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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; constitution</title>
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		<title>Trashing the Constitution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/trashing-the-constitution-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=trashing-the-constitution-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2014 05:23:05 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[America's fiercest warriors for freedom reveal Obama's assault on our rights at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “Trashing the Constitution,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/113571263" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Cinderella, Superman and Pinocchio were walking through the woods one day when they came upon a sign advertising a beauty contest.  Cinderella smiled at her two companions and said, “I’ve got this.”  She comes back an hour later with a trophy.  They continue on their journey until they see another sign, this one advertising a competition for the world’s strongest man.  Superman puffs out his chest, says, “I’ll be right back,” and about an hour later he comes back with a trophy.  Finally, just before sunset, the trio spies a final sign calling for a contest to find the world’s greatest liar.  Pinocchio scratches his nose and says, “No problem,” but an hour later he returns in tears with no trophy.  He manages only to blurt out, “Who is Barack Obama?”  When Pinocchio finally composes himself, his unbelieving companions ask how he possibly lost.  Pinocchio said, “I was in first place and then Barack Obama said, ‘I’m a constitutional scholar.’”</p>
<p>And so we find ourselves in 2014, gathered to discuss the trashing of the American Constitution.  My name is Paul Erickson.  I’ve been a part of the vast right-wing conspiracy since 1980 when I cast my first vote for President and for Ronald Reagan, and then serving eventually in his first administration.  Today’s topic has been one of the three animating issues of my avocation in politics since the days of my senior year at Yale when the Algonquin Round Table of my Yale political union party of the right stalwarts first formed the Federalist Society and I was privileged to take Nino Scalia’s final seminar at the University of Virginia School of Law before his elevation to the federal bench and his eventual donning of the black robes of justice.  But with us today are some very special individuals whose expertise makes me happier than President Obama with an open border.  I’ll introduce each of the experts in turn as they speak with plenty of time for your questions and a timely lunch.</p>
<p>Sean Noble is the founder of DC London, a one-stop shop for expert political messaging and campaign services.  Most of us first met Sean during his tenure as Arizona Congressman John Shadegg’s chief of staff.  His smiling, vicious campaign expertise has earned him the sobriquet “el sol diablo” from Arizona Democrats, many of whom speak English.  Sean has five children and is a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, but unlike Clayton Kershaw, his children have never let him down in the World Series.  His last thought of the day on his blog before he was swept up in the 2014 mid-term election analysis was a timeless quote by Margaret Thatcher.  “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”  I’m happy to have him charging the breach once again today.  Sean Noble.</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>Thank you, Paul.  Well, it’s an honor to be here today and to be at this conference.  This has been a wonderful experience.  I was completely motivated by Dennis Prager last night.  I thought he spoke real truth to power.  We are at a very interesting point in American history, and it’s something that’s kind of evolved over the last few years as Barack Obama’s been in the White House, and that is that we have seen the absolute destruction of not only the hope of what the American dream is, but the actual expectation that people have about what America is and what Americans should believe in, and it’s one of those things that is why the First Amendment is so important, because we have to have a vigorous debate about what it means to be an American, what it means to believe in policy, to fight against policy, those kind of things, and yet in Barack Obama we have someone who is actually wanting to erase the First Amendment, and that is to squelch speech of anyone who wants to be critical of him.  A few months ago my organization, American Encore, put together an ad that we ran nationally online, and whoever’s running the AV, if you could run that ad.</p>
<p><strong>Ad Audio:</strong>  Where would America be without free speech?  We haven’t always agreed with what’s said, but until now we’ve always agreed on each other’s right to say it.  The Obama administration recently proposed new rules at the IRS to control the speech of certain nonprofits, to legalize the IRS’s inappropriate targeting of conservative groups.  Now the right to free speech is dependent upon who is speaking, and it’s up to the IRS to make that call.  The Obama administration is proposing new tax rules, unfairly scrutinizing nonprofits, another line of attack against these groups.  The American Civil Liberties Union says the proposed rule threatens to discourage or sterilize an enormous amount of political discourse in America.  Tell President Obama don’t use the IRS to kill free speech.</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>So what the IRS proposed was pretty egregious, and Cleta is actually going to talk a little bit more about that.  I’m going to leave that to her, because she’s the actual expert on that front, but needless to say, the IRS is one of the most feared agencies of the federal government, obviously, and what’s particularly egregious about what they were doing is the fact that they were targeting not just organizations, which Cleta will talk about, but targeting individuals.  Obama had a hit list of folks in the White House in which they were actually breaking the law and getting the individual tax returns of individual Americans and businesses and then leaking that kind of thing to the press.  There were five nonprofit organizations that the IRS illegally provided confidential information to a supposed newspaper outfit.  It’s really a leftist organization.</p>
<p>One of those groups was Americans for Responsible Leadership, which is an organization that I put together and had been targeted for some activity in a ballot proposition in California, so we had a situation where the IRS was targeting individuals and organizations and then we had a state agency in California at the behest of Jerry Brown, who was the governor at the time and wanting to expose what was going on with a donation that came from Americans for Responsible Leadership to a ballot initiative fighting a tax increase that Jerry Brown wanted, and in California there’s an agency called the Fair Political Practices Commission.  Now it’s fair, they call it &#8220;Fair Political Practices,&#8221; as long as it’s liberal political practices.  If it’s not then it’s clearly not fair, and what they did is they specifically targeted the chairman of the commission.  It was a woman named Ann Ravel, and here you had a situation in which this organization decided they wanted to expose who was behind this contribution because they don’t believe in anonymous free speech, and they went to great lengths.  They couldn’t under the law actually find that information out because it’s not allowed, so what they did is they made up a law in the sense that they said we’re going to audit a report.</p>
<p>Now, it’s kind of complicated, but under the California Statute if you give a big political donation in a ballot initiative and you’re an organization, then you’re required to, the next January, file a report that says we did this.  Well, they wanted to audit a report that had not yet been filed, so that’s the authority they asserted, that they’re using their audit authority of a report that hadn’t been filed, and they took that all the way to the State Supreme Court, and on Sunday night before the election at 11:00 at night California time, the State Supreme Court voted unanimously 7 to 0 to allow the commission to force that disclosure from these organizations, which is just a complete overreach.  Now, the reason we know it’s an overreach is because the next year they went to the legislature and they actually passed a statute to give them the authority that they had asserted the previous year.</p>
<p>Now, Ann Ravel was then, this last year, has been put on the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission by President Obama.  That was the thank you to trying to expose these anonymous contributions and target those who would speak, and what was among the first things she did after she got to the FEC?  She’s proposing a rule, and she’s starting hearings in which she says that if you are a blogger and you talk about politics or you talk about campaigns then you need to be regulated by the Federal Elections Commission.  Think about the chilling effect that that would have on speech.  Not only is it so anyone who does opinion writing on a web site, who has a blog, frankly, the next step would be their Facebook pages.  Now we’re talking about individual Americans who would be targeted by a federal government agency and told what you can and cannot say, and when you can and cannot say it, and how much of it you can say.</p>
<p>That is the reason that we have to be stalwart in our defense of the First Amendment.  Because ultimately the biggest challenge we have is that the enemies of ours on the First Amendment are the press and liberal Democrats and left.  The press because their influence over the American people has been waning for years and years.  Newspapers are not nearly as influential as they used to be, and now an organization can be involved in the process and have just as much influence or more than the local newspaper.  They don’t like that.  Their power has been taken away, and secondly, the unions.  We hear all this stuff about “dark money.”  The left has been involved in this stuff since the 1940s with labor unions, and it wasn’t until labor unions’ influence started to wane, along with the newspapers and the media influence started to wane, that the left woke up and said wait, we’re losing control of the message, of the narrative.  We can’t have a level playing field because when conservatives have a level playing field with us, they’re going to win because our messages resonate with the American people, and so that’s why we’ve seen such an assault on the First Amendment, and in my mind it’s just so ironic that it’s the press that is leading the assault on the First Amendment, and they are protected, so you notice when Harry Reid put through the Senate a constitutional amendment to essentially regulate the First Amendment that &#8212; all the amendment language by Senator Udall from New Mexico is there &#8212; and at the very end of it, none of this amendment applies to the press, the way they define it.  They would not define bloggers as the press, which is the problem, so that’s why they have the FEC targeting these things.</p>
<p>So I would ask that you stay totally up on this.  Watch Ann Ravel at the FEC.  She’s a very scary person and doing the bidding of the left, and our hope is that we can expose them for what they’re trying to do and make sure we continue to have a robust debate in America under the First Amendment.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Thank you. Charles Johnson is a writer and a thinker, not always the same thing.  You’ve recognized his words from coast to coast, from the Los Angeles Times to the Wall Street Journal.  His thinking has been recognized as the recipient of both the Robert Bartley Fellowship and Eric Breindel Award at the Wall Street Journal as well as being named to the Publius Fellowship at the Claremont Institute.  He earned his credentials in the vast right-wing conspiracy when he was named a junior prince of darkness at the Phillips Foundation.  We know that as the Robert Novak Award.  He’s most recently authored “Why Coolidge Matters,” and he’s here today to remind us why the Constitution still matters.  Charles Johnson.</p>
