost assured. The amount of work required to find a policy, figure out your subsidy, buy coverage and file the paperwork will be very high. And it’s unlikely that folks who can’t even be bothered to go to ehealthinsurance.com right now will do it. The Affordable Care Act made the task of signing up young healthy people on the exchanges even harder with its much-loved requirement that companies allow kids to stay on their parents’ policies until they’re 26, which took millions of potential buyers out of the pool. The ones who are left are going to be disproportionately poorer and less well educated than the middle-class offspring who can get cheap insurance through mom and dad. There’s a reason that virtually every person you’ve seen written up in an article as they tried to get insurance at a community center or clinic is some combination of over 55, retired or afflicted with a serious chronic condition.

Once the death spiral happens, it’s very difficult to recover from. That’s why if the exchanges don’t work soon, we need to hit the reset button and try again next year. This will be very, very difficult: Insurers are already selling policies under the new regulations, and those regulations have driven up costs for existing buyers. People who have been counting on being able to buy insurance through the exchanges will have to spend another year without. And of course, it will be politically embarrassing. But it will be even more politically embarrassing to get to December and find out that we have commanded millions of Americans to buy insurance on a system that doesn’t work. And it is not a good bargain to cover some people now, but in doing so, to make insurance unaffordable for millions more in a few years. If we can’t launch the system correctly, then we need to wait until we can.

But McArdle is approaching this on the basis of bourgeois good faith, and the assumption that the Obamites share it.

They do not.

The death spiral isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. All of this is about blaming greedy insurance companies for destroying Obamacare, and laying the predicate for destroying those insurance companies in return. Which produces the single-payer, socialized medicine that the Alinskyites wanted in the first place. And they don’t care what damage is done along the way to individual fortunes or the American economy.

Because for them it’s about power over their fellow man. It always has been.

And so, the fight must be about Obamacare. And there can be no surrender on Obamacare; not even a small surrender. Either Obamacare is killed or we will be in a battle to stop socialized medicine from emerging out of the wreckage of the private system Obamacare causes.

That means the struggle. It means standing for principle. Nothing else is left. It means no surrender, and total war.

Obamacare is our Stalingrad. It is our Tours. It’s the Gates of Vienna, Alamo and Bastogne. This is our hill to die on. And those unwilling to fight here must be replaced with those who will.