Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Photo by roberthufstutter
Throughout out the Republican campaign process, Herman Cain has been portrayed as an interesting candidate, but with no serious chance of winning the Republican nomination. What I found was the most curious logic was on the O’Reilly Factor the other night. Bill’s reasoning that Herman Cain won’t win the nomination was because the most important thing to Republicans was to unseat Obama and that independents won’t vote for Cain because he is too conservative.
Whether you call it an iceberg or a torpedo, ObamaCare just struck something or vice versa and it doesn’t look good. The ship is taking on water and you can hear the orchestra tuning up as they rearrange the deck chairs.
After watching some of the Sunday talk shows and hearing the tough talk from House Democrats and learning more about the tax bill getting loaded up with subsidies it’s time for Republicans to put their hands up and slowly back away from this putrid mess.
Comments submitted in response to a previous post, “The Progressive War on Federalism,” focused on the Electoral College and a movement called the National Popular Vote (http://www.nationalpopularvote.com) bill. Rather than argue against my point it only seemed to reinforce it. The objective of this movement, which before this commenter’s contribution I was unaware of, is to abolish, or should I say neuter, the Electoral College and replace it with the direct election of the president. This movement looks to further weaken the states and move us away from federalism and toward a strong monolithic central government. Here is my analysis.
As is the case every ten years we take a census of the population of the United States, as required by the Constitution. After the census is taken the seats in the House of Representatives are shuffled to accommodate for shifts in population between the states.
So what does this all mean? In a previous post focusing on the Senate we showed that currently twenty-one Democrats and two independents who caucus (meet and generally vote with) the Democrats will be facing election in 2012 compared to only ten Republicans. In the House, everyone is up for re-election every two years. So after picking up 60 seats, or thereabouts as some races still haven’t been decided, where do the two parties start off as a result of reapportionment? Although final numbers won’t be in until December, it doesn’t look good for the Democrats.
New York state government is a basket case. Earlier this week we were treated to the theater of the governor’s debate featuring such luminaries as Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is 2 Damn High party, and former madam Kristin Davis who seemed smarter on fiscal policy than half of her opponents on the stage. But let us not forget it was a stage and this is New York. Instead of being held at Hofstra University, it should have been held on Broadway, but I digress.
The government itself is one problem, the state pensions are quite another. A problem on the order of $30 billion to $80 billion. Harry Wilson is running for state comptroller. Mr. Wilson made his money on Wall Street, investing and turning around troubled companies. His opponent, Tom DiNapoli was appointed to the comptroller position after his predecessor, Alan Hevesi, was charged misconduct for trading access to the pension in return for favors.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, newly elected Republican Congressman from Hawaii Charles Djou called Birthright Citizenship a GOP Achievement. And to think I was happy to hear Mr. Djou was elected in an unusual special election where he ran against two Democrats simultaneously. They split the vote and he won. Birthright Citizenship is not a GOP achievement it is an accomplishment of judicial activism, pure and simple. Mr. Djou says, “The Citizenship Clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment provides that a person born in the United States is automatically a citizen, regardless of the race, ethnicity or citizenship of his parents.” Where the hell does it say that?
The Amendment actually reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” These, so called conservatives, like the first part of the clause but seem to go ignorant or blind at the second part. If you are a Constitutional Originalist, you look to the meaning of the Constitution first in the actual text, then to any information that you can glean from what was discussed at the time of its passing. This is a case where that information could not be any clearer.
Senator Jacob Howard of Ohio was the author of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. He said:
“[E]very person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not [emphasis added] , of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are not citizens of the United States. “
How much clearer could “not include aliens” be? Aliens are outside the jurisdiction of the United States and are subject to their home country.
Linda Chavez, who presents as her conservative credentials that she served in the Reagan and Bush administrations, points to English Common Law as the basis of the Birthright Citizenship. Since under Common Law you are immediately and forever a citizen of the place of your birth. However, with the Declaration of Independence we did away with that custom of English Common Law. Under Common Law, you could not renounce your citizenship, and if we are still under that law, we are still all Englishmen. It was also one of the causes of the War of 1812. The British did not recognize our process of Naturalization. They were stopping our merchant ships and taking off sailors they deemed to still be English citizens and pressed them into service in the Royal Navy. The concept that Ms. Chavez is arguing supports Birthright Citizenship is from feudalism, where the serfs belonged to the land. They received the lord’s protection and in return gave their lord a lifetime of service.
At the time of passage of the 14th Amendment, whose purpose was to grant citizenship to the freed slaves, the debate was whether it would also confer citizenship on the American Indians. Under Mr. Djou’s logic and Ms. Chavez’s they were born here, it was automatic. But it wasn’t. Not because of discrimination but because they were members of their tribes which were considered sovereign nations. The United States signed treaties with them. In the Supreme Court case Elk v Wilkins the court ruled:
“Indians, born within the territorial limits of the United States, members of and owing immediate allegiance to one of the Indian Tribes, an alien though dependent power, although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more born in the United States and ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ …than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children, born within the United States, of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign Nations.”
That was the law until 1898 in the Supreme Court case United States v Wong Kim Ark, where the majority used the Common Law argument to ignore what was written in the text of the Amendment, what was discussed at the time of the Amendment by the author of the Amendment and its supporters and the prior Supreme Court case. This is judicial activism at its baldest. In the dissenting opinion by Chief Justice Fuller he made it clear:
“when the sovereignty of the Crown was thrown off and independent government established, every rule of the common law and every statute of England obtaining in the colonies, in derogation of the principles on which the new government was founded, was abrogated.”
The American Revolution did away with that definition of Birthright Citizenship under the Common Law.
