Obama - wants to reverse the Constitution - Granite Grok

Obama – wants to reverse the Constitution

You know, other than his books, there is little to be found of any of Obama’s scholarly writings are available for perusal – not from Columbia, not from Union Cooper, not from Harvard, and not from Chicago….nada.  It is as if his paper trail was scrubbed clean (and anything left, like the inquires by Stanley Kurtz into the Annenburg papers was hurriedly cleansed).

The latest utterance by Obama have certainly revealed more of what he really believes – that the Founding Fathers were wrong in how they constructed our most foundational document – the Constitution.  His lament? It restricts Government, that it is a negative liberties document ("it keeps the Government FROM doing things).  Our Founding Fathers had the idea that individual liberties were to have primacy – and not Government.  Unlike Hobbes and Rousseau, they believed that our Rights were from God, the Creator, and thus indisputable.  Because of that absolute declaration (with the implicit recognition that God is Supreme, and that man-generated State is not), they realized that limits HAD to be put onto Government – enumerating what Government should NOT do.

Andy McCarthy had it right:

For Obama, economic justice demands the positive case: what government “must do on your behalf” …[however] The purpose of the Constitution was not to make the positive case for government but for freedom. Freedom cannot exist without order, and thus implies some measure of government. But it is a limited government, vested with only the powers expressly enumerated. As the framers knew, a government that strays beyond those powers is necessarily treading on freedom’s territory.

Relatedly, the Constitution does state the positive case for government in its opening lines. Government is required to safeguard the rule of law and the national security. These injunctions are vital: there is no liberty without them. Why, then, do Obama and other Leftists ignore them? Because they don’t involve picking winners and losers; they eschew social engineering. These guarantees, instead, are for everyone, uniformly: Government must “provide for the common defense” and “promote the general welfare” (emphasis added). The Blessings of Liberty are to be secured “to ourselves and to our posterity”—not to yourself at the expense of my posterity.

And Obama is not pleased that he is hamstrung in what he can have Government DO (as did Teddy Roosevelt and FDR).  In fact, falling right into line with FDR, the most Liberal President that we have ever had (although Johnson gave him a run for his money).  In fact, what Obama is going to try to do is what FDR tried to do – give Government more power via a Second Bill of Rights:

  • The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
  • The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
  • The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
  • The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
  • The right of every family to a decent home;
  • The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
  • The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
  • The right to a good education.

How in the world did he, and people who believe as he did, think that Government would be able to actually deliver on these?  Each of the Rights actually enumerated in the real Bill of Rights simply demand that Government cannot encroach into our lives; they cost my fellow citizen nothing.  I can speak, practice my religion, assemble with like minded people, carry a gun, and all the others, and all it demands of my Government is that it does nothing.  The demands placed upon my fellow citizens as I exercise my rights are the same – it costs them nothing.  On the other hand, providing my fellow citizens with the above Second Bill of Rights WILL cost me (and you) a lot.  So, let’s take some of the above and take some to their illogical conclusions (well, maybe not, given how some Libs and some courts actually are able to mess things up).

  • Government ensures that I have a job where I live?  What if my skill set is not a match for what is in my area – is Government mandated to create one for me? And who needs to provide the financial wherewithal to allow me to pick where I live and be employed? Or do I have the right to live where I want?
  • If I do not have the requisite skills to properly afford a family, Government should force others to pay for my reeducation?
  • How is Government going to ensure that my business is not going to be impacted by a monopoly outside of our borders?  If I go into the oil business, will does my Government have to break up the oil monopoly OPEC?  Or would Government be forced to subsidize my ill chosen industry as it really cannot do this?
  • Do I get to grab a clutch of carpenters and force them to build me a house where I want to live?  Would that not be impacting their lives (and that of their families) to satisfy my own wants / needs?  What kind of house am I entitled to (after all, public housing has been such a rousing success)?
  • I have yet to see any place where anyone’s right to adequate health care has been always sufficiently and quickly fulfilled.
  • How is Government going to take all risk out of living ("The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment")?

The Union Leader editorial got it right:

…When Barack Obama envisions a government finally set free from the "essential constraints" the Founders wrote into the Constitution, he envisions a government wholly unconstrained, empowered to enslave one segment of the population, forcing it to work on behalf of another segment — to "spread the wealth around."

The U.S. Constitution exists for one reason. To protect us from men like Barack Obama, who is perilously close to being handed the power to begin undoing that protection. 