<p><strong>Charles Johnson: </strong>Hello.  So I’m actually probably the most optimistic on this panel, probably because I’ve seen that Barack Obama can be beaten and even humiliated, and so what I kind of want to think about, and forgive me, I’ve been very busy over the last few months electing a lot of Republicans, and what we’ve been doing is kind of thinking a lot about why it is that President Obama was elected in the first place, and I want to tell just a quick story.  In 2004 I went to the Democratic Convention in Boston, where I’m from.  My parents got tickets.  Our shop was closed down because it was right near where the convention was being held, and so I decided to go and have a look for myself, and what was remarkable there was how quickly people glommed onto this freshman senator who had no experience, and every time you’d ask them, “Why are you guys big fans of Barack Obama?” they would recite his story.  They would say he’s black.  They would make a big deal about this, and it occurred to me, when I worked with Andrew Breitbart and many others in the vast right-wing conspiracy, the not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy, that he really wasn’t vetted and what we did is we expected the press to really do the job for us, and it really didn’t happen, and so what I’ve kind of taken as my kind of life mission is hunting Democrats and RINOs for sport, and business is very, very good, especially after this last election, but I would caution you, just because we’ve elected a Republican Senate does not necessarily mean that we’ve elected a conservative Senate and that’s something very important to kind of keep in mind.</p>
<p>Now, as I mentioned earlier, I got my start with Andrew Breitbart, and he really had this idea about vetting the President, and really focusing on him, and so I’d find all sorts of things that were damaging to him and to the First Lady.  I found some stuff surrounding Barack Obama’s life in Indonesia as well as in Hawaii as well as in Chicago, and really it’s become clear to me that what we need to do on kind of the conservative right is start to vet these candidates very seriously, and that’s what we did this last election cycle.</p>
<p>One of the projects I worked on most recently was with Michelle Nunn in Georgia.  Now, Nunn is an extreme liberal Democrat, and she was kind of coasting on this moderate reputation.  Well, what we did is we took apart her entire life story and we went through every single chapter of it and found out that she had been in favor of bringing lots of immigrant children into the United States.  We took that piece of the puzzle and made sure that everyone saw it in sort of rural Georgia, and we also kind of looked into her past when she was hitting her opponent for outsourcing, and what we found is that her ancestors owned slaves.  Now, I know what you’re thinking.  Lots of people in Georgia owned slaves.  What’s the big deal?  But a lot of people in black talk radio really don’t like it that her family owned slaves, and so we made sure that they all saw that, so they weren’t enthusiastic to vote for her.  And these are the kind of things that we need to be thinking much more strategically about.</p>
<p>It’s my contention that we can defeat the liberal media.  We can actually replace it in many respects.  I was one of the first journalists to publish the name of Nina Pham, who’s this woman who had Ebola.  I had it 12 hours before NBC.  The liberal media was basically stopping that from getting out to the public because they realized that if there was a face behind this Ebola stuff it would be bad for them politically.  The media would sort of be forced to cover it, and I was talking to journalists in Texas and they were basically suppressing this information, and my attitude is what’s the worst that can happen?  And I published her name on my site, got a million page views in under a day, and what ended up happening next was really remarkable.  I had all these journalists criticizing me for providing information, and some of them even filed complaints about me violating HIPAA with Twitter, and so they kicked me off Twitter, and so I had to go to Twitter court to get reinstated.</p>
<p>But it’s my contention that right now we’re at a very, very good point.  I’ve been part of the team that’s been publishing these Gruber videos. [Applause.] Thank you.  If you had told me a week ago that Gruber would be trending on Twitter, this obscure policy analyst, I would have thought you were insane, and it’s kind of amazing that all this type of nerd research has paid off in quite amazing fashion, but there are people who are now publishing videos on Gruber that, when I started with Rich Weinstein in July, we had sort of a strategy of how to get this video out to the country, and I’ve been very excited to see kind of what’s happened there.</p>
<p>But I would say that the best thing we can do with Barack Obama is really realize that he is a lame duck, but he also has the executive orders, and so what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to shape events around him and run out the clock, and I think it can be done if only we start actually publishing material and really be aggressive towards every step of what he’s trying to achieve, and I think one of the kind of complaints that I had with a lot of conservatives is they spend a lot of time complaining about the liberal media, but I think that what we really need to start focusing on is replacing it and having it lose market share, and in particular, as we kind of start with Hillary Clinton, she has some of the highest negatives of anyone who’s ever run for President, and we should be exploiting this constantly and mercilessly, but we should also be strategic about it.  The Washington Free Beacon has published a lot of material surrounding Hillary Clinton.  I think it’s a mistake to release all of it right now, that we should basically have a strategy going, like with the Gruber tapes where we released the material in staggered stages, and I’m working on kind of the Hillary bomb right now that I think will be quite helpful.</p>
<p>But I want to say just very briefly, I think we can actually win the narrative, and one of the things I’ve learned from Andrew Breitbart is that if you frame news in the right context, in a pro-America, pro-citizen context, you can really change the debate.  We shifted the debate from talking about all these children who were sent here to dealing with the national health concerns of all these people coming with Ebola and really we’re winning the arguments among the American people, and I think there’s all this question about how can the Republican Party reach out to Hispanics, reach out to immigrants, but if you really think about last Tuesday’s election returns the Democrats have a serious problem with America.  They lost something like 22 percent of the white vote.  This is not a majority coalition thing, so I think, going back to thinking about the 2004 when Barack Obama came, really the dream, or the nightmare, that was Barack Obama is coming to an end, and in fact he is the exception to the rule, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we can kind of defeat him, and I think it’s much more important right now to defeat Obama-ism than to defeat Obama, because we need to stop them from kind of doing this kind of strategy in the future with other candidates and so we need to be proactive about neutralizing those kind of candidates now.  So with that, I’ll hear some of your questions.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Andrew McCarthy graduated from New York Law School and taught at both his alma mater and at Fordham University Law School.  He’s a contributing editor at National Review.  He’s the author of both “Willful Blindness, a Memoir of Jihad” and “The Grand Jihad, How Islam and the Left Sabotaged America,” detailed accounts of the campaign the Middle East Quarterly describes as an attempt to insinuate Islamic Sharia law into the fabric of American society.  The books are almost prosecutorial in tone, which would be appropriate since Andrew was the chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York who led the successful prosecution against Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheikh who’s behind bars because of Andrew.  What have you done in the war against terrorism today?  What many people do not know is that his investigations of President Obama led to discovery that Michelle Obama is a virgin.  Much like his war on terror, every night President Obama sits on the edge of Michelle’s bed and describes in vivid detail everything he’s about to do, and then nothing happens.  To tell us what we should be doing, Andrew McCarthy.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>And here I thought we spent all weekend talking about executive action.  Well, so you’ve heard from the most optimistic person on the panel, so I guess I’d be the most pessimistic person on the panel, but that probably comes with the territory of writing a book about executive lawlessness in the Obama administration.  The day my book, which is called “Faithless Execution:  Building a Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment,” the day that the book came out there was an announcement that Obama had released five Taliban commanders in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, who turns out to be a deserter, and what dawned on me at that point was the problem for a writer writing a book about executive lawlessness in the Obama administration is that at a certain point in time the writer has to stop writing so they can bind the book and get it to the stores and sell it.  The Obama administration goes merrily along, so I guess it was only natural that by the time the book came out I was four or five impeachable offenses behind, and that unfortunately is a pattern that has only picked up pace over time.</p>
<p>Now, what I get all the time about this is look, it’s politically impossible to impeach Obama, so why even talk about it?  And there’s a few answers to that, but I think the most important one is Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism really, famously said that the power of bad men is no indifferent thing, and Edmund Burke obviously didn’t know Barack Obama, but I think he had Barack Obama in mind, and I know the framers had Barack Obama in mind because one of the things that they spent the most time about in their deliberations was how to rein in the dangerous potentials of the presidency that they were creating, which was quite intentionally created as an awesome source of power because it’s in the presidency that we basically have most of the national security responsibility of the United States.  The problem of course is if you’re going to create an office that is that powerful, anything that powerful has the potential to be very destructive, so they wanted to make sure that they could rein in the power of the presidency if it ever fell into the hands of somebody who was not only corrupt but potentially incompetent or who at the very least had a different idea of what the government should look like than the constitutional framework that the framers gave us.</p>
