Filed under: Capitalism, Economics, Economy, Education, Environment, Free Markets, Free Speech, Freedom, Media Bias, National Security, News, Politics, Regulation, Technology, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: Short Attention Span, Surfing the Internet, The Constitution
The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center in an annual survey found that one in every five Americans cannot name a single branch of the government.
The center released its annual Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey on Thursday, and found that about 2 in 5 American adults accurately named the three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial.
- 39 percent named all three branches
- 14 percent named two branches
- 25 percent named one branch
- 22 percent couldn’t name any branch
- 1 percent refused to answer
The center notes that the percentage of people who could name all three branches “is the highest in five years, statistically the same as the prior high of 38 percent in 2013 and 2011 and a substantial increase over last year, when 32 percent could do the same.”
According to the center, the survey also found that people who took civics classes in high school, or were regular consumers of news, were more likely to know the answers to the survey questions.
That’s fairly startling, if accurate. National Review noted that the Democrats on stage for their debate Thursday night demonstrated that they are not qualified to hold forth on immigration policy because they have no idea what our immigration policy is. Joe Biden announced proudly that “we didn’t put children in cages” though all the pictures of children in cages come from the Obama administration. Andrew Yang announced that he would return immigration to the level it was during the Obama administration, which is exactly where it is right now. But one should know what the annual level of immigration is within a couple of hundred thousand, and whether it has gone up or down. These are people who supposedly want to be President.
In the past few weeks, Democrats have focused on the chance of a recession (hopefully), but steered clear of any mention of the current economy. You have probably read enough to know why they have.
I suspect that as a society, we are getting dumber. We get our news by surfing through the internet, reading a headline here and there, reading a few words of an article and deciding it’s too long, or not interesting enough, and moving on the the next bright object, as it were. And then we think of ourselves as well informed citizens, but are we actually? Is the nature of the Internet making us shallower and less informed? Scary thought, but plausible.
August reports from the Commerce Department and BLS show excellent economic results that continue to exceed MSM expectations. Retail sales climbed by 0.4 percent twice what analysts had predicted, and highlight retail sales strength year over year. Employment up for everyone. Need for food stamps dying. Unemployment for all in very low numbers.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Domestic Policy, Free Speech, Freedom, History, Law, Politics, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: Courageous Governor, The Constitution, The Electoral College
Nevada governor Steve Sisolak (D) today vetoed a bill which would have pledged Nevada’s six electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote for the President of the United States, or in other words nullifying Nevada’s voters and allowing California, Texas. Florida and New York to decide all of our elections. It would really simplify things – the rest of us could just not bother to vote, and candidates would save all sorts of money.
What is appalling is that a legislature would produce such a bill, or that our schools should be so deficient in teaching the basics of what our founders struggled to do when they devised the Constitution.
The origin of the whole thing was, of course, Democrats’ rage that Hillary won the popular vote and lost the general election. But the Left is fairly unfamiliar with the Founders, interested only in whether they owned slaves or not — because they learned their history from Howard Zinn, and assume that this country is evil, and will not be improved until governed entirely by the Left, or something like that. If you need a copy, the Cato Institute has dandy little pocket-sized versions as does Amazon.
Harvard professor and historian Bernard Bailyn, who has likely studied more of the early pamphlets than any other scholar, asserts that “influential in shaping the thought of the Revolutionary generation were the ideas and attitudes associated with the writings of Enlightenment rationalism—writings that expressed not simply the rationalism of liberal reform but that of enlightened conservatism as well.” “In pamphlet after pamphlet the American writers cited Locke on natural rights and on the social and governmental contract, Montesquieu and later Delolme on the character of British liberty and on the institutional requirements for its attainment.”
That’s from Mark Levin’s new Unfreedom of the Press (which I recommend). I also recommend Wilfrid McClay’s Land of Hope which I haven’t read yet. which is reportedly a refutation of everything Howard Zinn wrote by a highly recommended historian.
