Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Daniel Henninger wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tells of congratulating freshman Sen. Obama on a phenomenal speech. Without a hint of conceit, Mr. Obama replied, “Harry, I have a gift.”
In the article he also describes this observation:
Harvard Law Prof. Charles Ogletree told how Mr. Obama spoke on one contentious issue at the law school, and each side thought he was endorsing their view. Mr. Ogletree said: “Everyone was nodding, Oh, he agrees with me.”
That’s essentially how he got elected. With a heaping helping hand from the popular media, many people saw Obama as a blank screen upon which they could project their own views and see those as Obama’s own. He’s our man! He listens. He cares deeply. For a politician it is a phenomenal gift. For a legislator it is an extremely valuable gift. For an executive it is poison.
Pulling the Trigger
As a politician or a legislator you are in the role of persuader; somebody else makes the decision to vote for you or vote with you, respectively. As an executive you are in the role of the decider. You must make a decision and every decision, especially the tough ones are going to make a good many people unhappy. Perhaps that explains why, in the Illinois Senate, Obama voted “Present” so many times. Voting “Present” rather than “Yea” or “Nay” allowed him to hold that special place where everyone felt he agreed with them. Too many decisions one way or another would have tarnished “the gift”. So why is “the gift” poison for an executive? If you don’t have “the gift” and you make a decision your opponents may disagree with you, but they are not surprised. If you have “the gift” and you make a decision, those on the short side feel betrayed and angry, because they thought you agreed with them and then “sold out” and decided the other way.
Obama is in a tight spot where he has to make decisions and decisions have consequences. When you make a decision it is very hard to make it seem like everyone got their way. His complete lack of executive experience is telling. If he had some executive experience, such as a mayor or a governor, he might have had enough practice learning how to make his decisions appear to satisfy everyone, as his campaign speeches did. But that’s the thing about decisions. If everyone supports them, they’re not much of a decision, like deciding to pardon a turkey on Thanksgiving. Everyone enjoys the decision, but it’s really not what we elect presidents for.
I’ll Have the Waffles, Please
If you watch closely, you can see that Obama is struggling to preserve “the gift”. He said he is for closing Guantanamo, but not yet. He is for pulling out of Iraq, but no timetable. The general he put in charge of Afghanistan, McChrystal, said he needed 40,000 more troops, but Obama could not bring himself to say yes or no. He had to ponder, think, consult, weigh alternatives, and three months later, he gave McChrystal what he asked for. Those on the left complained that he was not pulling out. Those on the right complained that he wasted precious time while our troops were on the battlefield. His backers tried to give him the fig leaf of showing gravitas. He can’t seem to find the magic formula where everyone applauds him. From “the gift” he has gone to “the anti-gift”. Instead of satisfying everyone, he is finding that he is satisfying no one.
Move On
It’s time for Obama to “Move On”. He should put “the gift” in his trophy case right next to his Nobel Peace Prize. It got him to the White House. How much more can he ask of such a thing? So drop the pretense. We all know he is a hard left guy, so he should just be who he is. He may suddenly face a more hostile press, or they may love him more, although that would be hard to believe. But when he makes a decision he will at least please his base, and then his opponents can fight his statist goals without being branded as racists. As a hard left guy he will probably not get re-elected because America is not a hard left country, on the contrary the majority of Americans describe themselves as conservative. But by choosing he can try to do what he can within one term. It will be a battle. Obama’s poll ratings have dropped steadily since his inauguration and the Democrats are likely to lose seats in Congress this fall. As an old acquaintance once said to me, “It’s like standing in the middle of the road. Choose left or choose right, but choose; otherwise you get hit by traffic coming in both directions.”
When Ronald Reagan left office it was more than “Morning in America.” The Cold War was on its death bed. The economy was booming, and there was optimism everywhere. Why? Because Ronald Reagan didn’t see the government as the solution but part of the problem.
There is a story from World War II where the Germans successfully attacked an airfield wiping out many American planes on the ground. When they came back to do a reconnaissance check, they saw that all the planes had been replaced. They knew at that point they could never win the war when the American economy, not just the military was lined up against them.
How did Reagan win the Cold War without firing a shot? Not by negotiating for more arms reductions, but by building up our military. He understood that the planned economy of the Soviets could not possibly keep up with the free market American economy. They were broke and an arms race was not possible to win.