<p>So here’s the thing.  They came up with dispositive powerful checks on the presidency, and there’s primarily two of them in the hands of Congress.  I mean, they hope that the best check on the presidency would be the ballot box.  Right?  They assumed that if somebody was, or had demonstrated himself during his candidacy to be corrupt, incompetent or power hungry that the public wouldn’t elect such a person, and certainly wouldn’t reelect such a person, so I guess maybe they had higher hopes for what the American people would end up to be than has proven to be the case, but they did come up with two checks for Congress.  One of them, and the one that they expected was going to be used the most, was the power of the purse.  To the extent that the President needs resources to carry out schemes that contravene the Constitution, that funds, those resources have to come from Congress, so the thought was that Congress would be able to check the President by basically pulling back the purse strings.  The problem with that is, and we’re seeing this with immigration, for example.  We’ve heard any number of times all weekend long people talk about the President’s lawless executive amnesty plan.  Well, it’s lawless all right, but there are vast components of it that the President can actually implement without violating the law.  For example, the President can pardon every crime committed against federal law in the United States.  He could pardon tomorrow every crime committed by an illegal alien in the United States, and even classes of people outside the United States who violated federal law, and talk about resources.  You know he talks about he has his pen and his phone?  He doesn’t even need his phone for that.  He just needs the stroke of a pen.</p>
<p>The point is, there’s certain things that a President can do because the office is so powerful that even the power of the purse is not a check for.  The only other check that the system provides is impeachment.  Now, we hear impeachment and we think, oh, well, it’s inconceivable, and certainly the Republican establishment has taken the position since the Clinton days that, oh, that impeachment thing was a debacle and we never want to talk about it again.  The &#8220;i-word&#8221; is not to be mentioned on Capitol Hill.  We had the crazy specter about a year go where they had a hearing in the House about executive lawlessness, and you had a bunch of liberal law professors explaining to members of Congress that one of the major checks on lawlessness in the Constitution is impeachment.  Professor John Turley, who is a self-described left-winger called Obama’s manner of governance the most profound constitutional crisis that had arisen in his lifetime, and he lived through Nixon.  Right?  So you had these law professors saying impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, and you had these congressmen kind of ducking under their desks at the very mention of the word, saying to these professors, look, that’s a word we don’t say up here.</p>
<p>It’s a word that the framers not only said in the Constitution but that Madison described as indispensable.  He thought that without impeachment it would be impossible to rein in what they called the maladministration of the executive branch, whether it was corruption, incompetence or what have you, and they put impeachment in very intentionally as the ultimate decisive check on that kind of behavior, and the reason it’s important to talk about it is because it’s the only check if you decide that you’re not going to impeach the President and you decide that we are going to take this off the table and never even discuss it, that’s fine.  That’s a political choice that you can make, but when you make it &#8212; and this is the reason I wrote the book.  I want people to have their eyes open about this.  If you make that choice, you must make it mindful of the fact that there are certain abuses of presidential power that only impeachment can check, and if you deprive yourself of your only arsenal for combatting those abuses of power, you are going to get those abuses of power.</p>
<p>Now, why is this so important?  And I’ll leave it with this.  There have been checks on President Obama’s abuses of power over the last six years because there have been elections to worry about, his own elections as well as congressional elections, and don’t think public pressure doesn’t work.  Don’t think political pressure doesn’t work.  Remember when Obama just came to the presidency and the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House.  What was one of the first things they wanted to do?  They wanted to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan civilian court, the place where I used to work.  They weren’t able to do it, and the reason they weren’t able to do it is even in blue, blue New York the people rose up and protested against it, and that lit a fire under Congress, and Congress lit a fire under the White House, and the White House had to pull back and withdraw from the plan, so they are responsive to political pressure.  It’s not easy to do, and it’s certainly not easy to keep up the pressure, but they do respond to it.  But look, up until now, President Obama has had mid-terms to worry about twice and his own reelection to worry about once.  Now there’s nothing else, so you have somebody who has this vast power, who no longer has the political check of an election coming around the corner, and who has a lot of mischief that he can make over the last two years, and I think we’ve gotten every indication in just the last week that’s exactly the way things are going to go.</p>
<p>So yes, right now there’s no political will to remove President Obama from power, but I think we’re in for a very bad time unless we change that climate, and that doesn’t mean impeaching the President necessarily, but what you have to do, because of the way our system is designed, is go back to a time when impeachment was a credible threat that would bring the President to heel, or at least back him up before he would engage in corrupt or unlawful schemes.  If we don’t have that, I’m sorry to say I think we’re in for a very, very bad time the next two years.  And on that happy note …</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Anticipating Andrew’s cheery comments, Matt Drudge this morning on the Drudge report put up a banner headline that said “Impeachment Insurance” under the smiling face of Joe Biden.</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell is one of the truly indispensable players in the American conservative movement.  Last night you heard a list of her many accomplishments.  Today I would add only two.  I’ve had the high honor of serving with Cleta on the Board of American Conservative Union and watched her expert chairmanship of the American Conservative Union Foundation during a crucial time in that organization’s history.  In presidential campaigns and critical causes I have had to evaluate and hire some of the finest election law attorneys in the land.  Cleta is simply the finest election law lawyer in America, period.  She has been my lawyer.  The consigliore of the vast right-wing conspiracy and Freedom Center Annie Taylor Award winner, Cleta Mitchell.</p>
<p><strong>Cleta Mitchell: </strong>Well, good morning.  Yes, on that cheery note … but I want to talk about three things, but I’ll probably meander and talk about more than that, but I want to focus on three.  I want to talk about the IRS, I want to talk about campaign finance and how it works together, and then I want to talk about some of the scariest things that are going on in America today.  Those two things, but I’ve been working, I think I said last night, five years ago is when I first started realizing something had changed in the IRS.  I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that I think we have not looked at and I really hope that Congress will do, because I think that one of the most frightening things to me is something that Congress has yet to investigate, but I have to believe, and I just know what I know what I know.  I used to tell my daughter when she was growing up, particularly when she was a teenager, “I may not know today, I may not know tomorrow, but I will find out,” and interestingly, when I would find out things, she would just go, “Mom, how did you find out?”  I say, “I may not know today, I may not know tomorrow, but I will find out,” and I think we will find out, because I absolutely believe that this IRS looks at publicly available campaign finance reports, looks at contributions that people make, and decides who it’s going to subject to IRS personal and business audits based on their political contributions.  I think that’s a pretty frightening thing, but I absolutely believe it has happened, and I think that we have to get to the bottom of that.</p>
<p>I absolutely believe the IRS looks at organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, does not have to disclose its donors publicly but guess who it does disclose its donors of $5000.00 or more to?  You have to disclose those to the IRS.  The IRS uses that information, I believe, to target people for audits and further government inquiry, and I think that there are so many things.  Sean made reference to the IRS leaking confidential taxpayer information.  I know they’ve done it.  They’ve done it to my clients.  They’ve done it to other conservative groups.  Again, he made reference to the release of confidential tax information of Koch Industries.  That’s a criminal offense.  There have been no prosecutions, and in fact that’s a 6103 violation.  You should really do something with your life when you can start quoting sections of the tax code by number.  A 6103 violation is one in which the IRS is prohibited by law for any agency or IRS employee to release confidential taxpayer information, but guess what happens if you believe your confidential taxpayer information has been violated and you ask for information about that?  The IRS has turned that on its head and said we can’t tell you that information because whoever did it, whoever did that to you, the perpetrator, is protected by Section 6103 from having their information disclosed to you.  Now that is so unbelievably bizarre, but these are things Congress needs at look at and fix.  The IRS has failed to answer multiple subpoenas from the House committees.  They’ve just disregarded them.  They’ve said, subpoena from Congress?  So, your point is?  And I think that Congress has got to reassert its legislative prerogative.</p>
<p>Let’s not forget, contrary to what Joe Biden said in the vice presidential debate in 2008, Article 1 of the Constitution is the legislative branch.  That’s what the founders started with.  They started with the people’s representatives.  The executive branch is in Article 1, but we’ve let that get completely out of whack, and I think Congress needs to undertake what I call the great unwinding.  The great unwinding of a federal government, an administrative regulatory state that was built over a century by people who fundamentally disagree with us, and I think with our founding principles, and that’s what I think we as conservatives need to be talking about.  We don’t need new programs.  We need to get rid of what’s there, the great unwinding.  We have multiple situations where members of the Obama administration have gone before Congress and perjured themselves.  Let’s start with the IRS commissioner in March of 2012, who went before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and when asked is there targeting of conservative organizations going on today, and he said no.  Well, the last time I checked, lying to Congress is a federal crime.  Perjuring yourself before Congress under oath is a federal crime.  Just ask Roger Clemens.  And I want to know from the new attorney general nominee, and I’m going through and preparing and getting this to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the number of administration officials who have gone before the Congress in the last six years and lied under oath.  And they need to be prosecuted.  They are criminals.</p>
