Category Archives: Federalism

Update VI: Arizona Reclaims The Right To Repel (Brother Bush)

Barack Obama, Bush, Democracy, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, States' Rights

If democracy means anything, it is the right of localities to a measure of autonomy over how and with whom they live their lives. How wrong were the residents of Arizona to imagine that they would be granted that luxury. Polls show Arizonians do not want the crime and lawlessness associated with hordes of illegal immigrants streaming into their state. Her constituents support “Gov. Jan Brewer signing of a bill that requires police to question people about their immigration status – including asking for identification – if they suspect someone is in the country illegally.”

The murder last month of Arizona Rancher Robert Krentz—he had raised cattle in the area of Cochise County for decades—by one peaceable, illegal invader shook that community.

“The state senator who wrote the law,” a political embarrassment, according to the New York Times, is Russell Pearce.

Another overreacting, overreaching law-enforcement activist, Russell Pearce’s motives are suspect, hints the NYT, because “his son, a Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy, was shot and wounded in 2004 by an illegal immigrant and Mr. Pearce, a former sheriff’s deputy, was shot and wounded while arresting gang members 20 years ago.”

Only the Times would construe the sobering effects of experience as a bias. What will we do when the Pearce kind of patriot; tough old-timers, die out?

What won’t die out any time soon are the powerhouse advocates for illegals immigrants converging on the Grand Canyon State. They won’t be dying out as long as they can use the political machine to bilk the politically powerless (you and me) for the benefit of their clientele. sadly, Arizona will be tied up in the courts by the proxies for the powerful (open-border advocates).

The Arizona law, SB1070, resembles the law the federal branch of government has chosen to flout. SB1070 is a species of negative law that takes back from the federales the right to accept or repel invaders. By default, the Bush/Obama-run federal government had decreed that the states ought not be permitted to repel invaders and must assume the costs in blood and treasure of the invasion. The central government did so by way of ignoring laws only it was permitted to enforce.

Arizona has repossessed its sovereign right to determine if it wants unfettered immigration with Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

State sovereignty? Naturally, our illiberal president would take the most severe tone with such notions, supplemented by stern actions to curtail this show of independence from his outlying territories.

Earlier Friday, President Obama called the Arizona bill “misguided” and instructed the Justice Department to examine it to see if it’s legal. He also said the federal government must enact immigration reform at the national level — or leave the door open to “irresponsibility by others.”
“That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe,” Obama said.

Update I (April 25): David Smith (see Comments Section) points out another instance in which Glenn Beck has gone wrong in exhorting a sitting-duck pacifism. Via WikiAnswer:

“… taken from a letter Jefferson wrote to William Smith in 1787 in reference to an uprising in Massachusetts after the American Revolution. A more full quote:

“Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s [sic] motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s [sic] rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Jefferson is referring, specifically, to the Shays’ Rebellion. If you look at the context of the quote, it appears that Jefferson actually believed the men who took arms were essentially wrong about the facts, but he still considered them patriotic for making their voices heard. Jefferson felt it was important that the government be kept in check, even if those keeping them in check were not necessarily in the right. It wasn’t being in the “right” that kept the people free, but rather the fact that they had a voice and used it.

Update II (April 26): “You run into civil-rights issues whenever you try to enforce any law,” says Tucker Carlson. “That’s just the nature of enforcing laws.” Too true. And, “This Bill asks law enforcement officials to enforce the law. If by so doing you undermine basic notions of fairness, as the president alleged, let’s just give up on enforcing any law. It’s an absurd thing to say.”

Update III: The god-awful Chris Matthews, who makes no pretense at objectivity any longer, pummeled a mild-mannered John Huppenthal, a senator from Arizona. The Republican state senator explained that since the get-tough-on-illegals policies were implemented the murder rate in Arizona went from 250 in 2006 to 125 (the following year?). Half.

But what’s a hundred or so lives among liberals?

Matthews then went from bombastic to farcical. After being told that his guest has documented an association between illegality and crime, he demanded to know how did stopping a person because you think he is here illegally reduce crime. Patiently, Huppenthal explained that given the causal connection just mentioned, deporting a person caught in the act tends to do the trick.

Poor Huppenthal, clearly a good fellow working to make his community more tolerable, was then insulted and called. … a racist.

Is there anything more repulsive than a liberal man?

Update IV (April 27): Pat Buchanan, patriot, from “Whose Country Is This?”:

“…Al Sharpton threatens to go to Phoenix and march in the streets against the new Arizona law. Let him go.