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Immigration, Islam, Latin America, Law, Media Bias, Mexico, Middle East, National Security, Progressivism, Regulation, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: Immigration, Open Borders, The Constitution
In the waiting room at the veterinarian today, I was reading the new May copy of the Seattle Met magazine. Featured article concerned the tragic people who hailed from the countries affected by Trump’s travel ban, before it was halted by illegal judicial hold. (The order from the Seattle judge was clearly improper, because the president has clear authority under the Constitution to do precisely what he did.) It was, however, upheld by the 9th Circuit, which is so far left that it has become the most overruled circuit in history. Nevertheless, the magazine apparently went to print before this all became apparent, so their article was intended as a pity piece of how these people were suffering under the abusive Trump order, which only lasted for 6 months in any case.
Some abuse. Some of the seven people were students, another was unable to return home to visit because he then would not be able to get back in the U.S. There was no discussion of how long these people had been in this country, whether they were working/applying for citizenship, illegal or what. It was a sad tale of presidential abuse, and a typical leftist trick of attempting to conflate the entire immigration issue.
The Left wants open borders. They believe that immigrants will be more apt to become Democrat voters, particularly when immigration from countries like Cuba has been halted by the Obama administration. Escaping from a Communist country suggests that they might not automatically become Democrats. Obama worked hard at distributing refugees to voting districts where they might alter the future vote, or where increasing population numbers would shift the vote.
To achieve their ends, Leftists work hard at failing to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, ignore drug-dealing, sex-trafficking, and murderous gangs that have accompanied Obama’s lax border controls. Americans who object to illegal immigrants are supposed to be the bad people, not the illegals (“No human is illegal” say the signs). The fact that most countries have far more restrictive immigration laws than we had under the Obama administration is never mentioned. Mexico has a wall on their southern border, with guard towers, I believe. Canada’s immigration laws are more restrictive than ours. “We are a nation of immigrants” they proclaim, as if that had anything to do with anything. Apparently the United States is the only country in the world that is supposed to have completely open borders, and if you don’t believe that — you are a bad person.
This is false. We are quite entitled to admit those who are most apt to be a benefit or can contribute the most to the United States, and those who most want to become Americans. That is only basic common sense.
The Left wants cheap foreign workers to replace high cost Americans. Disney’s forcing high-tech workers to train their cheaper replacements or risk losing any severance pay was a dramatically ugly act. Wealthy Leftists desire for cheap servants isn’t very attractive either. There are real long-term concerns about Muslim immigrants who want to replace the American constitution with Sharia law—we should never admit anyone who arrives wanting to overthrow our government. You are not a bad person to expect such standards.
These are the tactics of the Left, and the reason for all the names we are called— racist, bigot, nativist, etc. etc. etc. If you do not think their way, you are a bad person. How many times lately have you hesitated in something you thought or said, because of what the Left might think of you?
But then, when we welcome the new dishes and foods immigrants bring as they open restaurants, we are accused of “cultural appropriation,”so there you go.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Education, Free Markets, Freedom, Immigration, Intelligence, Law, National Security, Politics, Regulation, Taxes, The Constitution | Tags: Remaining Free People, The Constitution
Over at Powerline, Steven Hayward wrote that he stumbled across a speech that President Reagan gave in 1977 that describes our modern predicament very well:
But how much are we to blame for what has happened? Beginning with the traumatic experience of the Great Depression, we the people have turned more and more to government for answers that government has neither the right nor the capacity to provide. But government, as an institution, always tends to increase in size and power, not just this government—any government. It’s built-in. And so government attempted to provide the answers.
The result is a fourth branch added to the traditional three of executive, legislative, and judicial: a vast federal bureaucracy that’s now being imitated in too many states and too many cities, a bureaucracy of enormous power which determines policy to a greater extent than any of us realize, very possibly to a greater extent than our own elected representatives. And it can’t be removed from office by our votes.
That gets into the problem of the Administrative State which has become an increasingly larger problem under the Obama administration.