<p>Sean mentioned the FEC and its proposal to regulate Internet activity.  Everybody in this room write this down.  FEC.gov.  Comments are due by January 15.  There is no reason why everybody in this room should not write a paragraph, go online, submit comments.  Have ten of your neighbors do it.  The last time the FEC started talking about regulating Internet political speech they were inundated with so many thousands of comments they said uncle.  We have to do that again.  We have to get everybody we can think of, your organizations, your individuals, write FEC.gov.  Comments close January 15.  Tell them you want to come testify.  That’ll scare them to death.  If they think they’re gonna have thousands of people wanting to testify, they’ll collapse.  January 15.  No reason not to do it.  Do it.  We have to get those comments.  We did that with the proposed IRS regulations, the one that Sean talked about, the IRS C4 regulations.  More than 160,000 comments we were able to generate saying don’t do this.  I mean, there might have been ten that said they were for it.  Of course, they were all submitted by people who are close to the New York Times, but they finally withdrew those proposed regulations, but guess what?  They’re working on reissuing them next year, so be vigilant.</p>
<p>Campaign finance.  I want to talk about that for just a minute.  Understand when they say campaign finance reform, here’s what they mean.  They say campaign finance reform.  They mean shut up conservatives.  That’s what that means.  Never be misled by what they mean.  Here’s what that bill that Sean referred to, the Harry Reid thing.  Let me reiterate what he said to you.  It was a proposed constitutional amendment to amend the First Amendment.  Think about that.  This great thing that the left supposedly reveres, crucifixes in urine, protect all that, etc. etc.  But they wanted to amend the First Amendment to allow elected politicians to decide what you a can and can’t say.  How’s that been working out for conservatives so far?  And guess what?  Every Democrat in the Senate voted for it.  Every one of them, and would you like to know what the political headline said the day after it was defeated, because it didn’t get the necessary two thirds?  All the Republicans voted against it.  “GOP Kills Campaign Finance Reform”</p>
<p>So that brings me to my third point.  Everybody’s got to buy this book.  Everybody’s got to read this book.  You gotta give it to everybody for Christmas, and you gotta talk about it:  “Stonewalled.”  It’s just out by Sharyl Attkisson.  It’s everything we know, but documented.  The lies, the deception, the chilling activity to which she was subjected, to which others have been subjected about the extent to which this government is going to spend our money to lie to us and to keep us under surveillance.  I’m going to read you one paragraph because this is a panel about the Constitution.  I’m going to sit down.  The big chill is on.  Now, mind you, her computer was hacked, classified documents were planted on her computer, deep in her computer.  Her phones were tapped, etc., etc.</p>
<p>Many sources, she writes, including congressmen, become wary of communicating the ordinary way.  One evening I’m talking with a member of Congress on my regular mobile phone about a somewhat sensitive news matter.  He’s avoiding giving straight answers.  I keep pressing.  Finally, sounding exasperated, he blurts out, “Sharyl, your phone’s bugged.”  I can’t argue the point.  We decide to meet in person and work out alternative ways to communicate.  It’s the new reality in a society where journalists and politicians suspect their government is listening in.</p>
<p>Now, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, people, but I am telling you, this is a lawless administration.  There are not enough hours in today’s program to go through all the ways that this government, under this administration, is violating the statutes and the Constitution, and we have to do everything we can do to keep them from continuing and being successful, and that’s what we’re about to do.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Q&amp;A</strong></p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>This is for Andrew.  You say that without any further election and without the power to impeach that we have basically disarmed and can’t do anything about President Obama’s lawlessness.  What about his doing further damage to the Democratic Party?  Does he care?  Do the Democrats care?  I mean, he’s already hollowed the party out.  Couldn’t he do even more damage in the next two years by his lawlessness, and would that be a deterrent?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>Look, in a vacuum, if that was the only consideration, sure it would be a deterrent, but let’s take a step back.  I was watching the news the day after the election results, or I guess the day after Obama spoke about the election results and indicated that he was actually doubling down on the executive amnesty, and the commentators presenting the news seemed baffled by it, and they just said this guy just doesn’t get it.  The electorate just spoke and he seems to have a tin ear.  He just doesn’t get it, and I sat there and I’m thinking about the commentators.  No, no, you don’t get it.  I mean, after six years you don’t get who this guy is.  He is trying to advance an ideological agenda, and his Alinsky-ite tactics are such that he has a long-range ambition but he has a very disciplined approach about going about it, which is you never go further than you think the political climate of the moment will allow you to go, but you always keep your eye on the ball, and you compute your activities in terms of what you think your political environment is, and that’s why it’s more dangerous now because he doesn’t have any elections to worry about, and will that hurt the Democrats in the short term, just like Obamacare did?  Sure, but they still got Obamacare, which was what they wanted.</p>
<p>If Obama’s successful in what he’s doing now, two things to bear in mind.  Cleta just listed them.  We could go through a thousand things, but the amnesty could result in as close to permanent as anything you get in politics, a permanent electoral majority for Democrats, no matter how unpopular some of their policies seem to be at the moment.  That’s why they’re pushing so hard to get it, and the second thing is, if you think you’re rid of Barack Obama in January of 2017, I got news for you.  By then he’s going to have put about 400 like-minded progressive activist lawyers on the federal bench who will be serving for 30 to 40 years and advancing the same agenda, so his work continues after he’s gone on the basis of the laying of the pavement that he’s doing now, so I don’t think he’s worried about the short-term interests of the Democratic Party.  I think he’s worried about, and moving toward, the long-term objectives of progressive ideology.</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>I’ll just add one thing.  It’s obvious he doesn’t care about the interests of the Democrat Party because a few weeks before the election he was, in prepared remarks &#8212; this is what’s astounding.  In prepared remarks, he said, “I’m not on the ballot this year, but you can be sure that my policies are, every single one of them.”  Now that was him trying to assert his role.  That was a gift for us.  We used that quote in commercials against members of Congress, against Senators, against a Secretary of State candidate in Arizona, a governor’s candidate, because we realized that while he was trying to assert himself in prepared remarks, it was a disaster for him to be saying that because we could use that against the Democrats that we were running against, so he doesn’t care about them because he’s such a narcissist.</p>
<p><strong>Georgette Gelbard: </strong>Georgette Gelbard from California.  This is mainly for Andy.  What would it take to limit executive orders for all Presidents going forward, and do you think that that’s a good idea for the future?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>I think it’s been unfortunate that the concept of the executive order has been kind of tainted in this whole escapade about not just immigration but other things as well.  There’s nothing in principle wrong with an executive order.  The executive branch is very extensive.  The President is the head of the executive branch, and as long as the President is just directing the proper activities of the executive branch, executive orders are a good thing.  They’re a little transparency for the executive branch.  The problem is when the President uses his executive directing power as camouflage for when he’s actually usurping the power of Congress and the courts either to write the law or to interpret the law, and this President has used executive orders for that purpose.  That’s the problem, and it’s not the number of executive orders, it’s what he does with them.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Hi, this question’s for Charles.  Which conservative candidate are you researching for 2016 and why?</p>
<p><strong>Charles Johnson: </strong>So I’ve researched almost all the conservative candidates, and the guy for me is clearly Cruz.  I know he’s controversial, but I’ve known Ted Cruz before he was an exclamation point on the right and an expletive to the Republican establishment and the Democrats.  What’s interesting, last year he told me his strategy for the shut-down.  He said look, people aren’t going to remember what the shut-down was about.  They’re going to remember that we stood up for them, and it’s interesting that in nearly every Senate race, except one, which was Scott Brown in New Hampshire which he lost, they were asking for Ted Cruz.  He was filling rooms in Alaska, and I’m a chess player.  It’s my hobby, and Ted Cruz is a chess player.  He’s advancing the ball, and I know there’s this silly notion right now that we need an executive or we need a governor, but the reason it’s silly is we need somebody with an executive temperament, and I’ve gone through a lot of the candidates on the right, and if you’re a governor you have a staff, and your staff can cause you a lot of trouble.  We’ve certainly seen that with Governor Christie and with some others, so I think for the moment I would go with him.  There’s a lot of stuff on Hillary.  I was talking with the FBI agent who investigated her for Whitewater, who’s actually a gay Democrat, believe it or not, one of the main ones, and there’s so much material there that the Republican Congress did not use because they were afraid of how hot it would be, and I think basically the problem right now is we’re going to have a GOP civil war, which is going to play out over the next two years, and it’s very intensive.  You talk to staffers, and there’s a serious fight for the soul of the right that’s about to take place, and right now we’re at the bleeding Kansas moment, but it’s going to get ugly.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Will there be any problems with Ted Cruz and the fact that he’s born in Canada?</p>
<p><strong>Charles Johnson: </strong>No.  This is a debate that a lot of people have.  The answer’s no.  John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone.  George Romney was born in Mexico.  The question of natural born is at birth are you a citizen, and his mother is from Delaware.  It’s still in the continental United States.  It’s still a state, I believe, even though Joe Biden’s from there.  No, a lot of people are trying to use this to disqualify him, which is kind of craven but no, he’s clearly eligible.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy: </strong>I thought he was born in Kenya.</p>
