Bloodthirsty Liberal

I am aware that the Constitution lays the responsibility of budgeting in the House of Representatives, though I couldn’t have told you exactly why.

This guy can, and so should Harry Reid:

It’s one of the clearest, easiest-to-understand provisions in the Constitution. And Harry Reid’s Senate flouts it routinely.

The Origination Clause in Article I, Section 7 states: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.” In addition to clarity, this provision has an even greater virtue: It serves a very good purpose.

The Founding Fathers required revenue measures to originate in the House because they wanted this authority to belong to the legislative body closest to the people. Plus, the Framers wanted the larger states to enjoy the most influence on matters of taxing and spending, which is the case in the House (whose seats are allocated according to population) but not the Senate (where each state gets two seats regardless of population and smaller states have outsized influence). “This power over the purse,” James Madison explained in Federalist No. 58, “may, in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has taken to thumbing his nose at this clear mandate. Recently, he publicly dismissed the Origination Clause as a “hyper-technical budget issue,” raised by his Republican opponents as “a fig leaf to hide their blatant obstruction.”

We’ll be charitable and describe Harry Reid as a partisan hack and not merely an ignoramus. He should know better, and I believe he does.

But when Senior Lecturer Obama (now Lecturer in Chief) described the United States Constitution as a “charter of negative liberties”, it’s clear he was speaking for a whole political philosophy. Liberals are fundamentally constrained from doing all that they want to do, what they feel they “must do on our behalf”. That is why they chafe at “hyper-technical” “fig leafs” (what a monstrous description of such a bedrock principle of government), why they talk of deeming bills to be passed rather than passing them, why they intrude into the relationship between patient and doctor and so basically alter an industry that amounts to one-sixth of the economy.

Oh yes, if it’s not too “hyper-technical” of me to observe, the Senate hasn’t passed a budget since 2009.

And it’s not just Obama, Reid, and Pelosi—everybody’s into repealing the Constitution:

One unnamed Senate staffer even speculated that the House’s fealty to the Constitution “may be part of some Republican plan.” This is all in keeping with how the leftist intelligentsia has viewed previous efforts to ignore the Origination Clause. The New York Times characterized one such mishap as an “arcane parliamentary mistake” the enforcement of which was designed “to block . . . everything else Mr. Reid is hoping to accomplish,” while The Washington Monthly termed it “a Democratic procedural slip-up.” As Elizabeth Price Foley, a professor at Florida International University’s School of Law and author of the excellent new intellectual history of the tea-party movement (The Tea Party: Three Principles), puts it: “Nowhere in these statements is there recognition that the holdup was constitutional rather than political.”

There is a constitutionally permissible way for the Senate to make its voice heard on revenue measures. Under widely accepted precedent, the Senate could take up House-passed tax bills, amend them, and then send the amended legislation back to the House for further consideration.

Liberal columnists like E.J. Dionne love to lament in print and on TV of the passing of the reasonable Republican, the one who wasn’t so “hyper-technical” and “arcane”, so obsessed with “slip-ups” and “Republican plans”. It’s clear why. Some Republicans might have gone along to get along. But not the Tea Party. It formed organically as a movement of citizens concerned about basic liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. Its adherents (their being no such formality as “membership”) saw in the presidential and congressional results of 2008 a dangerous swing toward autocracy in government. And they organized.

Negative liberties are still liberties—indeed they may be the only kind worth having.

The Supreme Court hotline is temporarily experiencing heavier than usual call activity. Please wait on the line, and a Justice will be with you shortly. Your Constitutional challenge to the cluster-Fluke known as ObamaCare is important to us. Thank you for your patience:

Catholic archdioceses and institutions filed suit in federal district courts across the country Monday against the so-called contraception mandate, claiming their “fundamental rights hang in the balance.”

The plaintiffs include a host of schools and organizations, including the University of Notre Dame and the Archdiocese of New York. The lawsuits, though related, were filed individually.

The schools are objecting to the requirement from the federal health care overhaul that employers provide access to contraceptive care. The Obama administration several months back softened its position on the mandate, but some religious organizations complained the administration did not go far enough to ensure the rule would not compel them to violate their religious beliefs.

…

We have tried negotiation with the Administration and legislation with the Congress – and we’ll keep at it – but there’s still no fix. Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now. … It is also a compelling display of the unity of the Church in defense of religious liberty. It’s also a great show of the diversity of the Church’s ministries that serve the common good and that are jeopardized by the mandate – ministries to the poor, the sick, and the uneducated, to people of any faith or no faith at all.

