Bloodthirsty Liberal

The previous post points out the Neville Chamberlain approach of our dear friends, the Brits. Here is Glenn Reynolds on the brownshirt tactics of the United States:

Here’s the key bit: “Just after midnight Saturday morning, authorities descended on the Cerritos home of the man believed to be the filmmaker behind the anti-Muslim movie that has sparked protests and rioting in the Muslim world.”

When taking office, the President does not swear to create jobs. He does not swear to “grow the economy.” He does not swear to institute “fairness.” The only oath the President takes is this one:
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.

By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated that oath. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace.

He won’t resign, of course. First, the President has the appreciation of free speech that one would expect from a Chicago Machine politician, which is to say, none. Second, he’s not getting any pressure. Indeed, the very press that went crazy over Ari Fleischer’s misrepresented remarks seems far less interested in the actions of an administration that I repeat, literally sent brown-shirted enforcers to launch a midnight knock on a filmmaker’s door.

But Obama’s behavior — and that of his enablers in the press — has laid down a marker for those who are paying attention. By these actions he is, I repeat, unfit to hold office. I hope and expect that the voters will agree in November.

Related thoughts from Ann Althouse:
That’s a scarf wrapped around his face, not a “towel.” Is the L.A. Times nudging us to think of this man as a “towelhead”? And look at this headline in the Daily Mail: “The man who set the Middle East ablaze hides his face in shame….” Shame? If I were imputing a motivation to this man, I’d say he has a fully justified fear of becoming a recognizable face.

But I think our government is delusional if it thinks the people who are rioting in Africa and killing our diplomats would — if they knew the facts — see individuals like Nakoula as the proper focus of their rage. They don’t believe the necessary premise: freedom as the superior value. As long as they favor a system in which blasphemy is outlawed and severely punished, they will continue to blame the American government for standing back and allowing blasphemy to flourish and flow everywhere. What good does it do to ask them to please understand our system? They hate this system.

Meanwhile, our government would scapegoat a free citizen. It’s not even effectual scapegoating.

So go to the link to read lots more.

Althouse enriches the discussion:

How is this not an assault on the First Amendment? Who cares how bad the movie was? Do any but the obsessed believe the movie is the reason for the killing? If it is, then so what? Our response should be to champion our freedom, not pander to the mob.
And I said:
If bad movies aren’t protected:

1. The vast majority of movies are not protected.

2. The legal authorities will have to distinguish good from bad.
Imagine if you had to make a good movie or a well-written book to have the freedom to disseminate it. What power the critics would have! They could be expert witnesses at our blasphemy trials.

“90% of everything is crud,” said Theodore Sturgeon. It’s Sturgeon’s Law… to which I humbly offer the Althouse Corollary:

If there’s a crud exception to freedom, we are only 10% free.

My 2 cents? If the American public gives Obama the boot, it won’t be because of this. They are no longer educated in the constitution in high school and no longer understand this silly idea of freedom of speech. If they dump the President, it will be because of the economy. The kind of ignorance we’ve seen on display by this administration, and indeed in the 2008 election campaign should have triggered concerns about the direction of freedom in our country if those concerns were going to happen.

- Aggie

Who says that we have a separation of church and state?

On Wednesday, Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran called on Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to explain why the agency’s employee newsletter encouraged them to not eat meat and participate in the “Meatless Monday” initiative for the environment.

“One simple way to reduce your environmental impact while dining at our cafeterias is to participate in the ‘Meatless Monday’ initiative http://www.meatlessmonday.com/,” The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) July 23, 2012 “Greening Headquarters Update” read. “This international effort, as the name implies, encourages people not to eat meat on Mondays. Meatless Monday is an initiative of The Monday Campaign Inc. in association with the John Hopkins School of Public Health.”

Pointing to the United Nations as their informational authority, the USDA’s newsletter said that going meatless is good for the environment because “animal agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases and climate change. It also wastes resources. It takes 7,000 kg of grain to make 1,000 kg of beef. In addition, beef production requires a lot of water, fertilizer, fossil fuels, and pesticides.” It further charged that heavy meat consumption has detrimental health effect.