We go to hear their speeches and attend their events and vote for them for public office, and they begin to think that they are special, and if we reelect them, it increases, and newsmen call them by their title and print what they say and before you know it they start believing they are essential, and we start talking about term limits, and making rules that say that they cannot move from holding office to becoming highly-paid lobbyists valuable to their employers quite specifically because they know all the senators and representatives with whom they used to work, and thus the ability to influence them.
When they leave office, do they return home—or do they stay on in the nation’s capitol—unable to part with the power they once had? You see what an incestuous and closed circle it all becomes.
It’s easy to propose term limits for people of the other party, but term limits for your own favorites are another question. You may believe in them as wise legislators who advocate for causes you believe in, who are particularly valuable because they know their way around Congress. At what point do you agree to send them back home and elect a fresh new face who may or may not turn out to be as valuable? Hard questions.
If our government is to be, in Lincoln’s words, “a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” then it will be a constant battle and a constant question, but we have to opt for the people and for generations to come.
I can think of a number of members of Congress who have been returned to Congress by their constituents for years and years that are, frankly, just plain dumb. Is that pure party loyalty? No appealing replacement? Why keep sending them back? Term limits would take care of that, but you’d lose your favorite too.
Do you have a copy of the Constitution? Have you read the whole thing? The Cato Institute (Libertarian) sells a dandy little pocket Constitution which includes the Declaration of Independence as well. Single copies are $4.95 or are cheaper in quantity. There’s a special on 10 copies for $10.00.
Why would you want ten copies? They make nice gifts for high school seniors off to college or off to the work world. No guarantee that they will read it, but everyone should have their own copy, on the off-chance that they might find it useful to refer to from time to time.
It was Ben Franklin who once said: “It’s a republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
Filed under: Politics | Tags: Illegal Immigration, Politics, President Obama, The Constitution
Among the publications of the Hoover Institution is an online magazine called Peregrine, which includes short pieces by Hoover fellows. This one about Obama’s use of his executive power by William Suter is particularly interesting:
President Obama is not the first President to use his executive power aggressively. President Lincoln used an Executive Order in 1861 to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. The Supreme Court held that his action was unconstitutional. President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to change the composition of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1937 in order to gain favorable votes for his New Deal legislation. His “Court packing” plan was rejected by Congress and the voters. President Truman seized steel mills in 1952 to avert a strike because the mills were needed to support the Korean War. The Supreme Court held that his takeovers were unconstitutional. Previously, Truman acted courageously by issuing an Executive Order in 1948 that desegregated the armed forces. In that instance, he was on solid legal ground because the Constitution states that the President is the “commander in chief of the Army and Navy.” President Obama attempted to make three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012 when the Senate clearly was not in recess. His reason for doing this was that the Senate would not confirm his nominees. He acted as though he was the first President to be treated rudely by the Senate. Not so! His crude attempt was an insult to the Constitution. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, held that his appointments were void.
Congress also uses its power aggressively. An example is the Senate’s late-night manipulation of rules to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) in 2010. That embarrassing episode rivaled the famous 1972 Olympic Gold Medal basketball game when three seconds were mysteriously added to the clock, enabling the Soviet Union to defeat the United States. …
President Obama, emboldened by his record of changing laws – including provisions of the Affordable Care Act – decided in November 2014 to bring about his vision of immigration reform, not through Congress, but by use of executive fiats. For years, he maintained that he had no legal authority to change immigration laws. The sweeping election wins by Republicans a few weeks earlier apparently caused the President to change his mind. The largest category of people affected by the President’s executive “Presidential memos” is an estimated population of five million illegal immigrants who have been in this country for five or more years and have children who are U.S. citizens or permanent legal citizens. If they pass a background check and pay their taxes, the President offers a 3-year temporary status of “deferred action” regarding deportation along with work permits. The President’s purported legal authority to do this is his power of prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutors have such authority in individual cases, but no one can seriously think that authority is applicable on such a grand scale. What the President is doing is refusing to execute the law. He has no more authority to do this than he would to exempt corporations from paying income taxes. He cannot change the law.
