Yesterday President Obama bypassed Congress and the United States Constitution by appointing Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Who cares? Exactly! Who has time to understand the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? What the hell is that? No one cares. It’s just another sign that the Republic is nearly over. Americans can’t be bothered by their elected leaders’ actions. At least half the country is going to vote for Democrats until death because they recieve tax breaks, subsidies, food stamps, or some other government entitlement, or work for the government.
A nation divided against itself cannot stand. Right now half the nation pays taxes while the other half collects some kind of government assistance. President Obama doesn’t have to worry about repercussions from ignoring the Constitution because, frankly, people are either too ignorant, too apathetic, or too drunk on big government to care. How else can you explain a “recess appointment” when the Senate isn’t in recess? Here is what President Obama has to say for himself:
But when Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as President to do what I can without them. I’ve got an obligation to act on behalf of the American people. And I’m not going to stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people that we were elected to serve.
Apparently President Obama is still confused about the oath he took (twice) on his inauguration. Here’s a reminder:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Obama’s job is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. This is the type of action that wouldn’t have floated during the Bush administration. Blocking appointments is nothing new. I’ve written before how the Democrats blocked almost every appointment they could when Bush was president. President Obama was was once part of that minority. The hypocrisy of this president is maddening.
In the end I don’t blame the President. The natural course of every apathetic nation is to be ruled by despots. President Obama is a symptom of a much larger problem. If Obama thought anyone cared he wouldn’t dare make such a tyrannical move, but today he can simply say he’s “looking out for the little guy” and his growing constituency will applaud. In the George Lucas school of dying Republics that’s exactly how liberty dies. To the sound of thunderous applause.
Texas Governor Rick Perry has suddenly caught the attention of Christianphobes. Governor Perry is participating in an all-day prayer event on August 6th. Apparently, his mere presence at the event is an establishment of a state religion. It’s amazing that a Texas governor could have that much power in the United States.
It is indeed possible the Rick Perry is holding the event for political reasons. It’s impossible to know the heart of a man. However, have we gotten to the point that even mentioning God is unconstitutional?
The Freedom From Religious Foundation, which claims more than 16,000 members, including 700 in Texas, filed the federal lawsuit Wednesday in Houston, contending that Perry’s actions violate the Constitution’s Establishment Clause by “giving the appearance that the government prefers evangelical Christian religious beliefs over other religious beliefs and non-beliefs.”
“We always say, beware prayer by pious politicians,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, who co-directs the group with her husband, Dan Barker, a former evangelical Christian minister who is now an atheist.
“Nothing fails like prayer,” she said. “It’s the ultimate political cop-out.”[emphasis added]
Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker’s real grief is with God and people who believe in God. It’s not Rick Perry or the Constitution. Doesn’t Rick Perry have a constitutional right to participate in any religious event he wants? Doesn’t he have a constitutional right to say God’s name? You don’t sacrifice your religion to run for higher office. President Abraham Lincoln mentioned God six times in his magnificent second inaugural address and it’s written on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial.
Indeed, Lincoln’s second inaugural address is the greatest inaugural address by this nation’s greatest president. Here is the second half of Lincoln’s address. According to Gaylor, this is the most unconstitutional speech in American history.
Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
The speech is mesmerizing in its honest and humble appreciation of God’s sovereign will. Obviously, not everyone believes that is the case, and they’re free to believe whatever they want. Christianphobes are allowed to believe, say, and think whatever they want. No one is forcing them to kneel before God; however, they don’t have the right to stop Rick Perry or forget about the powerful words of President Abraham Lincoln.