Watch Moran speak about the newsletter on the Senate floor:

Moran, who represents the third-largest beef-producing state in America, was shocked by the revelation.

“Never in my life would I have expected USDA to be opposed to farmers and ranchers,” Moran said in a statement. “American farmers and ranchers deserve a USDA that will pursue supportive policies rather than seek their further harm.”

Moran is thinking along the lines of the old model: The government is here to protect us from foreign aggression, build roads, etc. He believes that religion is part of life outside of government. He believes that his heathen citizens in Kansas, those that vote Republican, go to outdated churches, etc., are equal citizens. Silly man.

Note to Senator Moran: America – Get Over It. Did you ever wonder what the move on in moveon.org actually means? It means move on from the values that we thought were written into the Constitution.

- Aggie

Of all the scorn heaped on Chief Justice Roberts, none is laid on more thickly than by someone who agreed with him:

“Bitter concurrence” may sound like an oxymoron, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, joined by colleagues Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, filed one yesterday in NFIB v. Sebelius, the ObamaCare case.

Ginsburg was full of snark, and her target was Chief Justice John Roberts (citations omitted): “According to the Chief Justice the Commerce Clause does not permit that preservation. This rigid reading of the Clause makes scant sense and is stunningly retrogressive. . . . The Chief Justice’s crabbed reading of the Commerce Clause harks back to the era in which the Court routinely thwarted Congress’ efforts to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it. . . . The Chief Justice’s novel constraint on Congress’ commerce power gains no force from our precedent and for that reason alone warrants disapprobation. . . . The Chief Justice also calls the minimum coverage provision an illegitimate effort to make young, healthy individuals subsidize insurance premiums paid by the less hale and hardy. This complaint, too, is spurious. . . . Failing to learn from this history, the Chief Justice plows ahead with his formalistic distinction between those who are “active in commerce,” and those who are not. . . . The Chief Justice accepts just such specious logic when he cites the broccoli horrible as a reason to deny Congress the power to pass the individual mandate. . . . If long on rhetoric, the Chief Justice’s argument is short on substance.”

…

If Ginsburg’s side won the case, why is she so angry? Because on the central constitutional question at issue, Roberts in fact issued the legal left a powerful rebuke. To quote from his opinion–a portion of it in which he spoke only for himself but with which the four dissenters (that is, the actual dissenters–Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) agree: “The Commerce Clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave simply because he will predictably engage in particular transactions.”

Thinks Ginsburg: you bet your a** it is.

Maybe getting mad isn’t the best response. But I can’t think of a better one to these circumstances. I got mad enough to hold a sign for Scott Brown outside a polling place until my toes ached from the cold at the Soviet-style flouting of the succession law here in Massachusetts that allowed a Democrat governor to appoint Ted Kennedy’s succesor when a Republican one was forbidden from appointing John Kerry’s (had he won).

I can’t say what form my anger will take this time, but if you’re not mad too, maybe you deserve a second term of Obama and another 40 years of Ginsburg-like “legal” “reasoning”.

Here.

It is wonderful that a scholar of her caliber is writing a blog and explaining this to the rest of us. I cherry-pick below:

The Commerce Clause discussion is in Section III-A of the Chief Justice’s opinion:

The guaranteed-issue and community-rating reforms do not… address the issue of healthy individuals who choose not to purchase insurance to cover potential health care needs. In fact, the reforms sharply exacerbate that problem, by providing an incentive for individuals to delay purchasing health insurance until they become sick, relying on the promise of guaranteed and affordable coverage. The reforms also threaten to impose massive new costs on insurers, who are required to accept unhealthy individuals but prohibited from charging them rates necessary to pay for their coverage. This will lead insurers to significantly increase premiums on everyone. See Brief for America’s Health Insurance Plans et al. as Amici Curiae in No. 11–393 etc. 8–9.

The individual mandate was Congress’s solution to these problems. By requiring that individuals purchase health insurance, the mandate prevents cost-shifting by those who would otherwise go without it. In addition, the mandate forces into the insurance risk pool more healthy individuals, whose premiums on average will be higher than their health care expenses. This allows insurers to subsidize the costs of covering the unhealthy individuals the reforms require them to accept….

