Obama Abuses the Supremes

Several years ago, Mr. Obama stood at a podium when he reported to Congress and the American people, and wagged a rhetorical finger at the Justices sitting below him to the side, and made it clear he did not approve of their ruling on a case involving political action committees.  The justices sitting on their hands could do nothing for they are not political and Obama was being very political.

More recently, Obama has made it clear to the Supreme Court that he would like to

"remind conservative commentators that, for years, what we have heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism, or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law."

We are not commenting on Republicans Mr. Obama, we are commenting on what you have done, not what some hypothetical past congress did in your revised memory.  What we are talking about is your proposed healthcare (one which few members of congress read, which some of your own party told us we had to approve to find out what was in it) that was supported by one Republican with some Democrats crossing the aisle in opposition.  THAT Mr. Obama is a clear indication that it was not supported or approved by a majority and because you will raise the issue of a majority - a vast majority of Americans do not want your healthcare system.  They want it erased.

The Supreme Court is about to render parts of the plan unconstitutional.  You strike back that it was duly constitued and approved.  So was Plessy versus Ferguson.  So were the laws that enslaved.  So were many laws we now find repulsive and unconstitutional Mr. Obama.  Using your poor logic, those duly constituted and approved laws (separate but equal and enslaved) should be left alone.  The fact you think the law is constitutional doesn't mean anything except your opinion really does not matter on these issues.  What is clear is your opinion of yourself and the Imperial Presidency.

In the first months of his administration in early 2009, he stacked the Executive Office of the President with "Czars" who were not approved by the Senate, but were responsible to congress for the departments they oversaw.  This effort was, with very little question by reasonable people, an end-run around the requirement for Senatorial Advice and Consent.

It would seem you have little respect for the Constitution you swore to uphold Mr. Obama.

Just sayin'

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'We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World! Surprised I am not.

MAYBE the people need to reconsider 'entitlement'.  MAYBE the people who have lost interest are people incapable of grasping the depth of liberty and freedom afforded them by such a document.  Perhaps, like the men who defined the Enlightenment, many peoples around the globe were not capable of incorprating such complicated ideas and philosophies into their lives and political systems.

It makes a heck of a lot more sense than anything in the article as to why the appeal has waned.

February 6, 2012

‘We thePeople’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World

By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Constitution has seen better days.

Sure, it is the nation’s founding document and sacred text. And it is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But its influence is waning.

In 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, Time magazine calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”

A quarter-century later, the picture looks very different. “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to a new study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.

The study, to be published in June in The New York University Law Review, bristles with data. Its authors coded and analyzed the provisions of 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries from 1946 to 2006, and they considered 237 variables regarding various rights and ways to enforce them.

“Among the world’s democracies,” Professors Law and Versteeg concluded, “constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.”

“The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.”

There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.

In an interview, Professor Law identified a central reason for the trend: the availability of newer, sexier and more powerful operating systems in the constitutional marketplace. “Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1,” he said.

In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.

The rights guaranteed by the American Constitution are parsimonious by international standards, and they are frozen in amber. As Sanford Levinson wrote in 2006 in “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” “the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any constitution currently existing in the world today.” (Yugoslavia used to hold that title, but Yugoslavia did not work out.)

Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years. By odd coincidence, Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison, once said that every constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years” because “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” These days, the overlap between the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and those most popular around the world is spotty.

Americans recognize rights not widely protected, including ones to a speedy and public trial, and are outliers in prohibiting government establishment of religion. But the Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect, at least in so many words, a right to travel, the presumption of innocence and entitlement to food, education and health care.

It has its idiosyncrasies. Only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions protect, as the Second Amendment does, a right to bear arms. (Its brothers in arms are Guatemala and Mexico.)

The Constitution’s waning global stature is consistent with the diminished influence of the Supreme Court, which “is losing the central role it once had among courts in modern democracies,” Aharon Barak, then the president of the Supreme Court of Israel, wrote in The Harvard Law Review in 2002.