Club Soda adds: This is yet another shining example of how the Establishment Clause is misused. By participating in, and even favoring one religion over another, Rick Perry or any other politician is not “establishing” squat. However, if Rick Perry advocated forcing everyone to convert to whatever sect of Christianity he belongs to, that, my friends, would be an “establishment” of religion and therefore unconstitutional. You could argue that the dogmatic teaching of the theory of evolution in the public schools is an establishment of religion. The religion in this case would be Materialism, which is as much a faith-based system as any religion. It is, in fact, a religion by definition, and one that does not allow dissent from any of its precepts. But, as usual, I digress. To digress even further, I wonder if it’s okay for Minnesota’s Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison to favor Islam over Christianity. It’s certainly okay with me, and it’s apparently okay with the hyperventilating anti-Christian crowd if one professes Islam, Judaism, Materialism, Atheism, or any other faith over Christianity. Either be consistent or leave everyone the hell alone about their beliefs. Ultimately, this is not about the Constitution or religion or anything other than one group attempting to force its will and its own beliefs on others. If you don’t like the fact that we are absolutely free to believe and say what we want, then please move to one of the world’s Utopian societies, like Saudi Arabia.
I had an interesting conversation this past weekend while riding a gondola to the top of Aspen Mountain for the resort’s last weekend of skiing with a local immersed in Aspen’s culture. It wasn’t a conversation as much as it was a soliloquy as our fellow gondola rider waxed poetic about the town and the four ski mountains that surround it.
So you really want dufuses like this to run our health care system? Okay then...
He said he was originally from Indiana, but the state was “too conservative” for his tastes; Aspen was just right for him. The ride ended before I could ask him if he was Federalist in his politics, meaning a belief that locals rule the details while the federal government manages the “general political interests of the nation,” as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 84, not “the regulation of every species of personal and private concerns.”
The great thing about Federalism in theory and practice is that it allows someone who doesn’t like the political climate in his location to move somewhere else that better suits them. Do you want universal health care? Move to Massachusetts. Want to openly smoke pot? Move to Aspen. Don’t want the state to be on your ass all the time and regulate you into oblivion? Move to Texas or Indiana.
However, when those jokers in D.C. consolidate their power and begin to regulate every species of personal and private concerns, there is no escape. What does this have to do with Twitter Boy, Anthony Weiner? It’s just the latest example in a long line of bi-partisan examples that should warn all of us to limit, rather than enlarge, the scope and reach of the federal government.
But every time one votes for a Democrat they’re voting to give the federal government more power, concentrating that power in only a few hands, hands that are decidedly busy looking for ways to use their office to get into someone’s pants or pickpocket our money for nefarious purposes. I don’t really care what these people do in their spare time, but I sure as hell care when they do it on the taxpayer’s dime, a.k.a., my dime.
Then, they typically lie and obfuscate about their sins as they search for some way to retain the perks of their office, the aforementioned hands in the pants and pockets. And you really want them to run our health care system?
Let me be clear, to borrow a phrase… The only individual they care about is themselves, by and large. Where do you think you really stand in their world? Like most people the world over they have only their best interests at heart. This is human nature, the nature liberals deny in their unicorn-filled fantasy world.
America’s founders rejected this fantasy land, this brotherhood of man nonsense that they understood to be unattainable. They realized that allowing a small group of people the ability to regulate every species of personal and private concerns from a remote location would mark the end of the freedom they envisioned for the people of the United States.
Thus the Constitution is a document of limitations on federal power. It enumerates the necessary functions of a central government, while it gives states and localities the power to handle the details (please see the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights). If you think about it logically, it makes perfect sense. Our local and state leaders are far more accountable to the people than are a relative few thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C.
So why did the aptly named Weiner run for office in the first place? Was it a selfless dedication to protecting our liberties and freedoms through valiant public service? Or, was it to opiate the masses with hand-outs so that he could more easily pursue his primary passion… young ladies?
Reason #492 I oppose direct democracy.
I have always advocated for republicanism or representative democracy as opposed to direct democracy at all levels of government, mainly because the average voter, Yours Truly included, is not qualified to make an informed and right decision about specific legislation. That’s why we have representatives; it’s their job, not mine nor yours, to plow through the legalese and discern the actual impact a particular piece of legislation will have.
And so I find myself in the unusual position of being in favor of a lawsuit being brought against Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), passed as a ballot initiative in 1992. Basically, the current TABOR law says that taxes cannot be raised without the consent of the voters through tax-specific ballot initiatives.