<p><strong>Cleta Mitchell: </strong>Here’s one of the things I think is important and it goes to Charles and all.  This book makes pretty clear the extent to which the Obama administration has gone out of its way to attack journalists, to spin the stories, one after another, from fast and furious, Benghazi, the healthcare.gov, the IRS, all of it.  But guess what’s interesting about that?  No matter how much of our money they spend, no matter how hard they have tried and how well they have succeeded with what I call what is the state-owned media, NBC, CBS, ABC.  As I’ve said, we might as well be in Venezuela for all the independence they show for the government, but notwithstanding all of that, guess what, the people still know.  They have a low opinion of this president and contrary to Mr. Gruber, we’re not stupid, and we tell each other, and because we have these other outlets and ways to get information everywhere from Charles Johnson to Fox News and Andrew McCarthy, and all, we get the information.  We share it with each other, which is why, circle back to why is the FEC doing what it’s doing?  Why has the IRS been doing what it’s doing?  Because they’re trying to shut down those channels of communication, but we will not let them.  We’re not gonna let them, but you can buy the book, but you’ll have to look for it.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Johnson: </strong>The last question before lunch, the gentleman in blue.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yes, I think that despite what was on Drudge this morning about our very loving vice president, my understanding is Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats are not enthralled at the present time with Barack Obama.  Do you not think there’s an opportunity for them to think Joe Biden is a better hope for them in 2016 than Barack Obama?</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Sean?</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>Well, I think that everyone on the left, well, not everyone, the Democrat establishment is all in for Hillary, and that’s going to be Biden’s demise because they –</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>I’m not talking about the presidency.  I’m talking about &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Sean Noble: </strong>Well, I think that it’s going to be very difficult for the Democrats to win a presidency if their previous president gets impeached, so they will do everything they can to prevent any type of impeachment proceedings.</p>
<p><strong>Paul Erickson: </strong>Please thank our panel.</p>
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		<title>Obama vs. Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/obama-vs-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-vs-us</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/obama-vs-us/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2014 05:35:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245393</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Have we reached the "post-Constitution" stage of our history? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-12-obama.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245394" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-12-obama-438x350.jpg" alt="2014-10-12-obama" width="332" height="265" /></a>Suppose you saw a person driving his car on the wrong side of a highway, against the traffic. Would you call him a stupid and/or incompetent driver? You say, &#8220;Williams, what kind of question is that? Of course he&#8217;s one or the other!&#8221; I&#8217;d say, &#8220;Hold your horses. What are his intentions?&#8221; If the driver&#8217;s intentions are to cause highway calamity, one can hardly call his actions stupid or incompetent. Given his intentions, he is wisely acting in a manner to achieve his objectives.</p>
<p>This observation lies at the heart of my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell&#8217;s column last week, in which he says, &#8220;Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past.&#8221; After suffering an elective trouncing at the polls, President Barack Obama issued Congress an ultimatum, saying that if it doesn&#8217;t enact the kind of immigration law that he would like, he will unilaterally issue an executive order to change the nation&#8217;s immigration laws. This threat, along with other abuses of his office, is not a sign of presidential stupidity or incompetence.</p>
<p>Obama is doing precisely what he promised during his 2008 presidential campaign, to cheering and mesmerized crowds: &#8220;We are going to fundamentally change America&#8221; and &#8220;We will change America. We will change the world.&#8221; Obama is living up to those pledges by subverting our Constitution and adopting the political style of a banana republic dictator. He showed his willingness to ignore the Constitution when he eliminated the work requirement in welfare reform laws enacted during the Clinton administration. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was enacted by Congress and hence is the law of the land. Obama has used executive orders to change the law on several occasions. Ask yourself whether our Constitution permits the president to unilaterally change a law enacted by Congress. For a president to do so is for him to behave like a banana republic dictator.</p>
<p>As Sowell says, &#8220;people who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama&#8217;s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.&#8221;</p>
<p>The recent elections, which gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, clearly indicate a repudiation of much of Obama&#8217;s agenda. But the question is whether the Republican majority has the courage to act on that repudiation and stop the president from running roughshod over the Constitution. Because Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, there is not much a president can do without a budget appropriation. The question is whether Congress has the guts to exercise its power.</p>
<p>We can rightfully condemn the president for picking and choosing which laws of the land he will obey and which he won&#8217;t, in violation of the Constitution&#8217;s Article 2, but is his administration&#8217;s executive branch that much of an exception to the other branches of the federal government — the legislative and judicial branches?</p>
<p>The legislative branch is bound by Article 1 of the Constitution. Section 8 of Article 1 delineates the scope of congressional power to tax and spend. Nowhere within Article 1, Section 8 is Congress granted the authority to tax for at least two-thirds of the federal budget.</p>
<p>The courts are bound by the Constitution&#8217;s Article 3. Part of the courts&#8217; responsibility is to ensure that the executive and legislative branches of government uphold the Constitution. In that respect, the courts have been grossly derelict, particularly during and after the New Deal era.</p>
<p>Seeing as all branches of federal government ignore most of the provisions of the Constitution, I think we can safely say that we&#8217;ve reached the post-Constitution stage of our history. Washington politicians are not to blame. It&#8217;s the American people who&#8217;ve lost their love and respect for our Constitution. Washington&#8217;s politicians are simply the agents for that contempt.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Reasons for Political Hope</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/reasons-for-political-hope-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reasons-for-political-hope-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:52:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242261</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Four key factors working against the Left this election season. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/vote-here.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242263" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/vote-here-450x337.jpg" alt="Americans Go To The Polls To Elect The Next U.S. President" width="308" height="231" /></a>Many Republicans are excited about the midterm elections. They see a good chance of taking over the Senate, which means they can neutralize Obama’s last few years in office. Many also are hopeful about the presidential election in 2016, though Hillary Clinton will enter that race with decided advantages. Regaining the presidency, some believe, will lead to a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in which the country was turned from its leftward drift under Jimmy Carter.</p>
<p>Yet even if this scenario unfolds as the Republicans hope, it is doubtful the deeper structural problems of the country will be solved. The entitlement Leviathan, nourished under governments dominated by both parties, is unlikely to be reformed as significantly as it must in order to ward off looming fiscal catastrophe. Too many Republican politicians are enablers of government spending, voting to keep funding handouts like the $20 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. Others are plotting “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka amnesty, to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor.  Too many have seemingly accepted the disastrous cuts in military spending that put at risk our ability to defend our interests and security.</p>
<p>Then there are the nearly 66 million American people who reelected as president an inexperienced narcissist, serial liar, racial divider, and manifest failure. Whether they did so out of juvenile idealism, hope for racial reconciliation, or the lure of more government handouts doesn’t really matter. This lack of judgment and basic information, or sacrifice of principle to self-interest, bespeaks an electorate significant numbers of whom are unlikely to support any politician or party that seriously attempts to halt runaway entitlement spending, debt, and deficits, or to rebuild our military deterrence and reassert our will globally.</p>
<p>Yet despite these obstacles, the political order created in 1787, assaulted as it has been over the last 100 years, still possesses resources for putting us back on the right track. If we fail to take advantage of those resources and modern information technologies, we will have no one blame but our fellow citizens or ourselves for our country’s decline.</p>
<p>First and foremost, we still hold elections every 2 years, and elections have consequences. We can remain mystified that 66 million voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012, but think how much worse it could have been without the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” as Obama called, that gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans. We can disagree over what the Republican House should or shouldn’t have done with their power, but they at least slowed down the slow-motion train-wreck of the Democrats’ progressive policies.</p>
<p>Regular fair and transparent elections mean that changing course is always possible. It may be that things will have to get much worse than they are now to wake up those 4 million Republicans who stayed home in 2012, or those 5 million voters who gave Obama the victory. And there’s a chance that the pain of correction will be much more severe, much more socially disruptive than anything we’ve seen in many years. But we still will have the legal right to change course when that moment comes.</p>
<p>Second, despite decades of assault on federalism, sovereign state governments still exist. They still remain what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1932 called a “laboratory” in which citizens can “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” In recent years states have gone their own way on issues like gun control, voter identification laws, same-sex marriage, right-to-work laws, reduction of public employee unions’ political power, limits on abortion, or legalization of marijuana. Particularly important are the states’ right to set tax laws and business-friendly regulations that lure investment and people.</p>
<p>A comparison of California with Texas illustrates this phenomenon. As <i>Forbes</i> <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/07/03/texas-v-california-the-real-facts-behind-the-lone-star-states-miracle/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reported</span></a> last year on the country’s two most populous states, “California’s state and local tax burden ranks as America’s 4th-highest compared to Texas at 45th.  California taxes a 42 percent larger share of state income than does Texas, California’s restrictive energy policies discourage oil extraction, even though it has the largest proven shale oil reserves in the nation; while its industrial electrical rates are 88 percent higher than in Texas.” As a result, in 2011 Texas’ per capita GDP surpassed California’s. No surprise, then, that between 2000 and 2012, Texas’ population growth rate doubled California’s, and that 183 Californians moved to Texas for every 100 Texans moving to California.</p>