As one writer put it, “This move by President Obama is not a sign of righteous impatience; it is proof that he has failed at that most basic of tasks – working with Congress.” The President has created a constitutional crisis when there was no need to do so. That is regrettable. (emphasis added)
Filed under: Politics | Tags: A Republic, James Madison, Necessary Qualities, The Constitution
James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51
This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. In private affairs, arranging for ambition to counteract ambition would conduce to prosperity, as the emerging discipline of political economy was arguing. In public affairs it would give mankind a better chance than ever before to overcome the great political difficulty: to “first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself”
In Federalist No. 55, Madison after taking up and attempting to refute hypothetical questions about how the Constitution’s checks and balances might prove too weak to prevent this or that abuse Madison finally throws up his hands. Yes, the “auxiliary precautions’ that make ambition counteract ambition will help sustain a republic But, no, a nation of devils will not form a successful republic, no matter how intelligent they are or how well their state is organized. “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust” Madison wrote, “so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.
Did we assume too much, presupposing the existence of qualities in human nature that justify esteem and confidence? And they are missing? What then?
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, History, Law, Politics, Progressivism, Statism, The Constitution | Tags: Administrative Law, Philip Hamburger, The Constitution
This lovely paragraph is in Myron Magnet’s review of Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? in City Journal, the magazine of the Manhattan Institute:
The world-historical accomplishment of the American Revolution, and of the Constitution that came out of it, Hamburger notes, was that they turned upside-down the traditional governmental model of “elite power and popular subservience.” Americans “made themselves masters and made their lawmakers their servants” through a Constitution that they themselves had made. They observed laws that had legitimacy because they themselves had consented to them, through representatives whom they themselves had chosen. And “they made clear that not only their executives but even their legislatures were without absolute power.” Citizens claimed for themselves the liberty to do anything that the laws didn’t expressly forbid, and that freedom richly nourished talent, invention, experimentation, specialization—all the human qualities that are the fuel of progress and modernity.
It struck me that much of what drives the Left is contained in that paragraph. What the Left aims for is elite power and popular subservience. Obama, today, in response to a Republican sweep of the 2014 election, has decided, instead of making an effort to work with Congress in a bipartisan manner, to conduct foreign policy and legislate all on his lonesome. Politicians, by their very nature have a healthy dose of self-esteem, and they choose their rhetoric carefully to place their accomplishments or lack of accomplishments in the best possible light. That’s just natural. But insisting that because you are President of the United States you can do whatever you want to do by executive order, ignoring the tripartite nature of our Constitutional government, is just wrong.
The Constitution lodges all legislative power in Congress, which therefore cannot delegate its lawmaking function. It is, Hamburger says, “forbidden for Congress to pass a law creating an executive branch agency that writes rules legally binding on citizens—for example, to set up an agency charged with making a clean environment and then to let it make rules with the force of law to accomplish that end as it sees fit. The power of the legislative’ as the Founding Fathers’ tutelary political philosopher, John Locke, wrote, is ‘only to make laws and not to make legislators.’ And if Congress can’t delegate the legislative power that the Constitution gives it, it certainly cannot delegate power that the Constitution doesn’t give it—namely, the power to hand out selective exemption from its laws, which is what agencies do when they grant waivers.”
James Madison, architect of the Constitution saw the separation of powers as an essential bulwark of American liberty. Administrative agencies, however, make rules, carry them out, adjudge and punish infractions of them, and wrap up legislative, executive and judicial powers in one noxious unconstitutional mess. Judicial power cannot be delegated as legislative power, the Constitution puts all of it in the judicial branch. Unlike real judges, administrative judges carry out the policy of their agency, as set and overseen by their department chief or the relevant cabinet secretary who in turn oversees him. This is not a court, and not a law, and not legal. Yet they can and do order parties to appear before it, and extort millions of dollars in settlements, force companies to allow inspectors to enter their premises without warrants, and impose real criminal penalties. It can even kill a whole industry, as Obama’s EPA is attempting to do to the coal industry and the coal-fired power industry because the President mistakenly believes the carbon dioxide they emit is the cause of global warming.
