Category Archives: Constitution

Update II: Unhealthy & Unconstitutional (The Baucus Edition)

Constitution, Federalism, Healthcare, Law, Regulation, States' Rights

“The power ‘to regulate’ interstate commerce … is the favorite hook on which Congress hangs its hat in order to justify the regulation of anything it wants to control,” writes Judge Andrew Napolitano, in a WSJ op-ed.

“James Madison, who argued that to regulate meant to keep regular, would have shuddered at such circular reasoning. Madison’s understanding was the commonly held one in 1789, since the principle reason for the Constitutional Convention was to establish a central government that would prevent ruinous state-imposed tariffs that favored in-state businesses. It would do so by assuring that commerce between the states was kept ‘regular.'” …

“Applying these principles to President Barack Obama’s health-care proposal, it’s clear that his plan is unconstitutional at its core. The practice of medicine consists of the delivery of intimate services to the human body. In almost all instances, the delivery of medical services occurs in one place and does not move across interstate lines. One goes to a physician not to engage in commercial activity, as the Framers of the Constitution understood, but to improve one’s health. And the practice of medicine, much like public school safety, has been regulated by states for the past century.”

“The same Congress that wants to tell family farmers what to grow in their backyards has declined ‘to keep regular’ the commercial sale of insurance policies. It has permitted all 50 states to erect the type of barriers that the Commerce Clause was written precisely to tear down. Insurers are barred from selling policies to people in another state.”

“That’s right: Congress refuses to keep commerce regular when the commercial activity is the sale of insurance, but claims it can regulate the removal of a person’s appendix because that constitutes interstate commerce.”

Jonathan Turley—watch him mock the Tenth Amendment—would, no doubt, find Madison’s legal thought ever-so quaint.

Update I: My opinion of Turley’s latter day obsessions were reiterated in “To Bug Or Not To Bug Abu Zubaydah’s Cage”:

Forgotten in the faff over “enhanced interrogation” tactics is the invasion of Iraq. Of this war crime, most Democrats are as guilty as Republicans. The torture fracas is like manna from heaven for both parties and their media lapdogs, who cannot be coaxed out of a coma.
Whether to bug Zubaydah’s cage or not: this is a limited, small, relatively safe distraction that allows complicit journalists, jurists, politicians and pointy heads to skirt the real issue: the need to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Kerry, for invading Iraq.

Turley, moreover, is a stickler for the letter of the law—the positive law—but not necessarily for the higher moral law.

Update II (Sept. 17): The thrust of the healthcare proposal, “unveiled yesterday by Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus,” is sufficiently simple to defer to National Review, for once:

“[I]t tries to expand coverage through coercion and hidden taxes instead of through consumer choice and price competition in a free market.

Like the bills that have been approved by committees in the House and Senate, the Baucus plan is built on mandates, expanded governmental control, and taxes. It would require all Americans to sign up for government-approved insurance or face a hefty federal tax penalty — up to $3,800 per family. Employers would be required to offer insurance conforming to government specs or pay a head tax on each of their full-time employees.

There is no breakthrough miracle cure to be found here: Insurance coverage is expanded with tried-and-true, heavy-handed regulation. Americans who don’t play along will be disciplined by the IRS.

To take some of the sting out of the individual mandate, Senator Baucus promises new subsidies to some low-income families. He would limit their portion of the insurance premiums to a percentage of their income. Families with incomes at three to four times the poverty level would pay no more than 13 percent of their incomes toward insurance. But this promise comes with a lot of fine print: Workers with incomes in these ranges who are offered qualified coverage by their employers are ineligible for additional subsidization. They will have no choice but to take what is offered at work — whether they can afford it or not. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), only about 13 million people will be getting subsidized insurance through the exchanges in 2014 even though there are, as of 2008, 127 million Americans under age 65 in households with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty line. For the vast majority of Americans, therefore, the individual mandate is simply a hidden, onerous, and regressive tax.” …

Read on.

Updated: Million-Man March (Fly-Over Obama)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Debt, Healthcare, Liberty, Media

Those of us who’ve shown little confidence in what remains of “the people” may have to swallow some pride. That’s fine, because I have never wished so hard to be in the wrong.

The Daily Mail: “Up to two million people marched to the U.S. Capitol today, carrying signs with slogans such as ‘Obamacare makes me sick’ as they protested the president’s health care plan and what they say is out-of-control spending.