Many foreign judges say they have become less likely to cite decisions of the United States Supreme Court, in part because of what they consider its parochialism.

“America is in danger, I think, of becoming something of a legal backwater,” Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia said in a 2001 interview. He said that he looked instead to India, South Africa and New Zealand.

Mr. Barak, for his part, identified a new constitutional superpower: “Canadian law,” he wrote, “serves as a source of inspiration for many countries around the world.” The new study also suggests that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982, may now be more influential than its American counterpart.

The Canadian Charter is both more expansive and less absolute. It guarantees equal rights for women and disabled people, allows affirmative action and requires that those arrested be informed of their rights. On the other hand, it balances those rights against “such reasonable limits” as “can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

There are, of course, limits to empirical research based on coding and counting, and there is more to a constitution than its words, as Justice Antonin Scalia told the Senate Judiciary Committee in October. “Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights,” he said.

“The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours,” he said, adding: “We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!”

“Of course,” Justice Scalia continued, “it’s just words on paper, what our framers would have called a ‘parchment guarantee.’ ”

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Goose and Gander

I could accept the tit for tat argument, but to make it about the Republicans thwarting a president is ... at best, simplistic.



Dem to Lee: 'You got what you deserved' on Cordray

byJoel Gehrke

Washington Examiner

 

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., gave "a rebuke" to a Republican senator testifying in a House hearing today about President Obama's controversial recess appointments, which were made when the Senate was not actually in recess. Connolly, who represents the inner suburbs of Northern Virginia, said that Senate Republicans brought the unprecedented maneuver on themselves by obstructing President Obama's agenda.

"You got what you deserved," Connolly told Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah. "I guess, with all due respect, consider this a rebuke." Connolly criticized Senate Republicans for attempting to block the installment of Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Obama made two other recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, who been announced so recently that no paperwork had been submitted to the Senate and no confirmation hearings held.

"I believe that a statement by 44 Republican senators in the United States Senate announcing that they are going to try to thwart the implementation of a duly-passed law," Connolly said, is "a second extra-constitutional bite at the apple to thwart its implementation when you didn't have the votes to defeat it."

Lee explained in the hearing that the Republicans refused to allow a vote on Cordray because the law creating the CFPB was designed into protect it from congressional oversight. The law actually prevents future Congresses from defunding the bureau. "It enjoys an unusual degree of insulation from the normal controls on any government and that degree of insulation has historically been reserved for despots," Lee told House Oversight and Government Reform Chair Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Connolly did acknowledge that he believes presidents have long "abused" the power to make recess appointments, but he argued that it "has nothing to do with this president per se; it is a long-standing institutional and constitutional issue."









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Obama’s inoperable Constitution

By Robert Knight

The Washington Times
Friday, January 6, 2012

ASSOCIATED PRESS Former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray has been nominated to head the new Consumer Protection Bureau. But Senate Republicans say he would have too much power. Democrats, for their part, complain of political games being played in the process.

Back in 1973, when the Nixon administration was under fire for Watergate, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler uttered an unforgettable response when caught in a lie during a news conference: "This is the operative statement. The other statements are now inoperable."

Well, the Obama administration just topped that by essentially declaring the U.S. Constitution "inoperable." President Obama did not use that term when making an illegal recess appointment of Richard Cordray to the new post of consumer czar on Wednesday, but he might as well have.

Mr. Cordray now heads the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which will do its best to strangle any thought that business owners might have of getting out from under oppressive bureaucracy long enough to create any new jobs that aren't in the government.

Remember, these are the same folks who thought it was a great idea to let Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, bring the magic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the financial sector with the awful Dodd-Frank law. But merit aside, the Cordray appointment was made outside constitutional bounds.

Here's what the official White House blog says about why the administration staged the Cordray coup:

"The Constitution gives the president the authority to make temporary recess appointments to fill vacant positions when the Senate is in recess. ... In an overt attempt to prevent the president from exercising his authority during this period, Republican senators insisted on using a gimmick called 'pro forma' sessions, which are sessions during which no Senate business is conducted and instead one or two senators simply gavel in and out of session in a matter of seconds."