<p>Increasing red-state success in growing their economies and liberating people from the intrusive Leviathan state will attract more and more people, even as the bankrupt blue-state policies of ruinous tax rates and over-regulation will drive more and more people away. We could then see a return to the Founders’ idea of federalism as “islands of intolerance in a sea of tolerance,” with people free to feet-vote for the political and social order they find congenial.</p>
<p>Third, American civil society––those 1.5 million associations and organizations separate from government––is still vigorous, though not as much as it was at its peak in 1970. People still belong to groups like the PTA and the Rotary Club, and still attend more than 350,000 churches. The pushback by churches and religious organizations against Obamacare’s requirement that they offer abortifacients and birth control in their health plans illustrates the impact civil society can have on public policy. More significant is the rise of the Tea Party, a truly grassroots movement that quickly organized in 2009, and by the summer its members were confronting politicians at “town-hall” events, a display of direct political accountability to the people more typical of early America or ancient Athens. There is no question that the Republicans’ victory in the 2010 midterm was made possible by Tea Party activists.</p>
<p>Finally, new communication technologies have broken the monopoly liberals once held over information and commentary. Before the rise of talk-radio in the 80s, political opinion was controlled by a few score network news anchors, magazine editors, and syndicated columnists. Today there are hundred of thousands of voices and opinions on cable news networks like Fox News, blogs, on-line magazines like <i>FrontPage</i>, websites, social networks like Facebook, and video sites like YouTube. It’s clear that the persistence of Fox News in reporting the Benghazi debacle and the IRS scandal have kept these administration failures alive in the public square.</p>
<p>Of course some of these sites are frequently venues for misinformation, propaganda, and transient trivia. But they also provide ordinary citizens with a democratic virtual town square in which lies are exposed, truths hidden by the establishment media revealed, and opinions aired to raucous challenge and debate. Don’t forget, the Tea Party could become a national organization nearly overnight because of a YouTube video and the Drudge Report. Still protected by the First Amendment, this virtual town square gives everyone the opportunity to exercise their right to free speech, and to mobilize resistance to the political status quo.</p>
<p>The resources, then, are there, and they more than any one election give us hope. We just have to make use of them. It is still in doubt whether the 2 terms of Barack Obama have represented a permanent change in the American political character, a shift much farther to the left than this country has ever experienced; or whether the unique circumstances of electing the first black president will be a one-off, and the nation will return to its traditional center-right character, and restore our fiscal sanity and our global leadership. Whatever the outcome, it will be the responsibility of the people to use resources of the Constitution to get our country back on track.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>&#8216;To Hell With the Constitution!&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/to-hell-with-the-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=to-hell-with-the-constitution</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2014 04:50:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[citizens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239942</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The long road of soft tyranny that led to Obama. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/600x393.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239944" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/600x393-450x347.jpg" alt="600x393" width="289" height="223" /></a>In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, exceeding his Constitutional authority as president. When this was pointed out to him by Republican House whip James E. Watson, Roosevelt allegedly yelled, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”</p>
<p>This outburst reflected the novel Progressive view of the Chief Executive. Instead of the Constitution’s limited powers focused on specific needs, such as national defense, beyond the capacity of the individual states or local governments to address, the President needed more expansive authority in order to serve the “people.” Over 100 years later, Barack Obama has governed on the same assumption, one that undermines the Constitution’s structure of balanced powers and limited government, and puts at risk our political freedom and autonomy.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">In January of this year Obama famously asserted, much less honestly than did T.R., his willingness to shed Constitutional limits: </span>“We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got phone.” And he’s been true to his belief during his nearly six years in office. He has changed his own signature legislation, Obamacare, 42 times. He has also used his “pen and phone” to change immigration laws, gun laws, labor laws, environmental policy, and many other statutes that should be the purview of the legislative branch, to which the Constitution gives the law-making power.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Other presidents, of course, have used signing statements and executive orders. But Obama has pushed this traditional prerogative far beyond the bounds that presidents in the past were usually careful to respect. But the ideas behind this expansion of power are not peculiar to Obama, and transcend any one man. They come from the Progressive worldview that rejects the Constitution’s philosophical vision of humans as driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” and eager to amass power in order to gratify both. The Progressives, on the contrary, believe that human nature can be improved, and that technocrats armed with new knowledge of human behavior and motivations can be entrusted with the concentrated power necessary for managing that improvement and solving the new problems created by industrialism, technology, and the other novelties of modernity.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">In terms of the federal government, the key to this new vision is the executive branch, led by an activist president. Woodrow Wilson was quite explicit about these ideas. In 1890 he wrote of the need for a “leader of men” who has “such sympathetic and penetrative insight as shall enable him to discern quite unerringly the motives which move other men <i>in the mass</i>.” He knows “what it is that lies waiting to be stirred in the minds and purposes of groups and masses of men.” This sympathy is one “whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument,” and the leader possessing this “sympathy” cares only “for the external uses to which they [people] may be put.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">More frightening still are Wilson’s comments further expanding on this “sympathy.” “Whoever would effect a change in a modern constitutional government must first educate his fellow-citizens to <i>want</i> some change. That done, he must persuade them to want the particular change he wants. He must first make public opinion willing to listen and then see to it that it listens to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opinion, and then manage to put the right opinion in its way.” Gone are the notions that free people decide their own political fate and choose representatives to serve their interests and principles, their autonomy protected by the Constitutional structure of checks and balances. Now an empowered elite presumably wiser about human nature will, like Plato’s Guardians, manipulate the people’s opinions so that they make the “right” choice. These ideas are on a continuum that at the extreme end lie Mussolini’s fascism and Lenin’s communism.</p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">The president, then, must transcend the Constitution’s outmoded limits on government power. In 1908, for example, Wilson complained that the president was merely a “legal executive” and “guiding authority in the application of the law and the execution of policy,” which is the Constitution’s charge that the president “</span>shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” For Wilson, this was too limited an authority, for the president could only veto bad laws, and was not “given an opportunity to make good ones.” And explicitly rejecting the Constitution’s vision of clashing “factions” driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” Wilson writes, “You cannot compound a successful government out of antagonisms.” So much for Madison’s governing principle in <i>Federalist </i>51 that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The Progressive collectivist “people” possessing uniform interests must have a “President as the unifying force in our complex system.”</p>
<p>We see in Wilson’s writings another Progressive assumption still with us today: defining Americans as an abstract, collectivist “people.” This unitary “people” rejects the Founders’ recognition of America’s great variety of economic interests, passions such as religion, and regional folkways that characterize the citizens of the United States. Indeed, it is just this variety that threatened political freedom, for a flawed human nature is intoxicated by power, and always seeks more power in order to gratify its peculiar needs and interests by forming “factions” of the like-minded. As John Adams wrote in 1787, the “selfish passions in the generality of men” are the “strongest.” Knowing that this selfish inclination is rooted in a human nature unchanged since the days of Athens, and so cannot be improved or eliminated, the Founders sought merely to balance faction against faction so that no one faction can amass enough power to threaten the freedom of all.</p>