So along comes Lindsey Graham, who can’t decide if he is for open borders or against them, so his suggestion to amend the Constitution to end Birthright Citizenship sounds somewhat hollow. It is also irrelevant. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution clearly grants the Congress the power “To establish an (sic) uniform Rule of Naturalization..” This does not require an amendment, just a simple clarifying law that Birthright Citizenship does not exist in the United States.
The irony is that the 14th Amendment was created to make it more difficult for future Congresses to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which said pretty much the same thing as the 14th Amendment and it was changed with the stroke of the pen of an activist Supreme Court. Perhaps we need to consider the idea of Mark Levin in that perhaps we need to have a legislative veto of Supreme Court decisions. If the role of the Supreme Court is to interpret laws written by Congress, why not let Congress with a two-thirds vote, explain what the Supreme Court misinterpreted?
Just what is a czar anyway? And I am not talking about the Russian royal family. A czar is essentially a presidential advisor. Take a moment to think about that. Why does President Obama need to appoint 32, give or take, czars in his administration? Could it be that he really, really needs a lot of advising?
In the campaign, the main stream media, somehow diverted the attention away from Obama’s glaring lack of experience as the Presidential candidate and put all their focus on Sarah Palin’s “lack of experience.” Sarah Palin had more executive experience as a sitting governor and I emphasize executive experience, than Obama, Biden, and McCain combined.
But the media tut-tutted, and said “it’s only Alaska,” as for her mayoral experience, “it was a very small town.” When Obama slipped his teleprompter and tried to claim he was running a very large organization, his campaign, it was laughable. But don’t worry, he had Joe Biden to lean on. I feel better.
Presidents and The Experience They Brought With Them
Let’s take a look back at past elected presidents and the executive experience they brought to office:
Legislators Versus Executives
So, from the beginning of the 20th Century until the election of Barack Obama, only once has a president with only legislative experience been elected, John F. Kennedy. Nikita Khrushchev took advantage of Kennedy’s inexperience in their first summit in Vienna, and then there was the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the attempted overthrow of Castro. On top of those two building blocks we got the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought us closer than we have ever been to thermonuclear obliteration.
The Eternal Campaign
President Obama is no different. He has the least experience of any president since 1900. He effectively was only a United States Senator for two years, as he was busy campaigning for the next two years and resigned his last two years after being elected president. So what does he do? He does what he is comfortable doing and what he is good at, campaigning. He has held more press conferences in six months than his predecessor did in eight years. Who is running the show while Obama is running around? Is it Nancy Pelosi? Rahm Emmanual? His programs are falling apart. The stimulus isn’t working and more Americans say that it has hurt the economy rather than helped it (31%-25%) and that the rest of it should be canceled. His cap and trade plan is opposed by most Americans (56%) who don’t want to pay more in taxes to fight global warming. His government takeover of our health care is opposed by most Americans (53%-44%) and yet he presses on, figuring that with enough campaigning the American people will be won over.
This may be a long slog, waiting for 2012 and hoping our country does not get destroyed by all the power grabbing characters in Congress, who don’t care a whit about us, only about increasing the powerful control they have over our lives. We have the fight of our lives on our hands preventing the taking of our liberties.
Sometimes I wonder if this is all a bad dream and I will wake up at some point, in a cold sweat, comforted in knowing that it was just that. With the enhanced interrogation techniques, aka waterboarding, that was used on exactly three very bad men, and yielded 60% of what we learned about Al Qaeda, we are now Mirandizing terrorists on the battlefield. For those who never got a sufficient dose of crime dramas on TV here is how the Miranda rights start:
“You have the right to remain silent…”
Say no more. That is all you have to know. From using a technique to compel these murderous fiends to give up information about their likeminded associates, we have moved to telling them it is their right not to say anything. Here’s my advice… steer clear of tall or government buildings.
How 9/11 Happened
This is exactly how 9/11 happened. The Clinton Administration treated terrorism as a law and order issue rather than a war on our way of life. They constructed walls between the FBI and CIA forbidding them to share information. What the CIA learned about the terrorists before 9/11 they couldn’t tell the FBI and vice versa. As a result we got blindsided.
It is interesting to note that in putting together the 9/11 Commission to investigate how it all happened and what we could do to prevent it happening again, Jamie Gorelick, the individual who constructed this barrier in her role in the Clinton White House, was added to the Commission panel when she should have been testifying before it. (Later, without any financial background she was appointed Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae, made millions during her tenure, and Fannie Mae’s actions led to the current financial debacle).
What more will the Obama Administration do to weaken our defenses?
Your Tax Dollars Hard At Work
by Bill O'Connell on March 3, 2010
The US Postal Service is contemplating increasing postage rates and eliminating Saturday delivery. Really? They lost approximately $4 billion last year. But don’t worry the CEO got a bonus. It is reported that their labor costs, heavily unionized, exceed 80% of revenues. Did you know that the only place where unionization is growing is in the public sector? Union representation in the public sector surpassed the private sector for the first time this year.
But don’t worry, President Obama has a handle on it. He appointed Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union to the board to figure out how to reduce the deficit. Do you see a problem between these two news items? Can you see a problem with the objectives of an Andy Stern and you and me?
As a side note, Rick Perry just won the Republican primary for governor of Texas and in his campaign he used no yard signs, no phone banks, and no direct mail. As one commentator said “paper is dead.”
I know this is completely anecdotal, but my local post office just completed an expansion project increasing the size of the building. I have noticed more than one post office being expanded as well. Again, this is just my limited, personal observation, not a scientific study, but with the drop in mail volume, “paper is dead”, $4 billion in losses, performance bonuses for lackluster performance, heavy unionization, am I being unreasonable in thinking the government couldn’t handle health care even if it was a good idea?