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This lawsuit is about one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference. It is not about whether people have a right to abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception. Those services are, and will continue to be, freely available in the United States, and nothing prevents the Government itself from making them more widely available. But the right to such services does not authorize the Government to force the University of Notre Dame (“Notre Dame”) to violate its own conscience by making it provide, pay for, and/or facilitate those services to others, contrary to itssincerely held religious beliefs. …

If the Government can force religious institutions to violate their beliefs in such a manner, there is no apparent limit to the Government’s power. Such an oppression of religious freedom violates Notre Dame’s clearly established constitutional and statutory rights.

The First Amendment also prohibits the Government from becoming excessively entangled in religious affairs and from interfering with a religious institution’s internal decisions concerning the organization’s religious structure, ministers, or doctrine. The U.S. Government Mandate tramples all of these rights.

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[I]f one Presidential Administration can override our religious purpose and use religious organizations to advance policies that undercut our values, then surely another Administration will do the same for another very different set of policies, each time invoking some concept of popular will or the public good, with the result these religious organizations become mere tools for the exercise of government power, morally subservient to the state, and not free from its infringements. If that happens, it will be the end of genuinely religious organizations in all but name.

The Church has the force of the Constitution behind it, for all that matters. Because, as Professor Obama—sorry, Senior Lecturer Obama—told us: many believe the Constitution is a document of “negative liberties” that is silent on what the government “must do on your behalf”. If a bunch of dead white men didn’t think to order the Roman Catholic Church to sanction and provide for abortions, that’s their problem, not Sandra Fluke’s.

Anyhow, “Obamacare: The Court Case” sounds like it will run longer than Cats!

Obama born in Kenya.

H/t Rush, who directed his listeners to Drudge.

Note from Senior Management:

Andrew Breitbart was never a “Birther,” and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of “Birtherism.” In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.

Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.

It is for that reason that we launched “The Vetting,” an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)–not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.

It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below–one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.

It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

So was he or wasn’t he?

Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

The booklet, which was distributed to “business colleagues” in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.

It also promotes Obama’s anticipated first book, Journeys in Black and White–which Obama abandoned, later publishing Dreams from My Father instead.

Obama’s biography in the booklet is as follows (image and text below):

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.

The booklet, which is thirty-six pages long, is printed in blue ink (and, on the cover, silver/grey ink), using offset lithography. It purports to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Acton & Dystel, which was founded in 1976.

If, like me, you woke up from a lifetime of sleepwalking in a left-wing trance, your discovery (rediscovery) of the Federalist Papers was a revelation (no less the Anti-Federalist Papers). Serious people discussing weighty issues at the highest level of intellectual engagement. What is the role of government in our lives? Will the President merely replace the King as an omnipotent ruler? Are we a union, or a loose confederation, of 57 colonies? The philosophical treatises of the Enlightenment—from Rousseau and Mill to Hobbes and Locke—turned into flesh and blood arguments.

And nothing about percentage of Cherokee blood or whether you can keep your doctor.

No wonder left wing academia (which is all of academia) won’t go near the thing:

[D]espite the lip service they pay to liberal education, our leading universities can’t be bothered to require students to study The Federalist—or, worse, they oppose such requirements on moral, political or pedagogical grounds. Small wonder it took so long for progressives to realize that arguments about the constitutionality of ObamaCare are indeed serious.

The masterpiece of American political thought originated as a series of newspaper articles published under the pseudonym Publius in New York between October 1787 and August 1788 by framers Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. The aim was to make the case for ratification of the new constitution, which had been agreed to in September 1787 by delegates to the federal convention meeting in Philadelphia over four months of remarkable discussion, debate and deliberation about self-government.

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It displays a level of learning, political acumen and public-spiritedness to which contemporary scholars, journalists and politicians can but aspire. And to this day it stands as an unsurpassed source of insight into the Constitution’s text, structure and purposes.

At Harvard, at least, all undergraduate political-science majors will receive perfunctory exposure to a few Federalist essays in a mandatory course their sophomore year. But at Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Berkeley, political-science majors can receive their degrees without encountering the single surest analysis of the problems that the Constitution was intended to solve and the manner in which it was intended to operate.

Most astonishing and most revealing is the neglect of The Federalist by graduate schools and law schools. The political science departments at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Berkeley—which set the tone for higher education throughout the nation and train many of the next generation’s professors—do not require candidates for the Ph.D. to study The Federalist. And these universities’ law schools (Princeton has no law school), which produce many of the nation’s leading members of the bar and bench, do not require their students to read, let alone master, The Federalist’s major ideas and main lines of thought.