I agree with plaintiffs in this case, but with one important condition: If you throw out TABOR you have to cease and desist from filling our ballots with any initiatives or amendments in the future. I know why many of the plaintiffs are filing this case, and it has nothing to do with the primary Constitutional argument they’re making. They want to be able to raise taxes without voter approval so they can continue to grow government in their favor.
It’s no coincidence that the lead plaintiff is a Democrat representing Lakewood, Colo. in the state legislature and that among the plaintiffs are former University of Colorado presidents and others involved in the state education bureaucracy. Hmmmm… I wonder why they’d like to be able to raise taxes without voter approval? Still, I’m willing to cede this for the greater good of more republicanism in Colorado, if indeed a successful suit would rid us once and for all of those pesky ballot initiatives that are harmful to good government.
The lawsuit claims that TABOR, and I would assume any ballot initiative, violates Article 4, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, in which “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…” But it makes you wonder why, after all this time and thousands of ballot initiatives, the plaintiffs suddenly discovered republicanism.
The premise of the lawsuit is shaky at best because the wording is not explicit or even implicit, that every state has to have a republican form of government. If that were the case, it would say something more like this: Every State in this Union shall have a Republican Form of Government. There is no doubt, however, that the founders were against direct democracy. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote:
Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would at the same time be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
Madison continued that a republic “opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking.” Madison’s opinion did not come out of the clear blue sky, but was based on a thorough research of history and the various types of government that litter it. Republicanism is not only common sense, but is objectively and empirically proven to be the best possible form of government.
Unfortunately, once you let the direct democracy horse out of the barn it’s quite difficult to bring it back. There must be an open, honest and public debate about republicanism versus direct democracy on philosophical and historic grounds. It will not be accomplished through a Constitutional challenge, nor should it be the Trojan Horse for public sector pigs looking for new ways to extract more money from the taxpayer and wallow in the proceeds.
I haven’t gotten my head wrapped around this whole Libya conflict. The United States has no interest in what’s going on there besides oil. This is even more transparent than our action in Iraq. I’m sure this really annoys the anti-war left, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to the President.
“The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” – Sen. Barack Obama December 20, 2007.
Maybe I shouldn’t be giving the President the benefit of the doubt. It’s becoming more and more apparent the White House is aloof and the nation doesn’t have a clear policy on anything. The lack of focus coming from the White House is a damning indictment of Obama’s leadership skills. President Obama might be reelected, but he’s a terrible leader. What does he believe in? What are his core principles? When has he taken a stand on anything? Maybe the nation will have better luck next time.
The United States Constitution is a wonderful document. Part of the reason it’s been so successful over the past two centuries is because it’s easy to understand. Well, it’s easy for some people. On the left it’s a little more difficult to understand because they want the Constitution to mean different things. The right to privacy is a great example. Another good example is the Establishment Clause, which the left still doesn’t understand and continues to refer to as the “separation of church and state,” though it clearly does not say that.
Ezra Klein took to the Washington Post today to do what every good liberal does… call Republicans stupid.
In reality, the tea party — like most everyone else — is less interested in living by the Constitution than in deciding what it means to live by the Constitution. When the constitutional disclaimers at the bottom of bills suit them, they’ll respect them. When they don’t — as we’ve seen in the case of the individual mandate — they won’t.
This is part of Klein’s reaction to the future of ObamaCare. Wouldn’t his time be better spent discussing how the President of the United States sold his bill. While Obama was trying to pass his colossal Heath Care overhaul he took to the airwaves and said that the mandate wasn’t a tax. Now that the mandate is tied up in courts for Constitutional reasons, the Obama administration is arguing that the mandate is a tax. The President and his cronies are hypocrites of the highest order, but all Klein can whine about is the confusing Constitution. He also took his cringe-inducing argument to the echo chamber over at MSNBC. The Right Scoop has all the details, but here’s an excerpt of what Klein had to say on MSNBC:
The issue with the Constitution is not that people don’t read the text and think they’re following it. The issue with the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago.
