Category Archives: Constitution

Barletta Battles For Sweet Home, Hazleton

Constitution, Federalism, IMMIGRATION, Law, Private Property

Before Governor Janet Brewer of Arizona there was Mayor Lou Barletta of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Born and bred. In 2007, I wrote about this much-loved local leader, who has legitimately and faithfully represented his constituents—Republican and Democratic—in attempting to salvage a community ravaged by unchecked immigration.

Unwilling to wait for Washington, Mayor Louis Barletta of Hazleton attempted to reclaim his town by passing local ordinances to crack down on those who employ or rent to illegals. Barletta’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act was found to conflict with the unenforced Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, and, therefore, to be in violation of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. This, even though the Supreme Court itself has conceded that not every ‘state enactment …which deals with aliens is a regulation of immigration.’

Now, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has adopted the same decision issued in July 2007 by a U.S. District Judge, ruling that “the ordinance violates the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, which precludes states from enacting laws that are at odds with federal law.”

As I said at the time, I am not thrilled that to defend his town a mayor has been forced to circumscribe renting and hiring. Still less am I enamored of the ACLU and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund usurping a beloved Hazleton home boy—in the past, Barletta has won both Republican and Democratic nominations overwhelmingly.

Having become aliens in their hometown, Hazleton residents imagined that the Constitution allowed them a measure of autonomy over how they lived their lives. How wrong they were.

UPDATE II: Brussels: Obama’s New Mecca (& Cameroon)

Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Private Property, States' Rights

My new column, “Brussels: Obama’s New Mecca,” is on WND.COM. Here’s an excerpt:

“… Fifty five delegates convened in 1787 at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, to carve out the contours of this Constitution. Imagine those magnificent men making the case that the people of the colonies they represented ought to sit idle should their homesteads be overrun by trespassers and their families and friends imperiled. Imagine those very men arguing for a future central authority that acted as the sole arbiter in deciding who would breach the perimeters of their respective home patches.
Inconceivable.

If we lived in the old decentralized republic of absolute property rights, land owners in border communities would be policing and defending their properties and the commons. They’d have stopped the ongoing influx in its tracks. Whereas America’s modern-day community leader is suing Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for being a “bad gringo, a racist, and a bully”; community leaders in early America ? as historian David Hackett Fischer tells it ? often required an immigrant to furnish them with an affidavit from the Old Country, attesting to good character, before being permitted to settle among them.

Read the rest of “Brussels: Obama’s New Mecca,” on WND.COM.

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

UPDATE I (Sept. 4): As I mentioned in the column, “America’s modern-day community leader is suing Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for being a ‘bad gringo, a racist, and a bully.'” The sheriff has responded. Via Doug Powers, blogging for Michele Malkin:

“The Obama administration has filed three lawsuits against Arizona in the last few weeks … one against a college district, one against the state of Arizona and now one against my office. Each lawsuit centers on something to do with alleged racial discrimination.

These actions make it abundantly clear that Arizona, including this Sheriff, IS Washington’s new whipping boy. Now it’s time to take the gloves off. As for today’s lawsuit against my office: These people in Washington met with my attorneys only a few days ago. And in that meeting, Washington got our cooperation; they admitted they already have thousands of pages of the requested documents; and they were given access to interview my staff and get into my jails. They smiled in our faces and then stabbed us in the back with this lawsuit. The Obama administration intended to sue us all along, no matter what we did to try to avert it.

Washington isn’t playing fair and it’s time Americans everywhere wake up and see this administration for what it really is. Calculating, underhanded at times and certainly not looking out for the best interests of the legal citizens residing in this country.”

UPDATE II: We like the bright, plain-spoken Arizona state Sen. Frank Antenori:

UPDATE II: Brussels: Obama's New Mecca (& Cameroon)

Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Private Property, States' Rights

My new column, “Brussels: Obama’s New Mecca,” is on WND.COM. Here’s an excerpt:

“… Fifty five delegates convened in 1787 at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, to carve out the contours of this Constitution. Imagine those magnificent men making the case that the people of the colonies they represented ought to sit idle should their homesteads be overrun by trespassers and their families and friends imperiled. Imagine those very men arguing for a future central authority that acted as the sole arbiter in deciding who would breach the perimeters of their respective home patches.
Inconceivable.