Because those lines of thought encourage individualism, not collectivism. To liberals, everything is secondary to political ideology: religion, ethnic identity, you name it. Isn’t it telling that the left sees all sorts of guarantees in the Constitution (where are the blue pill and the red pill mentioned), while enumerated rights (to bear arms) are dismissed?

And thus so many of our leading opinion formers and policy makers seem to come unhinged when they encounter constitutional arguments apparently foreign to them but well-rooted in constitutional text, structure and history. These include arguments about, say, the unitary executive; or the priority of protecting political speech of all sorts; or the imperative to articulate a principle that keeps the Constitution’s commerce clause from becoming the vehicle by which a federal government—whose powers, as Madison put it in Federalist 45, are “few and defined”—is remade into one of limitless unenumerated powers.

Ha! Compare with the “philosophy” of Nancy Pelosi. Be afraid, be very afraid.(I’m serious!)

Another Executive Branch power grab

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is allowing U.S. funds to flow to the West Bank and Gaza despite a hold by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a rare display of executive-branch authority sure to anger the key lawmaker concerned about protecting her congressional oversight role.

A State Department official said that the letter was delivered on Tuesday to key members of Congress informing them of Clinton’s decision to move forward with the $147 million package of the fiscal year 2011 economic support funds for the Palestinian people, despite Ros-Lehtinen’s hold. Administrations generally do not disburse funding over the objections of lawmakers on relevant committees.

“[The funds deliver] critical support to the Palestinian people and those leaders seeking to combat extremism within their society and build a more stable future. Without funding, our programs risk cancellation,” the official, who was not authorized to speak about the issue, said in an e-mail. “Such an occurrence would undermine the progress that has been made in recent years in building Palestinian institutions and improving stability, security, and economic prospects, which benefits Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

I suggest that we suspend elections in the United States. Obama should be “re-elected” by acclimation. The Constitution should be shredded and used for insulation in homes in poor neighborhoods. The concept of checks and balances, respect for the law, and a civil society is dead.

- Aggie

James Taranto runs through all the apologists and explicators of Obama’s judicial threat:

What do you call it when a liberal law professor or commentator defends President Obama’s ignorant musings on constitutional law? Comedy gold. From WSJ.com:

Constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and former mentor to President Barack Obama, said the president “obviously misspoke” earlier this week when he made comments about the Supreme Court possibly overturning the health-care law.

Mr. Tribe, who calls the president one of his best students, said in an interview: “He didn’t say what he meant . . . and having said that, in order to avoid misleading anyone, he had to clarify it.”

…

This, from the Daily Beast’s Jesse Singal, cracked us up:

Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University, didn’t think it was fair to take Obama’s statement at face value.

“Do we really think President Obama, a former teacher of constitutional law, believes that any act of Congress enacted by a strong majority is immune to judicial review?” he asked in an email. . . .

“I find that impossible to believe,” Yoshino continued, “especially when the President’s pronouncement is viewed in context”–that is, as following up upon the rather eloquent defense of the law that preceded it in his news conference.

At least Singal didn’t call the president “articulate.”

And then there’s Obama’s own understanding of that “charter of negative liberties”, aka the Constitution:

Obama taught “Con Law III” at Chicago. Judicial review, federalism, the separation of powers–the old “structural Constitution” stuff–is covered in “Con Law I” (or at least it was when I was a student). Con Law III covers the Fourteenth Amendment. (Oddly enough, Prof. Obama didn’t seem too concerned about “an unelected group of people” overturning a “duly constituted and passed law” when we were discussing all those famous Fourteenth Amendment cases – roe v. wade, griswold v. connecticut, romer v. evans, etc.) Of course, even a Con Law professor focusing on the Bill of Rights should know that the principle of judicial review has been alive and well since 1803, so I still feel like my educational credentials have been tarnished a bit by the President’s “unprecedented, extraordinary” remarks.

The 14th Amendment is a hell of an amendment—due process, equal protection—but it’s hardly all there is. Maybe that’s why he’s so down on the Constitution: he hasn’t read it.

Let her tell it:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi today said she has “no idea” whether the Supreme Court will strike down a key provision of the health care law that she guided through Congress during her reign as speaker of the House two years ago.

“I have no idea. None of us does,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said. “We are all now talking about something of which we have no knowledge because we’re not members of the Supreme Court. We have knowledge of the legislation [and] we knowledge of the arguments, but we have no idea what the outcome will be.”