The line of protesters spread across Pennsylvania Avenue for blocks, all the way to the capitol, according to the Washington Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.”

People were chanting ‘enough, enough’ and ‘We the People.’ Others yelled ‘You lie, you lie!’ and ‘Pelosi has to go,’ referring to California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

Today’s rally, the largest grouping of fiscal conservatives to march on Washington, comes on the heels of heated town halls held during the congressional August recess when some Democratic lawmakers were confronted, disrupted and shouted down by angry protesters who oppose President Obama’s plan to overhaul the health care system.”

Contra the English Daily Mail, American news organizations pegged the number of protesters in the tens of thousands only.

CNN, I am sure, is not the only mainstream media outlet to frame the march as the product of the shenanigans of “The conservative advocacy group Tea Party Express,” which “massed at the U.S. Capitol on Saturday to protest health care reform, higher taxes and what they see as out-of-control government spending.”

The subtle suggestion is that these people have been organized and incited. However, first comes the discontent. Organization follows the discord.

“What they see as out-of-control government spending”: as though the stratospheric nature of Washington’s debt and deficits was not settled but open to debate.

The New York Time leads its online US Section with a story about … “pollutants in drinking water [that] have damaged residents’ teeth.”

Unlike the Times, The WaPo covers the event, under the headline, “Lashing Out At The Capital.” The peons from the provinces are disobeying Rome. Dishonestly the WaPo categorically asserts that the protest is an extension of the Republican Party, a “populist dimension” of it.

Nothing at the Christian Science Monitor, except for an item buried under the headline, “Obama takes on Glenn Beck and ‘tea party’ critics over healthcare.”

Meanwhile, Obama beat a hasty retreat out of DC, to “Democratic-leaning Minnesota.”

Updated (Sept. 14): FLY-OVER OBAMA. I extend our appreciation to Chip for imparting the feel and impetus of the march he attended. We hope to hear more from him. Chip’s “Goebbels” comment: According to the Pew Research Center, “The public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans’ views of media bias and independence now match previous lows.”

The underlying process that accounts for the malign and deficient reporting on the rising opposition to statism is suggested in Pat Buchanan’s latest:

“In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?”

The answer is: America, for the most, is no longer a nation, but a disparate collection of identity groups supervised and subdued by a massive managerial state intent on dissolving the historical people and electing another. The propositional nation has replaced the nation. America is but “a notion and an idea; not a community of flesh-and-blood people sharing a mother tongue, traditions, history and heroes.”

The New York Times’ JEFF ZELENY has a decent report (which I had failed to locate yesterday, becasue not on the front page):

“A sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since he took office … demonstrators came from all corners of the country, waving American flags and handwritten signs explaining the root of their frustrations. Their anger stretched well beyond the health care legislation moving through Congress, with shouts of support for gun rights, lower taxes and a smaller government. … many demonstrators expressed their views without a hint of rage. They said the size of the crowd illustrated that their views were shared by a broader audience.
Republican officials said privately that they were pleased by the turnout but wary of the anger directed at all politicians. … [My emphasis]
Protesters came by bus, car and airplane, arriving here from Texas and Tennessee, New Mexico and New Hampshire, Ohio and Oregon. The messages on their signs told of an intense distrust of the government, which several people said began long before Mr. Obama took office. …
In conversations with demonstrators, people identified themselves as Republicans, libertarians, independents and former. …” Democrats. [Ditto re emphasis]

ON HIS NOT-SO-MERRY way out of the capital, “Mr. Obama … flew over the assembling crowd in Marine One. The helicopter could be seen flying overhead as the demonstrators marched down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Update III: Cass Sunstein: Most Dangerous Czar By Far

Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Law, Natural Law, Pseudoscience, Reason, Regulation, Religion, Science, The Courts

And very possibly, a future Supreme-Court justice. Sunstein, bosom buddy and intellectual soul mate to Barack, was confirmed the other day by the Senate. Cusses all around. The tenacious Glenn Beck, who forewarned about Van Jones, has been on the case. But WND’s Ellis Washington makes the clearer case (although he fails to appreciate that America IS already regulated to death):

Cass Sunstein: Regulating America to Death
By Ellis Washington

Animals should be allowed to sue their owners.

~ Cass Sunstein

Because people ascribe a degree of respectability to academics, intellectuals, philosophers and scholars, they can disregard the rights of the people much easier than a naked tyrant. In fact, Rousseau, Darwin and Nietzsche can go places Hitler, Stalin, Chavez and Obama could never dream.