This issue here isn’t that the right is stupid; it’s that the left doesn’t get it. The Constitution is a protection from the government. The Constitution wasn’t created to be a Toys R’ Us of guaranteed benefits (I don’t want to grow up, etc., etc.). Free speech is a right that was given to us by our Creator, not by some bureaucrat. Having a place to eat and sleep is important as well, but those are the responsibilities of the people, not the state. What we have now is a government that increasingly takes care of everything. That’s not in the Constitution, and the left wants to blame stupid Republicans and the Constitution for being too old.
There was a darn good reason the Founders didn’t want the state to take care of every one of life’s inconveniences. Their wisdom about the dangers of an ever-growing and intrusive centralized federal government, clearly communicated in the Constitution, are being borne out in places like Greece and California.
As a vocal proponent of amending the Constitution so that the Federal government’s sole and exclusive power is to regulate college and professional sports, I am still somewhat dismayed at the news that sullied my desk the other day about Roger Clemens.
Roger the Rocket, so dubbed for his ability to strike out batters in years past, is now better known as Roger the Dodger for his inability to tell the truth about his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Unfortunately for Roger, the truth apparently eluded him while under oath before a Congressional hearing on steroid use in professional sports. As a result, Roger has been indicted by a Federal grand jury for what amounts to perjury.
In a sane world – that is, one in which the Federal government’s sole responsibility is policing sports – Clemens’ indictment would have been a necessary evil as part of the government’s only Constitutional power. But in this mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world, Clemens is being persecuted for no good reason.
It’s absolutely pointless to spend tax dollars on a Federal show trial of Clemens. I must have checked my copy of the Constitution at least a dozen times searching in vain for any mention of Congressional responsibility for Major League Baseball. But maybe it’s one of those clauses that covers everything, like the Commerce Clause or promoting “the general welfare.”
Let me be clear… This has nothing to do with anything other than a bunch of Congressional blowhards taking down easy targets so they can at least look like they’re accomplishing something. There’s nothing at stake here; only the apparently fragile egos of our beloved representatives. Congressional hearings have become nothing more than a three-ring circus of ghouls pick-pocketing the dead and then piling into their gas-guzzling freeloader-mobile to pick-pocket the taxpayers.
Meanwhile, the city of Houston has to undergo another indignity in a long line of indignities that stretches back to the 1979 Cotton Bowl.
What's more likely? This makeshift truck boat is headed from Cuba to the U.S. to escape an oppressive regime, or it's headed from the U.S. to Cuba with refugees clamoring for universal health care?
What motivates someone to build a boat out of a Cadillac and brave 90 miles of open ocean to leave Cuba for America’s shores? What motivates someone to risk life and limb and trek across vast desert wastes to leave Mexico and other Central American countries for America?
On the other hand, what motivates America’s citizens to stay put, excepting crazies like Lee Harvey Oswald, and spend all their time on Facebook? Could it have something to do with American exceptionalism, driven by its foundations in liberty and freedom?
The simple fact that people the world over are willing to die to get to America tells me all I need to know about which system is best. America, in short, is fantastic. But it’s not fantastic because our government has forced some utopian notion of equality on its citizens or provided “rights” like health care, housing and a comfortable standard of living. Our comfortable standard of living exists because government never provided it in the first place.
America was founded on the notion that governments are instituted to protect our rights to pursue such things with very little or no government intervention. In fact, government intervention was seen as a threat to liberty and freedom. This philosophy is the only sane and logical approach to good government in an imperfect world. The evidence that this is true is overwhelming.
The evidence that a giant centralized government that meddles in and plans every aspect of a citizen’s life is destructive is also overwhelming. While the likes of Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and Danny Glover return from worker paradises like Cuba and Venezuela with glowing reports of utopian equality, the citizens of those nations languish in widespread poverty and oppression.
No one who believes in American exceptionalism believes America is perfect, but America is the closest model to perfection we have and are likely to have. Again, this is not because our government has made everything perfectly safe and wonderful for each and every citizen; it’s because a person free to pursue happiness is more likely to find it on their own than through someone a thousand miles away who thinks they know what’s best for them.
The left in America, meanwhile, is constantly advocating for “social justice,” and other euphemisms to control the individual. In practice, this supposed social justice leads to a concentration of wealth and power in the ruling class. Those of us who believe the world is imperfect and that there’s no such thing as Utopia, other than the small town in Texas of that name, understand how dangerous it is to cede our responsibilities, and ultimately our liberties, to a powerful minority.