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Pelosi said congressional Democrats “have long believed in judicial review” as part of the country’s constitutional process, but said that as Democrats wrote the Affordable Care Act, “We were careful to honor our Constitution.”

Like “deeming” it passed? Offering kickbacks and side deals to buy swing votes? Creating a bureaucratic monstrosity that compels supposedly free citizens to purchase a health insurance plan of the government’s liking? Maybe Pelosi was speaking of the South African constitution (Justice Ginsburg’s preferred charter), ’cause she sure as heck ain’t speaking about the US Constitution.

Aside from the obvious social problems in France, they have bureaucracy out the wazoo. And a nifty comparison with Germany shows the effects of too much central planning.

A story in the New York Times a few weeks ago reported on two small towns on the border between France and Germany. French Sélestat, in Alsace, has an unemployment rate of 8% and a youth unemployment rate of 23%. Across the border in Emmendingen, the rates are 3% and 7%. (The U.S.’s own unemployment rates these days are closer to those in Sélestat.)

Deep in the article, the mayor of Sélestat explains why this is so. In Germany, he said, local and state governments can set many of their own rules. In France, “the national Education Ministry wants to keep all control.” The Affordable Care Act is our road to France’s ministry of education. For its designers, ObamaCare is their administrative coup de grâce.

But something more is in motion with this case than a potential, once-and-for-all movement of government authority from the nation’s parts to its center. As important is who exercises control. The answer is: the mandarins.

Mandarins are the intellectuals who design and order legally enforceable public systems within which the rest of the population resides, or tries to. French policy mandarins are the most celebrated in the world. Their most ardent admirers in America are the people who made the Obama health-care law.

An interesting academic exercise, one that has no chance of funding at this time whatsoever, would be to find borders between regions that have different levels of central control and compare all sorts of outcomes. A sample of one is an anecdote, but if this could be repeated in many places, the results might be interesting.

The Supreme Court is co-equal to the Congress and the Executive branch in our current system of government. I say “current system” advisedly, because with Hope ‘n Change – who knows? I’m not convinced that the Supremes will strike down the individual mandate, but even if they do, I’m not certain that the law will go away. There could simply be an executive order to reinstate it or there could be a mutiny.

- Aggie

Most of us cannot remember it at all, but Barack Obama is showing up the re-make

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president’s re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?

What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president’s surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president’s party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly—and accurately—stated that you have no involvement?

Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president’s re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president’s or anyone else’s office.

Now, in polite company, here in Massachusetts, we are encouraged to hate the Koch brothers. It’s part of the elementary school curriculum. (Just kidding). So I guess it is ok to do this to them?

What Messrs. Koch do, in fact, is manage businesses that provide employment to more than 50,000 people in North America in legitimate, productive industries. They also give millions of dollars to medical researchers, hospitals and cultural institutions. Their biggest offense, apparently, is that they also contribute generously to nonprofit organizations that promote personal liberty and free enterprise, and some of those organizations oppose policies advocated by the president.

Richard Nixon maintained an”enemies list” that singled out private citizens for investigation and abuse by agencies of government, including the Internal Revenue Service. When that was revealed, the press and public were outraged. That conduct will forever remain one of the indelible stains on Nixon’s presidency and legacy.

When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace.”McCarthyism,” defined by Webster’s as the “use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition,” will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welch’s “Have you no sense of decency?” are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him.

In this country, we regard the use of official power to oppress or intimidate private citizens as a despicable abuse of authority and entirely alien to our system of a government of laws. The architects of our Constitution meticulously erected a system of separated powers, and checks and balances, precisely in order to inhibit the exercise of tyrannical power by governmental officials.

Yadda, yadda, yadda… Will you please shut up – please? The Constitution is just paper and no better than the people that enforce it. Eric Holder enforces it now.

- Aggie

Tim Thomas did

Opposed to what he called the “out of control” growth of the federal government, Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas declined an invitation to join his teammates at the White House on Monday.

The award-winning Thomas, who last year led the Bruins to the Stanley Cup championship emblematic of National Hockey League supremacy, was one of three players missing when President Barack Obama met with the team to offer congratulations.

According to a story on the team’s website, www.bostonbruins.com, Thomas “opted out” of the White House visit. One of the other missing players was injured, and the third now plays for another team, according to the website story.

A statement by the 37-year-old Thomas posted Monday on the team website said he opposed the “out of control” growth of the federal government that threatened “the rights, liberties, and property of the people.”

“This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the federal government,” the statement said. “Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.”

Good for him. (Or are we supposed to assume that he’s a raaacist?)

- Aggie