Althouse comments: But in fact, as we shall see in the taxing power discussion, these healthy individuals won’t have to buy insurance, because they can simply opt to pay the penalty, which they rationally will do because it costs less. And this money goes to the government — it’s tax revenue — and not to the insurance companies, who now have those massive new costs.

So, it is a tax and a tax that is designed to break the insurance companies, just as the most cynical among us believed. And Roberts apparently doesn’t accept the idea that Congress can regulate inactivity:

Roberts: The language of the Constitution reflects the natural understanding that the power to regulate assumes there is already something to be regulated…

Althouse: And all the cases finding commerce power refer to some activity that is regulated. This is taking those who are inactive and forcing them to become active.

Roberts: Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. Every day individuals do not do an infinite number of things. In some cases they decide not to do something; in others they simply fail to do it. Allowing Congress to justify federal regulation by pointing to the effect of inaction on commerce would bring countless decisions an individual could potentially make within the scope of federal regulation, and—under the Government’s theory—empower Congress to make those decisions for him.

Roberts: Congress already enjoys vast power to regulate much of what we do. Accepting the Government’s theory would give Congress the same license to regulate what we do not do, fundamentally changing the relation between the citizen and the Federal Government.

To an economist, perhaps, there is no difference between activity and inactivity; both have measurable economic effects on commerce. But the distinction between doing something and doing nothing would not have been lost on the Framers, who were “practical statesmen,” not metaphysical philosophers….

Roberts explores the idea that everyone eventually needs health care, and Althouse takes his ideas to the logical conclusions regarding the insurance industry:

Roberts: It is precisely because these individuals, as an actuarial class, incur relatively low health care costs that the mandate helps counter the effect of forcing insurance companies to cover others who impose greater costs than their premiums are allowed to reflect…. If the individual mandate is targeted at a class, it is a class whose commercial inactivity rather than activity is its defining feature.

Althouse:

Note that as Roberts explains why these people can’t be regulated, he’s also explaining why the health insurance companies are doomed. (But, you may think, isn’t the mandate upheld under the taxing power? Again, what’s upheld is the tax imposed for not buying insurance, and that’s less expensive than buying insurance, and the money goes to the federal government, not to the insurance companies. Meanwhile — to make it crushingly clear — the insurance companies do have to sell insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. So these people who currently don’t buy insurance because it’s not worth it can start buying insurance as soon as it is worth it, and under the ACA, they can’t be charged more than the people who have been buying insurance all along.)

Well, that’s all I can stand. As long time readers know, I have lost my optimistic faith in our system of government, and in the ability of the Constitution to protect individual rights. I’m not surprised by any of the (because Althouse predicted just this outcome a couple days ago) and I am also not disheartened. We are moving into an age of the tyranny of the elite, a European system of decision making. That is what the people seem to want.

- Aggie

What does executive privilege mean?

PS: Had an intelligent thirty-something ask me today what Fast and Furious is. This means that the media hasn’t reported on it at all.

- Aggie

Not to get all Andy Rooney on you, but did you ever notice how liberals talk about amending the Constitution—if not crumpling the damn “charter of negative liberties” and wiping our national behind with it—when they don’t get their way?

Advocating the adoption of the new Constitution drafted in Philadelphia, the authors of “The Federalist Papers” mocked the “imbecility” of the weak central government created by the Articles of Confederation.

Nearly 225 years later, critics across the spectrum call the American political system dysfunctional, even pathological. What they don’t mention, though, is the role of the Constitution itself in generating the pathology.

Ignore, for discussion’s sake, the clauses that helped to entrench chattel slavery until it was eliminated by a brutal Civil War. Begin with the Senate and its assignment of equal voting power to California and Wyoming; Vermont and Texas; New York and North Dakota. Consider that, although a majority of Americans since World War II have registered opposition to the Electoral College, we will participate this year in yet another election that “battleground states” will dominate while the three largest states will be largely ignored.