Let us see how many African-Americans, who are today frozen out of the 8 million jobs held by illegal aliens that might otherwise go to them or their children, will march to defend an invasion for which they are themselves paying the heaviest price.

Last year, while Americans were losing a net of 5 million jobs, the U.S. government – Bush and Obama both – issued 1,131,000 green cards to legal immigrants to come and take the jobs that did open up, a flood of immigrants equaled in only four other years in our history.

What are we doing to our own people?

Whose country is this, anyway?

America today has an establishment that, because it does not like the immigration laws, countenances and condones wholesale violation of those laws.

Nevertheless, under those laws, the U.S. government is obligated to deport illegal aliens and punish businesses that knowingly hire them.

This is not an option. It is an obligation.

Can anyone say Barack Obama is meeting that obligation?”

Update V (April 27): BROTHER BUSH. Jeb “Bush … opposes the Arizona immigration bill, too.” WaPo: “Right after his not-so-secretly preferred U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio comes out against Arizona’s new immigration reform law [and for amnesty, or as it’s called in political locution: comprehensive immigration reform], Jeb Bush lends his name to an under-the-radar conservative campaign for federal immigration reform this year.”

One of our readers prefers that I remain mum about the Republican treason lobby. Sorry. Truth will out. With my help.

Update VI: AZ State Senator Frank Antenori fighting for his community. “What about my constituents,” he asks. He was responding to the CNN Woman’s idiotic question: “There are a lot of people who are very angry, very upset [a life threatening condition, clearly] that if they drive into Arizona [read, enter it illegally], they will be pulled over. How do you convince them not to be worried?” Apparently, laws in defense of life and private property must be tailored to suit the trespassers.

Antenori: “What about my constituents whose homes are ransacked? What about the ranchers who’re shot at while patrolling their fence lines; whose cattle are being slaughtered; there’s millions of dollars of economic damages… what about them? What about their civil right?

I have one correction to Sen. Antenori (a veteran): the rights he is trying to protect are not civil rights; they are the right to life, liberty and property. In defense of Suzanne Malveaux, she let it rest there, rather than give more time to the opponents, or try and humiliate the man, as is the habit of the hacks at MSNBC. [Look at how this dogmatic dodo insists on getting her opinion in.]

Updated: Maddow, McVeigh And The Militia

Federalism, Homeland Security, Liberty, Media, Propaganda, Reason, Terrorism, WMD

The excerpt is from “Maddow, McVeigh And The Militia,” now on WND.COM:

“Rachel Maddow’s gayness (and goggles) is the most interesting thing about her. What I’m trying to say here is that the MSNBC TV host has a mundane mind, which, rest assured, will insert and assert itself during an upcoming special presentation, “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist.” ….

A far more interesting choice for presenter of the forthcoming MSNBC feature on McVeigh would have been the brilliant belletrist Gore Vidal.

Like Maddow, Vidal (aged 83) is a gay leftist. Unlike Maddow, he manages to dazzle with his original insights. (Unfashionably, Vidal has also poked fun at assorted anal activists and at all manner of “vulgar fagism.”)

Vidal “became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh,” and considers McVeigh “a true patriot, a Constitution man.”

Gore Vidal is rare in recognizing the legitimate federal insults to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that motivated McVeigh to commit his crime. He is also unique, on the Left and Right, in acknowledging that McVeigh was not a rube, but a thoughtful man who had fought for his country and was familiar with its foundational principles and documents.

As the most able counsel for the defense (McVeigh’s), the iconoclastic octogenarian would have given his viewers something to mull over; mundane Maddow will not. …

The complete column is “Maddow, McVeigh And The Militia.” Read it 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 (April 16): Inferring motivation, or psychologizing about the reason Vidal respected some of McVeigh’s arguments are species of ad hominem. I avoid them, for the most; I don’t take them seriously when others make them. In fact, that’s MSNBC’s stock-in-trade; impute motivation (“racism” always) to your foe and attack him based on assumptions about his inner workings, rather than deal with the facts and merits of his argument.

So, our (much-welcomed) commenter claims Vidal had a homoerotic fixation with McVeigh, and therefore everything he claimed to respect in McVeigh is not credible. That line of reasoning is illogical.

A quote from McVeigh:

I think it all has to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the misconception that the government is obliged to provide those things or has the jurisdiction to deny them. We’ve gotten away from the principle that they were only created to secure those rights. And that’s where, I believe, much of the trouble has surfaced.

I agree with that. And if a “stormtrooper” agrees with the above statement, then consider that a stormtrooper, McVeigh and I agree about the statement. Other than to argue in circles, so what?!