What the White House regards as "gimmicks" are the letter of the law of the Constitution. Article I, Section 5, says "Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting."

Under Speaker John A. Boehner, the House has not granted the Senate adjournment. So, like it or not, Majority Leader Harry Reid's do-nothing Senate, which has not passed a budget in three years, is still in session. In 2007, Mr. Reid refused to adjourn the Senate in order to block President George W. Bush's recess appointments. Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush abided by the Constitution and backed off.

Mr. Obama also loaded up the National Labor Relations Board with three recess appointees who won't threaten the conviviality of the current labor-union-packed board, whose hobby appears to be sticking needles into a voodoo doll shaped like South Carolina.

The NLRB not only issued orders halting South Carolina's voter-approved measure to preserve secret ballots in union elections, but tried to close a brand-new Boeing factory and move it to union-shackled Washington state. Just the other day, the Justice Department ordered South Carolina to halt enforcement of its photo-ID law, which discourages voter fraud.

You can almost see officials sitting around in the White House, exclaiming, "What will it take to provoke South Carolina into bombarding Fort Sumter again? Should we outlaw barbecue, golf, Krispy Kreme doughnuts and mint juleps?"

The Obama administration's lawlessness is becoming so obvious that nearly everyone outside the liberal mainstream media has caught on. Many Americans are appalled, but hard-core leftists are delighted. They regard the Constitution as a sham document that enables an oppressive, racist, sexist, homophobic society of the rich to oppress college students.

They give a pass to Hollywood moguls, of course, and they think it's great fun to misquote the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom while going about scrubbing the public square clean of America's Christian heritage.

You almost have to admire Mr. Obama's audacity, which he warned us about in his autobiographies. He openly trashed the U.S. Supreme Court last January during his State of the Union address, knowing the justices who were present could not respond to his bald-faced mischaracterization of their ruling striking down the odious McCain-Feingold muzzling of political speech.

He told us he wanted the United States to get along better with other nations and then sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton abroad to lecture them on their stubborn resistance to abortion, homosexuality and global-warming extremism.

He said he wanted to be a healer, bringing the races together. But he appointed an attorney general whose hobby, when not sharpening needles for South Carolina, seems to be stirring up racial animosity and trying to frame Texas gun dealers.

Mr. Obama's piece de resistance, though, was ramming the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, down America's throat while assuring us that we could keep our current health insurance. The lies, evasions, backroom deals and front-room bribes could fill a dozen books.

When Obamacare was being debated, the administration insisted that the individual mandate was not a tax. After more than half the states sued to halt this unconstitutional mess, Mr. Obama's lawyers told courts it was a tax after all. Apparently, the previous claim became "inoperable."

If the constitutional order is not restored and Obamacare is not struck down or repealed, enemies of the state, such as older people who refuse to go gently into the night, might routinely start hearing scarier things than lies, such as: "That patient is now inoperable."

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Obama: There he goes again, deciding what is and is not Constitutional

We had this discussion for seven years - and Libya is no where near as big of a problem as Iran or North Korea or Syria or Nigeria, or Sudan or Somalia or Yemen or Congo or Uganda or ... and yet, we have become embroiled in a  war that truly, with no question, is so unimportant as to be unworthy of mention but for the fact we have spent a billion dollars dealing with this wholly contrived event that is not relevant to anyone on earth but for some Libyans - and they managed pretty well for 30 years.

Unlike Iraq - who had nuclear materials and had tried to assassinate a US president and was a threat to its neighbors and a majority of the population within its borders.