Elites, particularly Leftist elites, do not like the Constitution which restrains their grasp for power. Many have accused Barack Obama of wanting to be a king. He laughs it off, and tries to pretend that his executive orders and executive notes and memorandums and signing statements are all perfectly constitutional, and adds, of course, that Bush did it.
Constitutional government is by its nature slow, designed to force new laws to be discussed and argued about, which will incline them to be better written and better law. But Congress, at some point got lazy, and felt it would speed things up if they just handed the administrative function in its entirety off to the assorted agencies of the government.
Thanks to Obama, we have a prime example of the failure of that whole endeavor in the Environmental Protection Agency. Good intentions come up against the nature of bureaucracy which is to grow and elaborate their mission and enhance their power. The Clean Water Act has long since accomplished it’s intent, and the EPA is vigilantly attempting to extend its regulating power to the trickles that flow into the ditches that flow into the creeks that flow into the streams that eventually flow into the “navigable waters,” the big rivers, that were originally given into their oversight. That’s pure power grab.
Congress must take back the legislative power assigned to it, agencies must shrink drastically in size, authority, and reach. They are not allowed to make law, administer law, investigate and judge law and assign penalties. Things have gotten so far out of whack that most, if not all, agencies have their own swat teams.
Part of the problem is that judges don’t know or understand the intricacies of the underlying facts of that which the agencies are attempting to regulate. Congress told the EPA that the navigable waters of the United States should be reasonably clean. The courts don’t necessarily understand where the dividing line for “enough” should fall.
Even while adhering to Supreme Court precedents about administrative power, they “remain free—indeed, [the courts] are bound by duty—to expound the unlawfulness of such power.” And at some point, Hamburger expects, the Supreme Court will have to man up and frankly state that what the Constitution says is the supreme law of the land.
And the people are going to have to let their representatives know that we care about the Constitution and our freedom, and are opposed to the administrative state.
Filed under: Freedom, History, Military, National Security, The United States, United Kingdom | Tags: George Washington, History, The Constitution
Reposted from 2010.
When George Washington was elected President, there were so many questions. A Republic was something completely new to the Americans. What they knew was monarchy, and a very opulent monarchy at that. They definitely didn’t want to go back to the pomp and circumstance of England. The new office of the President of the United States needed importance, respect, dignity and what exactly? The people did not rebel against a King in order to establish a new monarchy.Congress insisted on a salary of $25,000, a huge sum for the time. Washington accepted it reluctantly, but he spent nearly $2,000 of it on liquor and wine for entertaining. He had, of course managed an army and a plantation. In fact, Mount Vernon had more staff than his presidency did.
“Washington was keenly aware that whatever he did would become a precedent for the future. How often should he meet with the public? How accessible should he be? Could he have private dinners with friends? Should he make a tour of the new states?” He sought advice from those closest to him, including his vice-president, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, his Secretary of the Treasury. The only state occasions that any of them were familiar with were those of European monarchies.
“Hamilton thought that most people were ‘prepared for a pretty high tone in the demeanor of the Executive,’ but they probably would not accept as high a tone as was desirable. “Notions of equality,” he said, were “yet…too general and too strong” for the president to be properly distanced from the other branches of the government.” Gordon Wood tells of the dilemmas.
“When Washington appeared in public, bands sometimes played “God Save the King.” In his public pronouncements the president referred to himself in the third person. His dozens of state portraits were all modeled on those of European monarchs.”
We can be truly grateful that Washington was so aware that he was establishing precedent, and so careful of what he said and did. He was setting an example, and everything he did was intended to hold the new nation together, to form a more perfect union.