<p>The proponents of centralized power, however, require a more homogeneous “people” to justify expanding government power. Such a “people” will have similar interests that only the central government can effectively identify and serve. Interests like “social justice,” “social duties,” and “social efficiency,” cannot be fulfilled by local or state governments, or by the parochial aims of civil society or the market, or by churches divided by sectarian beliefs. The federal technocrats of government agencies, more knowledgeable than the people about what they really want and need, must be given the power to trump those clashing local interests and manage polices that serve the larger “social” good––as defined not by the people in all their variety and complexity, but by federal bureaucrats and technocrats.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Go back to Obama’s “pen and phone” statement and read what follows to see this same collectivist vision at work: </span>“And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.” The president assumes that in a country of some 330 million people, “the help they need” and their views on improving job creation, education, or job training are all the same, and thus one man can formulate policies that advance them, cutting out the several hundred representative of Congress, and state and local governments.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">The obvious danger is one evident from the 20<sup>th</sup> century’s history of totalitarianism from the Bolsheviks to the Khmer Rouge. Elites convinced of their superior knowledge and insight into human behavior and the proper aims people should pursue, demand the coercive power to achieve these goods. But true to the Founders’ vision of a flawed human nature, power is “of an encroaching nature,” as Madison and Washington both warned. It intoxicates and corrupts those who possess it. Moreover, it requires weakening the autonomy and freedom of the people, whose various interests will contradict the “vision of the anointed,” as Thomas Sowell dubs them, who claim to know what’s best for everybody, and use their power to neutralize or eliminate those who resist this superior wisdom.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">We need to recognize that for over a century this Progressive vision has revolutionized the federal government, which now has a size, scope, cost, and coercive power that would have horrified the Founders. The ideas underlying this vision––for example, the notion that the federal government and its agencies are better able to “solve problems” than are local and state governments, or civil society––are taken for granted as self-evident even by many Republicans. Thus focusing on the spectacular incompetence of Barack Obama can blind us to the dangers that will continue after he has left office. Obama vowed to “fundamentally transform America,” but that transformation had started long before he became president.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Proof Bush Respected the Constitution More Than Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/proof-bush-respected-the-constitution-more-than-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=proof-bush-respected-the-constitution-more-than-obama</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/proof-bush-respected-the-constitution-more-than-obama/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 03 Aug 2014 14:13:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[amnesty for illegal aliens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237704</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Legal warnings from his own people telling him that he can't do something are ignored.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ObamaConstitution.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-237705" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ObamaConstitution-337x350.jpg" alt="ObamaConstitution" width="337" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Bush also favored amnesty. But unlike Obama, <a href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/08/report-obamas-mass-executive-amnesty-plan-rejected-by-bush-admin-as-unconstitutional/">he wasn&#8217;t prepared to torch the Constitution to do it</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>After a broad immigration bill failed in 2007, President George W. Bush ordered his staff to come up with every possible change he could make without the approval of Congress.</p>
<p>“Gregory Jacob, who worked on immigration issues with the president’s Domestic Policy Council, said the list included similarly broad protections from deportation as those implemented by Obama. But Bush’s staff concluded that the president didn’t have the legal authority to grant such “sweeping and categorical” protections, Jacob said.</p></blockquote>
<p>Now Obama has gotten similar legal advice over his illegal actions, such as the Libyan War, and he rejected them.</p>
<p>Where Bush saw a Stop sign, Obama sees Forward sign.</p>
<p>Legal warnings from his own people telling him that he can&#8217;t do something are ignored.</p>
<p>I <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-and-putins-savage-world-order/">wrote about this attitude last month</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>If you can do something, you do it. If your opponents can’t stop you, then you have the right to do it. The true radical, the man of destiny, will do anything he wants because that is what makes him great. Lies are constant and utterly shameless. No lie can ever be exposed because the liar moves on to the next lie and then the one after that. Truth is as meaningless in a Kto-Kovo world as law.</p>
<p>A Kto-Kovo leader, whether in the 7th century or the 21st century, operates by rallying his followers through bold acts that expand their power and humiliate and destroy the morale of their enemies.</p></blockquote>
<p>This has been Obama&#8217;s lawless attitude all along. It&#8217;s what led to the border crisis. It is what is leading him to illegal alien amnesty.</p>
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		<title>The Progressive Assault on the Legacy of Independence Day</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-progressive-assault-on-the-legacy-of-independence-day/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-progressive-assault-on-the-legacy-of-independence-day</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Jul 2014 04:58:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[4th of July]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[declaration of independence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[King George III]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235562</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[America relives the days of King George III.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/iStock_000023736786Small.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235564" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/iStock_000023736786Small-450x299.jpg" alt="Three Sparklers with American Flag" width="281" height="187" /></a>Independence Day is a good time to revisit the foundations of our political order, especially given the long record of Barack Obama and the Democrats’ disregard for the Constitution. The members of the Continental Congress who met in Philadelphia in July 1776 sought their independence from England in order to recover their rights that had been violated by a tyrant, and to establish political freedom and autonomy so that those rights could be protected from further erosion. For a century now the Progressive ideology has insidiously undermined that legacy of autonomy in a slow-motion revolution that aims to “fundamentally transform America.”</p>
<p>The Declaration of Independence contains a statement of principles that justify the indictment of George III that makes up the bulk of the document. The principles are straightforward: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.––That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The key point is that rights are not the gifts of men, for such rights can be taken back by the same power that bestows them. Rather, they are the defining elements of human nature bestowed by the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Individual autonomy is the birthright of all, and can be limited only by the consent of the people, who establish collective power residing in government for specific, limited purposes, and they can take that power back when government exceeds those legitimate purposes. A decade later the framers of the Constitution would enumerate these limited powers and institutionalize the purposes for which they can be used. Thus the significance of the Declaration must be found in the political order created a decade later to institutionalize the principles of 1776.</p>
<p>For the framers, political power had to be divided, balanced, and limited because human nature was prone to corruption, empowering “passions and interests” that threatened freedom. This suspicion of concentrated power defined the political thinking of the framers, who agreed with Machiavelli that “it is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will uses their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity.” They had learned from history and their own experience as subjects of an unjust ruler that a flawed human nature meant no man or elite, whether defined by birth, wealth, or education, can be trusted with power for too long. Such power inevitably becomes tyrannical, as the “repeated injuries and usurpations” of George III, copiously documented in the Declaration, demonstrated. Yet the mass of people, if given unlimited freedom, could be just as tyrannical and oppressive, just as prone to the corruption of power. <span style="color: #362f2f;">To protect those “unalienable rights” and guarantee the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” then, a political order had to be created that, in the words of Orestes Brownson, protected “the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy.”</span></p>
<p style="color: #362f2f;">The Constitution crafted a decade after the Declaration brilliantly institutionalized the protection of freedom and autonomy at the same time it created a unified central government to perform the functions beyond the powers of the individual states. It did not create the federal government to “solve problems,” for local communities, families, civil society, and state governments were better suited for that task, as they were closer to and more intimate with the great variety of the American people and their mores, religious denominations, customs, and interests.</p>
<p style="color: #362f2f;">Obama and his Progressive brethren have attacked the philosophical assumptions of the Declaration and the Constitution root and branch.  A century ago Progressives were calling for a “living” Constitution more suitable for modern times than the allegedly outmoded one of the founders. Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1913, “All that progressives ask or desire is permission––in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution’ is the scientific word––to interpret the Constitution according to Darwinian principle.” This same assumption has been the credo of modern progressives like Ezra Klein, who in 2010 dismissed our foundational document, claiming “<span style="color: #000000;">the text is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago [sic] and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done.” As a candidate in 2008 Obama similarly complained that the Constitution was a mere “charter of negative liberties” that “says what the states can’t do to you, says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.” </span></p>
<p>Some see this statement as ignorance or misunderstanding on the part of an alleged constitutional scholar. But in fact this sentiment is completely in line with Wilson’s desire to interpret the Constitution “according to a Darwinian principle,” since humans have changed and society advanced so much that only a technocratic elite armed with new knowledge can be trusted to run society for everybody else, and to know what government “must do on your behalf.” What such a Constitution would be evolving <i>from</i>, of course, would be the idea of a limited federal government that respects the autonomy of citizens and states, and leaves them free to rule themselves and solve their own problems.</p>
<p style="color: #362f2f;">Consistent with this greater role for the federal government has been the expansion of executive power at the expense of Congress, evident in Obama’s unilateral rewriting, adapting, or ignoring the laws. This encroaching executive power is also a development the early Progressives explicitly called for. Long before he became President, Wilson dreamed of a national leader more evocative of Benito Mussolini than George Washington. Such a leader would “know what it is that lies waiting to be stirred in the minds and purposes of groups and masses of men,” and would use this knowledge “to command” men and discover “the external uses to which they may be put . . . There are men to be moved: how shall he move them?” Later, when writing specifically of the president’s powers, he complained that under the Constitution, “He was empowered [by the veto] to prevent bad laws, but he was not to be given an opportunity to make good ones.” Has any president since acted as vigorously on this anti-constitutional wish to bypass Congress and make laws by fiat than Barack Obama and his “pen and phone”? He has made 41 changes to the Affordable Care Act law alone, and more recently has threatened to take unilateral executive action on immigration, all in violation of the constitutional injunction that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Obviously, an imperial president who “moves” men and knows better than they what is good for them is antithetical to the spirit of the Declaration and its principle of liberty possessed by humans as part of their human nature.</p>