Updated: Allowed History From Below ONLY

Federalism, History, Just War, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism, States' Rights

Confederate History Month: Declared anew by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, with the intent of honoring the Commonwealth of Virginia’s shared history. Read the April 2010 proclamation declaring it Confederate History Month. Reasonable stuff.

If you’re going to do something as controversial as honor the South’s sacrifice, be prepared to stick to your guns. Otherwise, don’t bother to put on the show. The specter of yellow-bellied pols capitulating to the pieties of political correctness is sickening.

The history of the US is what the Legislative Black Caucus, the NAACP, and so-called civil-rights activists say it is; it’s history from below; a litany of complaints and contrivances from self-styled victims’ groups on behalf of minor historical figures.

Update (April 8): I contacted my good friend the valiant Tom DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, for a comment about the fracas. Here it is:

“What would the race hustlers and the pompously politically correct do without Confederate History Month? How could the former frighten little old black ladies into sharing their social security checks with them if they couldn’t use it to scare them into thinking there are people out there who want to bring back slavery? As for the PC crowd, which includes the usual leftist suspects as well as such outfits as the ‘libertarian’ Cato Institute and the neocon Claremont Institute, Southerners must forever be demonized for the sin of slavery– but not New Yorkers and New Englanders, who also owned slaves and ran the transcontinental slave trade for centuries. No, only Southerners must be demonized because they were the only group in American history to seriously challenge the notion that the politicians in D.C. are ‘sovereign’ over everyone and everything.”

Grounds For A Constitutional Challenge Of H.R.4872

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

In an interview with NewsMax.com, Judge Andrew Napolitano outlined the grounds upon which the Supreme Court of the United States ought to repeal major portions of Obama’s overweening health care legislation:

“The Constitution does not authorize the Congress to regulate the state governments,” Napolitano says. “Nevertheless, in this piece of legislation, the Congress has told the state governments that they must modify their regulation of certain areas of healthcare, they must surrender their regulation of other areas of healthcare, and they must spend state taxpayer-generated dollars in a way that the Congress wants it done. …

That’s called commandeering the legislature,” he says. “That’s the Congress taking away the discretion of the legislature with respect to regulation, and spending taxpayer dollars. That’s prohibited in a couple of Supreme Court cases. So on that argument, the attorneys general have a pretty strong case and I think they will prevail.” …

The Supreme Court has ruled that in areas of human behavior that are not delegated to the Congress in the Constitution, and that have been traditionally regulated by the states, the Congress can’t simply move in there,” Napolitano says. “And the states for 230 years have had near exclusive regulation over the delivery of healthcare. The states license hospitals. The states license medications. The states license healthcare providers whether they’re doctors, nurses, or pharmacists. The feds have had nothing to do with it.

“The Congress can’t simply wake up one day and decide that it wants to regulate this. I predict that the Supreme Court will invalidate major portions of what the president just signed into law.”…

Napolitano believes the federal government lacks the legal authority to order citizens to purchase healthcare insurance. The Congress [is] ordering human beings to purchase something that they might not want, might not need, might not be able to afford, and might not want — that’s never happened in our history before,” Napolitano says. “My gut tells me that too is unconstitutional, because the Congress doesn’t have that kind of power under the Constitution.”

The sweetheart deals in the healthcare reform bill used that persuaded Democrats to vote for it – the Louisiana Purchase, Cornhusker Kickback, Gatorade Exception and others – create “a very unique and tricky constitutional problem” for Democrats, because they treat citizens differently based on which state they live in, running afoul of the Constitution’s equal protection clause according to Napolitano. “So these bennies or bribes, whatever you want, or horse trading as it used to be called, clearly violate equal protection by forcing people in the other states to pay the bills of the states that don’t have to pay what the rest of us do,” Napolitano says.

Exempting union members from the so-called “Cadillac tax” on expensive health insurance policies, while imposing that tax on other citizens, is outright discrimination according to Napolitano. “The government cannot draw a bright line, with fidelity to the Constitution and the law, on the one side of which everybody pays, and the other side of which some people pay. It can’t say, ‘Here’s a tax, but we’re only going to apply it to nonunion people. Here’s a tax, and we’re only going to apply it to graduates of Ivy League institutions.’ The Constitution does not permit that type of discrimination.” …

[SNIP]

In this televised interview, the Judge laid out more clearly the test for a constitutional challenge, namely that one is harmed by the legislation.

Note the comment on the impossibility of reading and making sense of H.R.4872 Reconciliation Act of 2010 (my experience) each section of which amends and alludes to other laws in the US Code, which in itself is large enough to fill a house with paper stacked to the ceilings.