As I have written many times, the Obama administration are the masters of misdirection and chaos theory; therefore, while the America people last week were transfixed on the resignation of “Green Czar” Van Jones, another even more dangerous fascist from the academy quietly slipped through the portals of power.

Last Thursday Cass Sunstein, a former colleague and mentor of Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School, was confirmed by a Senate vote of 57-40 as the new director of regulatory affairs and information, an obscure but powerful agency within the Office of Management and Budget. Here is what the “regulatory czar” does: He regulates laws – past, present and future.

Sunstein is a friendly fascist who only “nudges” people to bow to his will. TV host Glenn Beck says of Cass Sunstein that he is “the most powerful invisible man you’ll ever see.”

Are we headed for a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss? Find out in “Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America” Judge Richard A. Posner, an intellectual mentor of mine and former colleague with Sunstein and Obama at the University of Chicago Law School, said the following about Peter Singer, a Princeton professor and a leading scholar on animal rights with whom Sunstein is often associated:

Since the publication of “Animal Liberation” [1975], Singer has received a wide range of philosophical challenges to his formulation of animal rights. … Richard Posner challenged that Singer failed to see the “radicalism of the ethical vision that powers [his] view on animals, an ethical vision that finds greater value in a healthy pig than in a profoundly retarded child, that commands inflicting a lesser pain on a human being to avert a greater pain to a dog, and that, provided only that a chimpanzee has 1 percent of the mental ability of a normal human being, would require the sacrifice of the human being to save 101 chimpanzees.

While Sunstein spent his entire career inventing rights for rats, dogs and pigs that would make the Constitution’s framers spin in their graves, he is even more despicable in casting aspersions against constitutional rights plainly delineated in the Bill of Rights. For example, here is Sunstein views on the Second Amendment right to bear arms:

“My coming view is that the individual right to bear arms reflects the success of an extremely aggressive and resourceful social movement and has much less to do with good standard legal arguments than [it] appears.”

In 2008 Sunstein co-authored “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness” with economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. “Nudge” discusses how public and private organizations can “help people” to make better choices in their daily lives since apparently Sunstein and his busybody socialist colleagues of the academy think that We the People are too stupid to live our own lives our own way and accept the consequences. Thaler and Sunstein argue that: People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. Space will not allow me to adequately detail the utter tyranny and naked assault on our constitutional rights Sunstein plans to launch against American capitalism in his new role as regulatory czar.

Here is a summary of the autocracy Americans can expect from Czar Sunstein: * Sunstein advocates a “Second Bill of Rights” even more totalizing and all-consuming than initially proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s. Among these rights are a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care and a right to protection against monopolies. * Sunstein notes that personhood need not be conferred upon an animal in order to grant it legal standing for suit. * Sunstein has argued that “we should celebrate tax day.” * Rumor has it that Obama is grooming Sunstein as a future Supreme Court justice.

Last week Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said, “[Sunstein] is to the left of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The leitmotiv of Sunstein’s entire legal philosophy and worldview is encapsulated in two very evil and failed philosophies of the past: 1) Social Darwinism [evolution], and 2) Moral Relativism – a theory, especially in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.

In other words, nothing has more intrinsic value than anything else. Sunstein’s ideas on judicial minimalism and behavioral economics belie the fact that for almost 30 years he has assaulted the Judeo-Christian traditions of Natural Law so venerated by the Constitution’s framers to preserve America’s republic.

To Sunstein ideas like “liberty,” “freedom” and “Natural Law” are irrelevant and counterproductive to his grand, socialist view of law rooted in moral relativism and social Darwinism. That’s how Sunstein can have a scholarship named after his dead dog while concurrently mandating environmental policies that will put tens of thousands of American farmers out of business by fostering ever expanding environmental, land and water regulations that will de facto make farming too cost-prohibitive.

What Mussolini, Stalin and Mao did in the light to harm their citizens and deny them their fundamental human rights, Cass Sunstein, as Obama’s regulatory czar, will do in the night by slowly, irrevocably regulating America to death. Sunstein reminds me of Shakespeare’s “Othello” when the sinister Iago repeatedly whispered his verbal venom into the receptive ear of Othello (Obama), which lead to his demise. Indeed, Sunstein said it best: “There is no liberty without dependency.”