One simple problem was what to call the president. John Adams had discussed the problem with his colleagues in Massachusetts. They called their governor “His Excellency”: should not the president have a higher title? Adams thought only something like ‘His Highness’ or ‘His Most Benign Highness’ would answer. Washington was said to have initially favored “His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties.” The Dutch leaders of the States-General of the United Provinces called themselves “Their High Mightinesses” and they were leaders of a Republic.” Madison managed to get his fellow congressmen to vote for the simple republican title “President of the United States.” And that was that.
Washington was relieved when the title question was settled. But “he still was faced with making the institution of the presidency strong and energetic.” In fact, said Gordon Wood, “the presidency is the powerful office it is in large part because of Washington’s initial behavior.”
Gordon S. Wood: Empire of Liberty; A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Politics, Taxes, The Constitution | Tags: Presidential Arrogance, The Constitution, The Fiscal Cliff
I wish you a Happy New Year in spite of an upcoming year that is not promising.
We dropped over the fiscal cliff at Midnight, and then the Senate passed their 157 page fiscal cliff bill which everybody passed without reading it. Didn’t anyone learn a lesson about passing unread bills? Obama is triumphal because he accomplished his two main goals. He stuck it to the Republicans and can now call it ‘a tax cut’ that he delivered to the middle class (Don’t fall for that pathetic meme), and he forced Republicans to forgo their insistence on not raising taxes.
Republicans want to keep taxes low for everyone, because low taxes will help the economy to grow. New layoffs have been coming at a furious rate as more small businesses let workers go, or shift more of their workforce to part-time to avoid the massive fines imposed by ObamaCare on those companies who have more than 50 workers. People and businesses respond to incentives. The rich will rearrange their finances, or move to a location more friendly to capital. Businesses will invest in more labor-saving devices — more telephone trees, robotic voices, more automated check-out stands, more factory innovations that save the cost of labor and it’s benefits. And although taxes will go up, the revenue will not yield as much as expected.
Republicans recognize government jobs as just another expense that will require increased taxes from the public, and yes, the middle class. They believe in smaller, less complicated government that regards its tasks as those enumerated in the Constitution, rather than one that feels it’s role is regulating our showers, our lightbulbs, our appliances. (Did you know there are new regulations for dishwashers that reduce energy and reduce the amount of water used from 6.5 gallons down to 5 gallons. This will, of course dramatically raise the cost of a dishwasher, and you will not have it long enough to realize any savings in either water or electricity).
Republicans don’t believe that it is the government’s task to control health care, nor to tell the healthcare industry just what care they may give to a patient. Republicans believe a lot of stuff that is very hard to explain in short slogans or clever bumper stickers. They think deeply about their philosophy, the meaning of the Constitution, and the maintenance of liberty.
Democrats believe in the maintenance of power. Theirs. They want to win.
Their fondest desire is to end the Republican party and all its influences. Including the U.S. Constitution, singularly restrictive on what powers are granted to the government by the American people. Democrats don’t like those restrictions that Republicans are always nattering about.
Obama has not the slightest intention of cutting back on spending in any way. He doesn’t see any reason for doing so. Economist Alan Reynolds remarked that “Barack Obama does not understand economics and refuses to listen to anyone who does.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts it this way:
“With the population aging and health care costs per person likely to keep growing faster than the economy (gross domestic product), the United States cannot sustain the federal spending programs that are now in place with the federal taxes (as a share of GDP) that it has been accustomed to paying.” $1 in spending cuts ($15 billion) for every $41 billion in tax increases ($620 billion).
The compliant (suck-up) media has accepted the Obama narrative that it it’s only Republican rigidity that makes negotiations so difficult and leads to deadlock, because Republicans want to protect the rich. This means that there is even less incentive for Obama and Congressional Democrats to engage in genuine bargaining. But the media has not performed their job as government watchdog for many years.
We are not getting a genuine debate that we deserve. The president is lying about having cut a trillion dollars from the budget. He increased it by a trillion. The President is playing ugly Chicago politics in the national arena. And Chicago, the murder capital of the country, is the nation’s most dysfunctional city. Obama’s already overbearing arrogance will swell even more. No leadership. No understanding.