Unlike Afghanistan - where a sunni sect decided it would interpret the Koran and sharia law as strictly as possible, including when necessary shooting women on the streets if they had fingernail polish on, or were not covered completely.  A group of pedophiles barbarians who abused little boys as earnestly as they abused little girls and older women - all in the name of their religion.  Stopping men on the street to measure their beards, and beating anyone who did not have a beard the correct length.   A group of barbaric men who decided to destroy 5,000 year old monuments because they somehow offended their sensibilities (probably just before they all jumped back in their trucks and went back to town to molest little boys).  An extremist sect who gave refuge, support, aid, and comfort to the world's most sought after terrorist, and in the process brought ruin upon what was left in Afghanistan - often shooting children or teachers if they were in a school, burning down schools, killing anyone and everyone who opposed them.  A group who provided a state for any and all terrorists from which they might plan and carry out attacks against the United States or Germany, or England, or ... any country.

Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya is a model student.  In 2003, when George W Bush said we would go after anyone and everyone who had WMDs and otherwise anyone who aided terrorism - Kaddafhi called up Bush and asked him to come to Libya and take away his nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons because he no longer wanted them.  Kadaffi has always been a pain but it never bothered Bush, Clinton, Bush enough to act.  Reagan tried to dissuade him from the dark side, only to push him over the edge, and we were not there to ensure he didn't climb back up because by then it was H. Bush and he was not Reagan.

Suddenly Libya is worth a billion dollars.  No.  They are not.  Egypt is not worth $3 billion.  Pakistan is not worth $5 billion.  No.  Not any amount.

Shame on Obama.






2 Top Lawyers Lost to Obama in Libya War Policy Debate


By CHARLIE SAVAGE
The New York Times

June 17, 2011




WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.



Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, said there had been “a full airing of views within the administration and a robust process” that led Mr. Obama to his view that the Libya campaign was not covered by a provision of the War Powers Resolution that requires presidents to halt unauthorized hostilities after 60 days.

“It should come as no surprise that there would be some disagreements, even within an administration, regarding the application of a statute that is nearly 40 years old to a unique and evolving conflict,” Mr. Schultz said. “Those disagreements are ordinary and healthy.”

Still, the disclosure that key figures on the administration’s legal team disagreed with Mr. Obama’s legal view could fuel restiveness in Congress, where lawmakers from both parties this week strongly criticized the White House’s contention that the president could continue the Libya campaign without their authorization because the campaign was not “hostilities.”

The White House unveiled its interpretation of the War Powers Resolution in a package about Libya it sent to Congress late Wednesday. On Thursday, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, demanded to know whether the Office of Legal Counsel had agreed.

“The administration gave its opinion on the War Powers Resolution, but it didn’t answer the questions in my letter as to whether the Office of Legal Counsel agrees with them,” he said. “The White House says there are no hostilities taking place. Yet we’ve got drone attacks under way. We’re spending $10 million a day. We’re part of an effort to drop bombs on Qaddafi’s compounds. It just doesn’t pass the straight-face test, in my view, that we’re not in the midst of hostilities.”

A sticking point for some skeptics was whether any mission that included firing missiles from drone aircraft could be portrayed as not amounting to hostilities.

As the May 20 deadline approached, Mr. Johnson advocated stopping the drone strikes as a way to bolster the view that the remaining activities in support of NATO allies were not subject to the deadline, officials said. But Mr. Obama ultimately decided that there was no legal requirement to change anything about the military mission.

The administration followed an unusual process in developing its position. Traditionally, the Office of Legal Counsel solicits views from different agencies and then decides what the best interpretation of the law is. The attorney general or the president can overrule its views, but rarely do.

In this case, however, Ms. Krass was asked to submit the Office of Legal Counsel’s thoughts in a less formal way to the White House, along with the views of lawyers at other agencies. After several meetings and phone calls, the rival legal analyses were submitted to Mr. Obama, who is a constitutional lawyer, and he made the decision.

A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about the internal deliberations, said the process was “legitimate” because “everyone knew at the end of the day this was a decision the president had to make” and the competing views were given a full airing before Mr. Obama.

[to read the rest of the article, click on the link]
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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