Update I (Sept. 12): I’m not mad about the cheapened Argument From Hitler (in the Comments Section). So far, Barack is continuing the “work” Bush and others before him began. Few Republicans fussed about the breakneck speed at which the Bush Administration concentrated power in the executive, to give but one example. Or the way it expanded the warfare state, to give another. So far, I don’t see a qualitative difference between Bush and Obama; they exist on the same continuum of accreting statism.

Update II: I wonder if crazy Cass would come for me if he read my defense of Michael Vick: In Defense Of Michael Vick I & In Defense of Michael Vick, Part 2.

Update III (Sept. 13): To the imperious reader who is unhappy with my disinterest in the futile, immaterial evolution debate: We are not about to go off-topic and veer into evolution. Take it behind the scenes with Myron. As for the “not good enough” complaint: More so than most columnists and writers, I have applied libertarian thinking to a wide-ranging array of topics, from intellectual property to antitrust, to Just War, to economy, Hollywood, Islam—you name it, I’ve written about it. Far more important than the idiotic evolution debate has been my defense of the unique, privileged, preeminent nature of humanity in the universe. The articulation of that philosophical position is far more significant than the idiotic debates about evolution, engaged in by the Godless neocons/Republicans and their adversaries. Now, if the bitching reader were a major donor toward my generally thankless efforts at shedding light where darkness is the rule—then I might indulge him. But, alas, he isn’t.

Addendum: Here’s fodder for another fit over my unorthodox positions: Even more disinterested am I in whether God exists or not. I conduct my life with morality and ethics. Some would say that’s godly enough. Others would demand communal worship. Frankly, I don’t care. It makes no sense to assert or fight over the irrational and the supernatural; that which cannot be proven. I respect believers and defend the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition–this is the sum of my work. That’s all that matters. To me, at least. (At that’s what counts.)

What Daniel Hannan Should Have Said About The BNP

Britain, Constitution, Free Speech, libertarianism, Liberty, Natural Law, Private Property

The brilliant Sean Gabb, academic, broadcaster, Director of the Libertarian Alliance in England, and a friend (who is not too good at keeping in touch), says what Daniel Hannan (scroll down) ought to have articulated about the British National Party (BNP), instead of disgorging the fascist epithet. The column you want to read in its entirety is “The British State and the BNP—The Post-Modern Tyranny of ‘Human Rights.'” Here are excerpts:

“We in Britain are endlessly told nowadays that freedom of speech does not involve the right to preach hatred and ‘intolerance.’ But it does. Freedom of speech means the right to say anything at all on any public issue, and to make any recommendation on what the law should be.”

“I was born into a Britain where this understanding was broadly accepted. I live now in a country where it is not. Thus Simon Woolley of Operation Black Vote dismisses freedom of speech as an ‘almost sacred cow.’ He even appeals for support to the majesty of the British Constitution:

Over centuries our unwritten constitution has given us a framework for our democracy. From Magna Carta to the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, our democracy has evolved to reflect our changing times. This framework gives us a democracy which, for all its limitations, seeks to balance individual freedoms with fairness and tolerance.

“In the technical sense, Woolley may be right. Being unwritten, the British Constitution is whatever the authorities decide it to be.

But his claim is irrelevant. A constitution does not legitimise oppression. Rather, it is legitimate so far as it protects rights. If the British Constitution no longer guarantees freedom of speech, so much the worse for the Constitution.

* Second, as said, the authorities are frightened to make a direct attack on freedom of speech. Instead, they are relying on laws that abolish freedom of association.

But this is barely less important within the liberal tradition than freedom of speech. The two rights complement each other. Freedom of speech is the right to say anything. Freedom of association involves the right to propagate what is said. It means the right of people to come together for any purpose that does not involve aggression against others. …

I am not frightened that the BNP is a party of national socialists, and that its leaders are counting the days till they can rip off their business suits, to show the black and red uniforms beneath. Under its present leader, Nick Griffin, the BNP has become a white nationalist party. The party believes in the expulsion of illegal immigrants, an in some voluntary repatriation of non-whites who are legally here, and in dismantling the Equal Opportunities police state from which people like Mr Wadham benefit. Other than this, a BNP Government might easily show more respect for the forms of a liberal constitution than have the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown—after all, this would not be difficult.

The problem is that the BNP and much of its leading personnel used to be national socialists. There are too many published statements in praise of Hitler or denouncing the Jews.” …

READ THE COMPLETE COLUMN, “The British State and the BNP—The Post-Modern Tyranny of ‘Human Rights,'” on VDARE.COM (where else?).