Just ask any Cuban who’s not with one of their Party handlers if they’ve found Utopia. Sure, they have “free” health care and I’m sure gun violence is practically non-existent, but at what price? I don’t know about you, but I’m much more willing to take my chances in a free society and all the risks that come with it than to be controlled within an inch of my life by the state.
I have a feeling that most people agree with me since I don’t see a lot of people in Miami building makeshift boats to escape America and take advantage of Cuba’s health care system and high “literacy” rates. What I see instead are Canadians coming to America for health care because they have to wait months, if not years, for treatment.
Nor do America’s progressives head for the supposedly greener pastures in more “progressive” nations. Maybe that’s because deep down they understand that America is not the racist, imperialistic devil they’ve been taught it is, but actually is the land of opportunity. I suppose progressives don’t understand that our opportunity is, as the founders put it, derived from our Creator and not a central planning authority, a.k.a., the Federal government. They must think it appeared out of thin air.
When a society’s philosophy shifts from “endowed by the Creator” to “endowed by a centralized bureaucracy,” you can kiss freedom goodbye. Even atheists who understand human nature and have an inkling of history know that it’s far better to be endowed by what they consider to be a mere sociological illusion than it is by their fellow man, who has a long and storied history of doing everything he can to oppress and control others to benefit himself.
Why else do they riot in Greece when their benefits are going to be cut so that the government remains at least nominally solvent? Why else do America’s senior citizens, supported by the AARP, fight tooth and claw for the unsustainable entitlements that will bathe their descendents in debt and, ultimately, economic calamity?
Do they really care about their fellow citizens, particularly those who will follow them? They can cry and whine about the “children” all day long, but until they make actual sacrifices for said “children” you can bet that the “children” are being used as human shields to ensure they get all the goodies the taxpayer can provide them.
America’s unfunded liabilities – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – currently stand at more than $110 trillion. That’s a “t” followed by “rillion,” and it’s not a typo. That works out to about $350,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Who’s going to pay for that? Will it be the senior citizens currently receiving benefits, or will it be Yours Truly and my children and grandchildren?
Tell a senior citizen that their benefits will need to be cut to ease the burden on future generations and observe the wrath that follows. So, if you hear a senior citizen say something weepy about the “children” and how we have to secure health care or whatnot for them, know that they’re really looking out for themselves. You can safely substitute “me” for “children” whenever you hear a Democrat defend the latest unsustainable program, as in, “We’re doing this for [me].”
Something tells me that future generations will be building rafts out of used compact fluorescent light bulbs and heading for China. If we continue on this “progressive” path, America will no longer be that “city upon a hill” that brought the oppressed to its shores.
Imagine if America’s founding had been based on “social justice” and providing creature comforts (health care, unemployment insurance, etc., etc.), rather than the individual’s freedom to pursue those things through their own ingenuity and industry. If based on the former, would we have the same standard of living we do now? What would the world look like now if America had been founded as a nanny state? I’m not sure, but there’s a good chance we’d all be speaking German.
The big news today is that President Obama has selected his nominee for the Supreme Court. Elena Kagan doesn’t have much of a record and would be the first justice in 40 years without prior judicial experience. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We’re supposed to believe Kagan might not be liberal enough, but I’m starting to suspect that Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald is just giving his side cover. There’s nothing to suggest that Kagan isn’t as liberal as Justice Stevens and it’s likely she’s further to the left. Why anyone takes Greenwald seriously is another story.
Ultimately, this is one of the consequences of the 2008 election. Many may forget that in 2006 then Senator Obama tried to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee. For those that don’t know, that’s an extremely partisan gesture. There’s no telling how extreme Kagan will be on the court, but if Obama’s record is any indication it won’t be good for the nation.
The biggest question I have today is rather trivial. Doesn’t Elena Kagan look a lot like Rachel Maddow?
I think I can see Maddow's future.