If we lived in the old decentralized republic of absolute property rights, land owners in border communities would be policing and defending their properties and the commons. They’d have stopped the ongoing influx in its tracks. Whereas America’s modern-day community leader is suing Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for being a “bad gringo, a racist, and a bully”; community leaders in early America ? as historian David Hackett Fischer tells it ? often required an immigrant to furnish them with an affidavit from the Old Country, attesting to good character, before being permitted to settle among them.

Read the rest of “Brussels: Obama’s New Mecca,” on WND.COM.

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

UPDATE I (Sept. 4): As I mentioned in the column, “America’s modern-day community leader is suing Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio for being a ‘bad gringo, a racist, and a bully.'” The sheriff has responded. Via Doug Powers, blogging for Michele Malkin:

“The Obama administration has filed three lawsuits against Arizona in the last few weeks … one against a college district, one against the state of Arizona and now one against my office. Each lawsuit centers on something to do with alleged racial discrimination.

These actions make it abundantly clear that Arizona, including this Sheriff, IS Washington’s new whipping boy. Now it’s time to take the gloves off. As for today’s lawsuit against my office: These people in Washington met with my attorneys only a few days ago. And in that meeting, Washington got our cooperation; they admitted they already have thousands of pages of the requested documents; and they were given access to interview my staff and get into my jails. They smiled in our faces and then stabbed us in the back with this lawsuit. The Obama administration intended to sue us all along, no matter what we did to try to avert it.

Washington isn’t playing fair and it’s time Americans everywhere wake up and see this administration for what it really is. Calculating, underhanded at times and certainly not looking out for the best interests of the legal citizens residing in this country.”

UPDATE II: We like the bright, plain-spoken Arizona state Sen. Frank Antenori:

Big-Government Gerson

Bush, Conservatism, Constitution, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

BUSH’S Bastardized Conservatism is also Michael Gerson’s. As a committed ideologue, formerly of the Bush administration, Michael Gerson is a completely consistent, dangerous statist. He imagines that the General Welfare Clause gave our overlords, and the Little Lord Fauntleroys who serve them (the female version: Dana Perino), authority to enact the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, federal civil rights law; direct what Gerson terms “economic growth,” and pursue the national greatness agenda.

To oppose “Alexander Hamilton and a number of Supreme Court rulings” that affirm such overreach is “morally irresponsible and politically disastrous,” says Gerson.

Today, Laura Ingraham referred to Gerson, affectionately, as being part of that wonderful big tent that makes the GOP so inclusive. Yet Gerson, whom BAB celebrity Myron Pauli long ago identified as the most dangerous kind of (crunchy) conservative, holds that the welfare clause, “and Congress will have the power…to provide for the general welfare”—Article I, Section 8—implies that government can pick The People’s pocketbooks for any possible project, even though the general clause is followed by a detailed enumeration of the limited powers so delegated.

Asks historian Thomas E. Woods Jr.: “What point would there be in specifically listing the federal government’s powers if the general welfare clause had already provided the government with an essentially boundless authority to enact whatever it thought would contribute to people’s well-being?” Woods evokes no less an authority than the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison: “Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.”

You’d think Madison knew one or two things more than Michael about this document.

I once wrote that “sometimes the law of the State coincides with the natural law. More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.” When Gerson and company (you’ll find that Rove, Perino, and the rest, currently masquerading as conservatives, are no different) reject “a consistent constitutionalism,” namely a critique of the current promiscuous applications of the 14th, the “General Welfare” clause, and so on, and embrace the concept of the Constitution as a “living, breathing” document—they rely for their case on layers of that rubble.

Having shoveled the muck of lawmaking aside, constitutionalists base their case on the natural justice and the founders’ original intent.

Gerson is the enemy of liberty. But even more so, because so deceptive, are the Ingrahams of the world. Ms. Ingraham wanted to know how Gerson could bad mouth the tea part, yet still call himself a Bush conservative. Ms. Ingraham has set up a dichotomy where there is only congruity and consistency on the part of Gerson: now that is dangerous.