Mark Steyn, one of smartest, most biting conservative writers on the planet, adds this:

But even in theory (as promoted by Sunstein and many others) it inverts the great idea of America as a republic whose government is restrained and limited by the natural rights of the individual and replaces it with a conventionally European view in which all "rights" are granted by the Sovereign and devolved down to his grateful subjects…

and he adds this:

[UPDATE: A reader writes:

I think adding "The right to an attractive and compatible mate who satisfies one’s physical desires" to the list would generate a lot of enthusiasm for socialism among unattractive people. If Paul is entitled to some or all of Peter’s earnings, why shouldn’t he be entitled to some or all of Paula’s assets as well?

Almost right. To be truly "redistributive", it should read "the right to attractive and compatible mate(s)." Another reader felt the US Second Bill of Rights rang a vague bell:

Article 40. Citizens of the USSR have the right to work (that is, to guaranteed employment and pay in accordance wit the quantity and quality of their work, and not below the state-established minimum), including the right to choose their trade or profession, type of job and work in accordance with their inclinations, abilities, training and education, with due account of the needs of society…

Article 41. Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure…The length of collective farmers’ working and leisure time is established by their collective farms.

Article 42. Citizens of the USSR have the right to health protection.

Now, join Obama’s views of the faults of our Constitution with his choices of Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal wraps it up in a ribbon for what Obama wants in a judge:

…Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: "[W]e need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges."

…He also noted that the Court "didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted." That is to say, he noted that the U.S. Constitution as written is only a guarantee of negative liberties from government — and not an entitlement to a right to welfare or economic justice.

Every new federal judge has been required by federal law to take an oath of office in which he swears that he will "administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich." Mr. Obama’s emphasis on empathy in essence requires the appointment of judges committed in advance to violating this oath. To the traditional view of justice as a blindfolded person weighing legal claims fairly on a scale, he wants to tear the blindfold off, so the judge can rule for the party he empathizes with most.

Nothing less than the very idea of liberty and the rule of law are at stake in this election. We should not let Mr. Obama replace justice with empathy in our nation’s courtrooms.

Jonah Goldberg adds more in this same vein:

America first encountered the vision Obama espouses under Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive president, and the first to openly disparage the U.S. Constitution as a hindrance to enlightened government. His new idea was to replace it with a "living constitution" that empowered government to evolve beyond that document’s constraints. The Bill of Rights, lamented the progressives, inhibited what the government can do to people, but it failed to delineate what it must do for people.

The old conception of individualism needed to be replaced by a new system in which the citizen "married his interests to the state," in Wilson’s words. This would allow the state to fulfill the progressive pledge to "spread the prosperity around." Obama shares Wilson’s faith in a living constitution and has argued that Supreme Court judges should be confirmed based on their empathy for the downtrodden.

…In 1944, FDR proposed updating the Bill of Rights with a new "economic bill of rights" that would define freedom not as liberty from government intrusion but as the possession of goodies provided by government. "Necessitous men are not free men," FDR proclaimed. It’s a statement Obama surely agrees with; his advisor, Cass Sunstein, wrote a book saying FDR’s "second bill of rights" should become the defining principle of American politics.

And thus, turning the Founders’ idea of individual freedom on its head and allow it to be lost in the morass of government bureaucracy and interminable lawmaking.  Instead of Rights from God that should not be meddled with.

A just-unearthed 2001 interview with Obama on Chicago public radio reveals as much. Then a law school instructor and state legislator, Obama offered an eloquent indictment of the Warren court for not being radical enough. While the court rightly gave blacks traditional rights, argued Obama, the "tragedy" was that "the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth." Unfortunately, according to Obama, "it didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers and the Constitution."

Thomas Sowell, concurs:

…Senator Obama has stated very clearly what kinds of Supreme Court justices he wants– those with "the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

Like so many things that Obama says, it may sound nice if you don’t stop and think– and chilling if you do stop and think. Do we really want judges who decide cases based on who you are, rather than on the facts and the law?

…Didn’t we spend decades in America, and centuries in Western civilization, trying to get away from the idea that who you are determines what your legal rights are?

A court case should not depend on who you are and who the judge is. We are supposed to be a country with "the rule of law and not of men." Like all human beings, Americans haven’t always lived up to our ideals. But Obama is proposing the explicit repudiation of that ideal itself.

That is certainly "change," but is it one that most Americans believe in? Or is it something that we may end up with anyway, just because too many voters cannot be bothered to look beyond rhetoric and style?

We can vote a president out of office at the next election if we don’t like him. But we can never vote out the federal judges he appoints in courts across the country, including justices of the Supreme Court.

Ob
ama, frankly, wishes to "Change" our Constitution and our legal system from a fact / law system to an emotional one.

Change we can do without…

>