I’ll leave this question to the scholars to ponder, and I’ll let Scott Lemieux make my final point. He might be a little over the top, but I think his central argument is true. Liberals aren’t really concerned that much about what the constitution says, but what they can interpret it to say.
When you’re reduced to noting that a prospective nominee for the highest court in the land is a “brilliant conversationalist” and that other Harvardites think she’s good people, one has pretty much conceded that the pick is Ivy League nepotism of the worst sort. The idea that the complete absence of evidence about her constitutional vision is no big deal is something that’s easy for someone who will never be denied an abortion, be discriminated against by an employer, etc., to say, but for people who actually take such things seriously it’s rather important.
As the conservative reaction to Harriet Miers indicates, conservatives do take their constitutional values seriously. I suspect we’re about to find out that far too many liberals don’t. And if a more Republican future Senate rejects or filibusters Obama’s next nominee down the road, this will rank as a blunder on a par with Reagan‘s failure to nominate Robert Bork while the GOP still controlled the Senate. You don’t waste a pick on a blank-slate centrist when your position in the Senate is about to get dramatically weaker.
Yours truly, Club Soda, happens to be one of those whom the White House and its fascist phalanx of Democratic Party machine drones have characterized as part of “the mob”. In reality, the vast majority of those showing up at town hall meetings to confront their “representatives” are average Americans expressing their Constitutional right to assemble peaceably and disagree with the direction those representatives are taking them.
So what if they’re encouraged by right-wing blogs and talk radio to take to the streets? How else do citizens mobilize en masse? When progressives do it, it’s called “community organizing,” but when conservatives do it they’re referred to as a “mob”. In reality, progressive community organizing means recruiting professional thugs, goons and bullies from unions and Soros-funded shadow groups with benign nom de plumes like Americans Coming Together (ACT).
As these community groups are brought together to help quell the popular uprising of ordinary Americans, you can almost hear Hedley Lamarr from Blazing Saddles: “I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists.”
What concerns many Americans is the surrender of political power from the local and state level to the Federal level. The more responsibility the Federal government takes for the individual, the less free that individual becomes.
The powers delegated to the Federal government are quite clear, and they basically boil down to national defense, infrastructure and interstate commerce. The 10th Amendment clearly states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, or prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The entire concept of the Constitution was to provide the necessary cohesion to the Union not provided by the Articles of Confederation while maintaining the autonomy of the individual to pursue life, liberty and happiness with minimal Federal restraint. This is why we do not see an enumeration of “positive rights” in the Constitution, such as a “right” to health care or other creature comforts. Rather, the Constitution enumerates “negative rights,” or the freedom of the people from governmental encroachment on their individual lives and decisions.
Perhaps no one personifies the corruption, cronyism and condescension currently permeating the nation’s capitol than Barbara Boxer. Through Boxer, we are provided a window into the soul of an arrogant aristocracy that will happily trample on our freedoms to expand their power and influence. It is this arrogant exercise of power at the expense of the individual that is driving much of the dissent in America today.
Progressives complain bitterly about evil giant corporate conglomerates, and to some extent I agree with them. I simply hate having to deal with large corporations because I can never get anything done quickly and easily. I am not an individual to this corporation; I am simply a number in a vast sea of ones and zeroes. “Press One for English. Prense dos para Espanol. Press Three for this. Press Four for that. And so on and so forth until you hang up in disgust. Have a nice day!”
The point is that the larger and more remote any organization gets from its constituency, the less likely it is to have any care for the individual. And that’s the problem with yielding more power from the local and state level to the Federal level.
Do we seriously believe that a gigantic, centralized bureaucracy will be efficient, caring and, ultimately, just? If we do, we deserve what we get, which will ultimately be a huge corruptacracy that serves a mish-mash of powerful special interests and grievance-mongering groups living 30 years in the past, a.k.a., community organizers.
This is not “progressive”; it is positively regressive and de-evolutionary. Was the Soviet Union a success; a model to be emulated by future U.S. administrations? What did we learn from past collectivist/socialist/fascist/Marxist forms of government? We learned that concentrating power and wealth in a centralized government led to vast societal misery and poverty. The “people’s republics” were about people alright… the people in power.
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