You can’t have Big Government and low taxes. Doesn’t work. The president will have to come after the middle class, because that’s where the money is. The payroll tax returns. They’re already talking about your 401-ks as a source of revenue. More to come.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Election 2012, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Politics, The United States | Tags: Corruption in High Places, The Constitution, The Office of the Presidency
Filed under: Freedom, History, Law, Politics, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: 225 Years Old, Preserve Protect and Defend, The Constitution
*The Constitution of the United States of America is 225 years old and in all that time amended only 27 times. It is the oldest constitution in the world, and has served us remarkably well.
So when all these other countries are writing constitutions and organizing new governments, how come they all form parliamentary governments of one sort or another? Even our very own Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsberg advised the Egyptians that if they were going to write a new Constitution, they ought to imitate the constitution of South Africa, which is precisely 16 years old. James Lileks explains Justice Ginsberg’s appreciation for the South African Bill of Rights.
When French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing wrote the new constitution for the European Union, he studied the Constitution of the United States carefully, and wrote a constitution described as “a badly organized 855 page, 156,447 word document written at a 16th grade level”. It was elsewhere described as” the Constitution of a Dictatorship.”
It’s not too hard to figure out. Constitutions are written by politicians. Our Constitution is a document that says “We the People” grant these limited powers to the government, and anything else we reserve to ourselves. What politician is going to go for that kind of official limitation on their power? Some of us might say that politicians do a pretty good job of gathering power to themselves in spite of the limitations of the Constitution, and we’d be right. But the Constitution guarantees us a hearing when the politicians have gone too far, and we can call them to account.
Governments don’t want a populace that can talk back. When our new government was first formed, European countries were horrified. It was inconceivable to them that we should so elevate the common man. They had centuries of the Divine Right of Kings, and landed aristocracy, peasants and shopkeepers. Remember what an earthquake it was in the Middle East when triumphant Iraqis went to the polls to vote, men and women, and waved their purple-stained fingers in the air for newsmen to photograph.
The president and all officers of the government as well as the Congress and the Courts take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Obama’s aggressive disregard for any constitutional limit on what he wants to do has had the effect of sending Americans back to the Constitution. Conservative complaints are directed to all areas of Obama’s policy, foreign, economic and social. The fear that Mr. Obama was changing the rules led to the founding of the Tea Party movement.
On foreign policy, Obama’s claim that firing rockets in Libya were somehow not a war was troubling. Obama’s hiring of all sorts of ‘czars’ to manage aspects of national policy without congressional approval was disturbing. The notion that Obama could decide whether or not Congress was in session or in recess so he could make recess appointments of someone who could not get Congressional approval, angered many. The administration’s argument that the protections of the First Amendment do not extend to the Catholic Church’s freedom of conscience, while simultaneously granting freedom from participation to Muslims is sure to engender another Constitutional challenge. The administration’s EPA has been losing one court case after another, so there has been some welcome check on the agency’s activities.
Ordinary Americans who had never previously heard of the Commerce Clause are perfectly capable of understanding the argument that if the federal government can require a citizen to buy a product in the marketplace, there is nothing that the citizen cannot be forced to do. How startling then, to discover that way too many liberals could not grasp that argument.
Liberals do not like the Constitution and would prefer to have it rewritten. They would much prefer a document that spells out the rights that the government grants to citizens and one that puts no limits on what government can do. Then they can all work for government, and they could keep the rest of us from disagreeing with them. Not my idea of Utopia, but I don’t believe in unicorns either.
* The marvelous Michael Ramirez daily comes up with perfect visual analogies. I don’t know how he does it, but you can see his work daily at Investors.com, and even purchase his book on his best political cartoons. A wonderful record of what we were thinking at a particular moment in time.
ADDENDUM: Here is Obama, agreeing with me about liberals Constitutional preferences. He goes even farther, to state that the Constitution should certainly contain rights about redistribution of wealth. At least this was his opinion on
January 6, 2011.
American Elephants 