Our vaunted system of “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” — a legacy of the founders’ mistrust of “factions” — means that we rarely have anything that can truly be described as a “government.” Save for those rare instances when one party has hefty control over four branches — the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court — gridlock threatens. Elections are increasingly meaningless, at least in terms of producing results commensurate with the challenges facing the country.

But if one must choose the worst single part of the Constitution, it is surely Article V, which has made our Constitution among the most difficult to amend of any in the world. The last truly significant constitutional change was the 22nd Amendment, added in 1951, to limit presidents to two terms. The near impossibility of amending the national Constitution not only prevents needed reforms; it also makes discussion seem futile and generates a complacent denial that there is anything to be concerned about.

I seriously had to read this all the way through to see if he was kidding; I was sure he was. It’s a common trick in writing: set up an absurd argument as if you believed it, only to swat it aside. There is no such swat, just this tw*t.

Another reform would aim to fix Congressional gridlock. We could permit each newly elected president to appoint 50 members of the House and 10 members of the Senate, all to serve four-year terms until the next presidential election. Presidents would be judged on actual programs, instead of hollow rhetoric.

If enhanced presidential power seems too scary, then the solution might lie in reducing, if not eliminating, the president’s power to veto legislation and to return to true bicameralism, instead of the tricameralism we effectively operate under. We might allow deadlocks between the two branches of Congress to be broken by, say, a supermajority of the House or of Congress voting as a whole.

…

What was truly admirable about the framers was their willingness to critique, indeed junk, the Articles of Confederation. One need not believe that the Constitution of 1787 should be discarded in quite the same way to accept that we are long overdue for a serious discussion about its own role in creating the depressed (and depressing) state of American politics.

This guy is a law professor! But then they let anybody lecture law students, not matter what nonsense they talk. We have the evidence.

But from all the nonsense above, let me extract this one strain of DNA to show you how virulently antidemocratic (yet perversely pro-Democratic) this argument is:

Elections are increasingly meaningless, at least in terms of producing results commensurate with the challenges facing the country.

Elections are meaningless; what counts are “results”. And I swear to you he’s serious!

This is how liberals talk about the Senate filibuster, too. They hate it when they are in the majority and those “obstructionist” Republicans use it to thwart the will of the (Democrat voting) people. Put the Democrats in the minority, however, and it is the most valuable weapon standing against the tyranny of the majority. What the filibuster is is a Senate rule. They could choose keep it or toss it aside anytime they liked, without a Constitutional crisis. Everything else is noise.

I’d like to dismiss this guy as an idiot, but he’s not. He’s a monster, even if (probably) a very nice monster you’d enjoy talking to at a backyard barbecue. What I think he knows but won’t say is that the writers of the Constitution would have chosen meaningless elections over results every time.

Meaninglessness, at least as he means it, is the beating heart of the Constitution. Better elections without meaning than government run amok.

“Enhanced presidential power”? What powers does this president lack? He sends armed forces into battle in Libya without consulting Congress, appoints so-called czars when mere cabinet secretaries are deemed inadequate (beholden as they are to Congressional oversight), makes recess appointments when Congress won’t advise or consent to his radical appointees, makes signing statements to laws written and passed by Congress to dictate what he thinks the law says, and terminates with extreme prejudice any enemy combatant he can’t capture, while holding indefinitely without trial those few he can.

Give him x-ray vision or the ability to bend spoons with his mind if you’re so hot for “enhanced presidential power”. Goodness!

And, yes, I’m aware President Bush wielded most or all of the same powers in his administration. The difference is people weren’t crying over how limited and gridlocked government was back then. I seem to recall sentiments then like “if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention”.

The meekest Tea Party follower knows ore about the founding principles of our government than do the social engineers of the Left. Chief among the “challenges facing our country” is government bent on doing sh*t “on our behalf”, as State Senator Obama once put it. If ObamaCare’s persistent 15-20 point deficit in popularity isn’t enough of a clue, then cluenessness, not meaninglessness, is your lot in life.

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.

…

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.

…

[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.

…

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.