Then and Now
Where are we today? President Obama and his administration are piling more debt on us than at any time in history. His is attacking the most productive in our society as the means to pay for all his plans. How long will they put up with it? He is trying to expand government to unprecedented size. Meanwhile the Chinese Communists are instituting free market reforms and buying up our debt. It is not hard to see at some future date the Chinese Communists doing to us what Reagan did to the Soviets. The Chinese economy is growing strongly, and the Obama Administration is crippling our ability to respond to a Chinese threat of an arms race, with overwhelming debt. His focus may look like it’s domestic, but it carries a dangerous national security component. National security is explicit in the Constitution. Everything that Obama is reaching for is under the cloudy authorization of “the General Welfare” under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. We need to get back to the explicit responsibilities of the federal government enumerated in the Constitution and leave everything else to the states and the people as the Tenth Amendment tells us.
Congressman Tim Bishop referred to it in his town hall meeting. If you ask a statist where does the Constitution authorize them to get involved in every detail of our lives, the only place they can point to is Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have the Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; {my emphasis}
So what does the general Welfare mean? Statists who claim the Constitution is a living breathing document believe that this clause gives them the right to do whatever they please, and whatever gets them reelected. As conservatives we believe in original intent and therefore we have to go back to what the founders meant when they penned those words. Why is that an important distinction? Because the meaning of words change.
Are You Gay?
If you were asked that question in the eighteenth century, the questioner would have been asking you if you were merry; keenly alive and exuberant; having or inducing high spirits. If asked that question today, the questioner wants to know if you are a homosexual. So if the founders wanted to emphasize that the Constitution was a serious document and wrote, “nothing contained herein should be construed to be gay,” no one at the time would have raised an eyebrow, other than the dopiness of the clause. If read in today’s context, it would create an uproar.
Are You Bad?
The band Huey Lewis and the News have a song called “Bad is Bad” in which the band plays on how the word “bad” now means ”good” in contemporary vernacular, but sometimes it actually means bad, really bad. It shows how words change can change with time. Back when the Founders wrote the Constitution and you said someone was bad, you might find yourself choosing dueling pistols. Today, the response to the statement, “You’re bad,” would probably be, “Thanks, man.”
So if you don’t seek out the original meaning of the Constitution and our laws based on when they were written, everything can become meaningless over time.
What Did the Founders Mean by Provide for the General Welfare?
Alexander Hamilton was a proponent of a broad interpretation of the General Welfare and he supported that position during the Constitutional Convention. However proposals along those lines, such as spending for internal improvements were rejected by the Convention.
“{James} Madison repeatedly argued that the powers to tax and spend did not confer upon Congress the right to do whatever it thought to be in the best interest of the nation, but only to further the ends specifically enumerated elsewhere in the Constitution, a position supported by Jefferson.” — The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, p.93
There was another interpretation that fit in the middle that even Hamilton recognized. That was that the term “general” meant “national” welfare and not for purely local or regional benefit. President James Monroe demonstrated this
“in his 1822 message vetoing a bill to preserve and repair the Cumberland Road. Monroe contended that Congress’s power to spend is restricted ‘to purposes of common defense, and of general, national, not local, or state, benefit.” — The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, p. 93.
Later President James K. Polk vetoed a bill that looked a lot like today’s runaway earmarks.
“It provided $6,000 for projects in the Wisconsin territory — constitutionally permissible because of Congress’s broader power over federal territories — but it included $500,000 for a myriad of projects in the existing states. Polk contended that to interpret the Spending Clause to permit such appropriations would allow ‘combinations of individual and local interests [that would be] strong enough to control legislation, absorb the revenues of the country, and plunge the government into hopeless indebtedness.’” – ibid, p. 95
If you changed some of the numbers you could have written that today rather than in 1847. Where this came off the rails, along with so many other government disasters we are paying for today, was during FDR’s tenure beginning in 1936. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions left the definition of “General Welfare” up to Congress. How ridiculous is that? Justice Sandra Day O’Connor summed it up pretty well in her dissent in South Dakota v. Dole
“If the spending power is to be limited only by Congress’ notion of the general welfare, the reality….is that the Spending Clause gives ‘power to the Congress….to become a parliament of the whole people, subject to no restrictions save such as are self-imposed.’ This….was not the Framer’s plan and it is not the meaning of the Spending Clause.”
Out of Control Spending
The outrage demonstrated at the town halls shows that the American people are fed up with Congress ignoring what they are saying and bankrupting the country. The Supreme Court in the 1930s opened the door to profligate spending by Congress that was kept in check by the Constitution for 140 years prior. To allow Congress to define general welfare as they want and then spend accordingly makes no sense logically or otherwise. If the Supreme Court does not set this right, a Constitutional Amendment may be required, and I am no fan of amending the Constitution at every turn. As an American I take pride our Constitution that we have only felt a need to amend 27 times in over 200 years. But if we allow changes in the definitions of words to drag the Constitution along with them, then we need to take measures to put the Constitution back where it was as a beacon to guide us rather than a quaint artifact of our history.
