Category Archives: Political Philosophy

What The EU Has Done To British Sovereignty

Britain, Conspiracy, EU, Europe, Political Philosophy

Some say a North American Union à la the EU is a conspiracy theory. The people who say so have a nasty tendency of looking down on “bitter” types who prefer guns and god to the goons in government.

In contrast to deniers such as Michael Medved, there are authentic, credible conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan who say the supra-state under construction is real, and is being covered-up.

In “Adieu to the Evil EU,” I explained a thing or two to the O’Reillys of the world who had been heaping scorn on the French for rejecting the centralized state American neocons were applauding at the time.

Here are some of the effects on the UK of joining the EU. O’Reilly and his fellow Fixers may find them appealing. As will Kaiser-in-Waiting, McCain:

“The effects of EU membership are complicated and have worked in part in conjunction with other international influences, primarily the incorporation into British law of the European Convention on Human Rights. EU law has taken primacy over UK law. As a result, Parliament is no longer what it was. While, in British constitutional tradition, Parliament could decide as it wanted, Parliament can now decide as it wants only provided that what it wants is in conformity with EU law. As a result, writes King, ‘British government today is shackled government to a far greater degree than it used to be’”.

“But that is only the beginning of the story. With European law comes also the European Court of Justice. British citizens can take the British government to court in Europe, and the European Court can find against the British government even if it is acting in accordance with British law. Furthermore, British citizens can take the British government to court in Britain on incompatibility between UK and EU law, and British courts can declare UK laws inoperable with reference to EU law. The same applies to human rights and the European Court of Human Rights. British citizens can appeal, in Britain or Europe, to a law that stands above laws enacted by their own Parliament. This represents a double transfer of power: from British elected to international non-elected institutions, and in Britain from Parliament to the courts. The courts have been handed a set of super-laws which they can use to test the validity of laws passed in Parliament, and thereby the power to override the will of Parliament.”

“The scope for judicial review by the courts has thereby been radically extended. But even that is not the end of it. With its new powers, the judiciary woke up from ‘a long sleep’, started to assert itself, and the senior judges metamorphosed into a political class of activists. The old doctrine that the courts only interpreted the law was thrown out in favour of a new doctrine by which the courts explicitly make law. ‘No one’, wrote Lord Denning, ‘can tell what the law is until the courts decide it.’ Judges were no longer only judges, but threw themselves into public debate, felt free to criticize lawmakers and ministers, chaired all kinds of commissions and so on. Under John Major, ‘war broke out between senior ministers and senior judges’”.

Election Briefs (March 4)

Elections 2008, Political Philosophy

* Stretch out on the Freudian chaise lounge, and free-associate the word “McCain.” The first refrain to come to mind is POW. It’s the same reflex Rudy honed in his interlocutors after 9/11. You could sleep-walk the “Rudy/9/11” refrain. I don’t think I can take 4 years of the McCain mantra. It might be easier to abhor Obama.

* Care to hazard a guess as to the reason for the obsessive calls for candidates who aren’t winning to quit? What is it with the media and other members of the chattering class out there, who cannot tolerate discordant, fractious voices, or competition in government? Words such as “spoiler” should be scorned in this context. Ditto “to unify the party.” The idea that a campaigner should slink away with his tail between his legs so as not to steal votes from the bigger tickets, or sow confusion—that’s contemptible. The greater the political chaos, the greater the chance for real political change. Oh, I get it, the Media-Military-Congressional-Industrial Complex craves consensus. In this way, positions as gate-keepers of permissible opinion are secured.

Update: Media clucked about the need for Hillary to bow out for the reasons enumerated above. What do you know; she won big in Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island. The New York Times is still using moribund terminology to describe her gains. Apparently, she is barely keeping her candidacy alive. Let’s wait and see.

Although finality has yet to be reached on the Democratic front, the same consensus-seekers can at least rejoice in Huckabee’s quitting.

Diablo’s Birthday

Constitution, Federalism, Political Philosophy

“Feb. 12 ought to mark the birthday not of an American icon, but of a man whose name should live on in infamy. If Americans want to reclaim their moral character as a nation, they will have to confront and denounce ‘The Real Lincoln,’ who carried out a violent constitutional revolution (instead of pursuing peaceful emancipation like every other nation did), a revolution, which, in turn, sired the modern imperialist, interventionist and highly centralized American State.

Let’s imagine, as the Lincoln-louts claim, that the Constitution ratified in 1788 forbade peaceful secession and authorized the federal government, which was supposed to have limited powers delegated to it by the people, to invade and occupy any seceding state, declare martial law, subdue the secessionists by force, burn and ransack entire cities, and then establish a military dictatorship over those states for a dozen years.

Let’s pretend that it was constitutional to intentionally wage war on civilians, blacks included, to imprison without trial thousands of Northern citizens, jail, even execute people who refused to take a loyalty oath to Lord Lincoln, shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, incarcerating editors and owners, and generally suspend the Bill of Rights, the writ of habeas corpus and international law.

If it endorsed, or even accommodated what Lincoln did, including his ignoring of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, and his violating of the Second, then the Constitution is categorically evil and self-contradictory.”

Derb On The Irrelevance of Libertarianism

Elections 2008, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Ron Paul

In “High Priests of Pomposity Pan Ron Paul” I contended that whatever was revving the Ron Paul Revolution, it was not the ideas or the “energy” of Beltway libertarians, represented by the Cato and Reason claque. In fact, there was almost no overlap between “the [Ron] Paul and the [Virginia] Postrel solitudes”:

“Ron’s Revolutionaries have coalesced around the illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional invasion of Iraq, against America’s hegemonic overreach, and for a sovereign, less ‘cosmopolitan,’ America.
Beltway libertarians, conversely, are moved in mysterious ways by gaping borders, gay marriage, multiculturalism, cloning, and all else ‘cool and cosmopolitan.’”

John Derbyshire goes further. In a new VDARE.com column, Derb contends that, “Paradoxically, Ron Paul’s candidacy is proving the irrelevance of libertarianism.”

Particularly courageous, given the commentariat’s general allergy to the truth, is Derb’s daring defense of Paul’s association

“with people, fifteen or twenty years ago, who thought that we were all better off when homosexuals had to be discreet, and that black Americans are prone to civil disorder, and that Martin Luther King was a philandering plagiarist, and that the Confederacy had a right to secede from the Union, and that the Korean storekeepers of Los Angeles behaved in true American spirit when they defended their property with guns against rioters. People really seem to have believed such things! And Paul gave them space in his newsletters! Euiw!”

As I’ve said in this space, “Derb’s Da Man.”

Derb also adds an “affirmations of undying political correctness” to his indictment of the Girls and Girly Boys of the Beltway.

That has to be particularly painful to a collective—and they do act and think as one—that likes to think of itself as ultra-rad (man).

The article is “Paradoxically, Ron Paul’s Success Proving Irrelevance of Libertarianism”