<p style="color: #362f2f;">Finally, the bloated federal government and its regulatory regime also challenge the ideal of self-government and citizen autonomy celebrated in the Declaration and institutionalized in the Constitution. Just the Environmental Protection Agency alone enforces 7,000 rules that cost the economy $350 billion a year, and that doesn’t count Obama’s pending assault on coal-fired power plants. In 2012, the <i>Federal Register</i>, which publishes new rules and final changes to existing rules, weighed in at nearly 79,000 pages. The Code of Federal Regulations, which publishes permanent rules and regulations, totaled over 174,000, with over 1 million individual regulatory restrictions. The Competitive Enterprise Institute reckons the annual cost of obeying all these rules and regulations at $1.8 trillion a year. But more important than the cost of this regulatory behemoth backed by the coercive power of the government is the erosion of our freedom and autonomy, the very foundational principles of the Declaration. Indeed, it recalls the Declaration’s indictment of George III, who “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”</p>
<p style="color: #362f2f;">Needless to say, all these Progressive assaults on the spirit of the Declaration and the structure of the Constitution have accelerated and worsened under Obama, and once again recall the Declaration’s condemnation of George III for “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our government,” and for declaring himself “invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.” In short, the Obama administration has created a regime undermining the foundational principles of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The founders had a word for such an assault on freedom––tyranny.</p>
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		<title>Welcome to the Executive Dictatorship</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/welcome-to-the-executive-dictatorship/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=welcome-to-the-executive-dictatorship</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/welcome-to-the-executive-dictatorship/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2014 04:40:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234825</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[America's elected tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cons.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234826" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cons.jpg" alt="cons" width="255" height="203" /></a>The Constitution is dead.</p>
<p>Long live the executive dictatorship.</p>
<p>There is almost nothing the president of the United States cannot do. This week, we found out President Barack Obama&#8217;s IRS not only targeted conservative nonprofit applicants with impunity but then destroyed the emails that could have illuminated the process behind such targeting. Meanwhile, the attorney general — the executive officer charged with fighting government criminality — continues to stonewall an independent prosecutor, maintaining along with his boss that there is not a &#8220;smidgen of corruption&#8221; in the IRS.</p>
<p>On the southern border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been converted from a policing agency to a humanitarian-aid agency, as the Obama administration encourages thousands of unaccompanied minors to flood Texas and Arizona. Those illegal immigrants are being shuttled around the southwest and released into the general population, and told by activists that they are just months away from amnesty.</p>
<p>Across the seas, Obama is unilaterally destroying America&#8217;s anti-terror infrastructure. Iraq has become the preserve of the al-Qaida offshoot ISIS and the Iranian-connected Shiite government — the specific outcome the United States originally wanted to avoid in the country. Afghanistan will soon devolve back into a Taliban-led cesspool for terror. And the Obama administration continues to fund a Palestinian government that includes terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that has now kidnapped an American citizen, along with two other Israeli boys.</p>
<p>Nobody in the executive branch has been punished for Benghazi, Libya, Fast and Furious, serious national security leaks to major news outlets, violations of civil rights by the National Security Agency or any other major scandal.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has seized authority to regulate health care, carbon emissions and labor relations in unforeseen ways.</p>
<p>And no one will stop the executive branch. Impeachment will not solve the problem of a 3 million-strong regulatory branch in which accountability is a fantasy. The legislature has no interest in stopping the growth of the executive, given that legislators seek re-election by avoiding responsibility, and granting more power to the executive avoids such responsibility. And the judiciary seems unwilling to hem in the executive branch at all, given its decisions on the Environmental Protection Agency and Obamacare.</p>
<p>So what&#8217;s left? An elected tyranny in which the whims of the president and all of his men decide the fate of millions. The founders would have fought such a government with every fiber of their being — and, in fact, they did fight such a government. The question now is whether state governments, elected officials and the people themselves will be willing to take the measures necessary to do the same.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Faithless Execution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/faithless-execution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=faithless-execution</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2014 04:18:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Andrew C. McCarthy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Andrew McCarthy builds the political case for Obama’s impeachment.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/er.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234118" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/er-450x328.png" alt="er" width="331" height="241" /></a><strong><span class="summary">Andrew McCarthy will be speaking at the Freedom Center&#8217;s </span>Wednesday Morning Club in Los Angeles on June 18, 2014. For more info, <a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/wmc-andrew-mccarthy-tickets-11640000555">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a policy fellow at the National Review Institute, a contributing editor at <em>National Review</em>, and a columnist for PJ Media. He was a top federal prosecutor involved in some of the most significant cases in recent history. Decorated with the Justice Department’s highest honors, he retired from government in 2003, after helping launch the 9/11 investigation. He is one of America’s most persuasive voices on national security issues and author of the bestsellers <em>Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad</em> and <em>The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America</em>. He is the author of the new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Faithless-Execution-Building-Political-Impeachment/dp/1594037760"><em>Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment</em></a>.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Andrew C. McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>Jamie, it’s a pleasure to speak with you again.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Let’s begin with what inspired you to write this book.</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>Presidential lawlessness and derelictions of duty. I guess that, in light of my background, it’s not surprising that I’m intrigued by how our Constitution deals with modern challenges—or, more accurately, modern iterations of eternal challenges like abuse of power. President Obama’s lawlessness is unprecedented in its scope, starkness, and purpose to undermine the separation-of-powers. The Framers rightly believed the latter was the key to safeguarding liberty—preventing the accumulation of too much power, and especially the joining of executive and legislative powers, in a single set of hands. Because they so worried about the specter of executive lawlessness and overreach, they gave Congress tools to address it decisively. But there are really only two of them: the power of the purse and impeachment.</p>
<p>So I wrote the book to say, “Look, presidential lawlessness is a significant threat to our liberties and to our aspiration to be a Republic under the rule of law. The system gives us weapons to combat it. If we don’t use them, that is a political choice that can be made, but let’s make it with our eyes open because it has serious consequences. I means we will no longer be the same kind of country.”</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What exactly are “high crimes and misdemeanors” and can you give a few brief examples of how has Obama committed them?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>Thanks for asking that because it gets to another reason I wanted to write the book. There is mass confusion about what “high crimes and misdemeanors” means, which is somewhat surprising given that the Clinton impeachment happened less than a generation ago. But it does not refer to conventional “crimes” and “misdemeanors” that I prosecuted back when I was a government lawyer. It is a term of art borrowed from British law—in fact, the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, who was charged in Parliament with “high crimes and misdemeanors” by Edmund Burke, was underway in England while our Constitution was being written, and the Framers were very engaged in such affairs. The phrase, as Hamilton explained, refers to the “political wrongs of public men”—meaning abuses of power and breaches of the public trust reposed in high executive officials. More than penal offenses, it much more resembles concepts found in military justice, e.g., dereliction of duty, failure to honor an oath, etc. The Framers were most concerned about executive maladministration that would undermine our constitutional framework, usurping the powers of the states and the other federal branches.</p>
<p>I recently heard former Attorney General Mukasey give a great example of how an impeachable offense need not be a standard crime or an indictable offense. Presidents have plenary, unreviewable constitutional power to issue pardons and commutations for federal crimes and sentences. If a president suddenly decided to pardon and commute the sentences of every single convict in federal prison and every indicted defendant in a federal case, there would be no crime in that. A president clearly has the constitutional authority to issue such an order. But it would also be a massive abuse of power and he could and, one hopes, surely would be impeached and removed from office for doing it.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>You emphasize that making the legal case for impeachment is not enough. Kindly explain.</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>In their genius, the Framers wanted us to have a clear standard—treason, bribery and high crimes and misdemeanors—defining what misconduct legally suffices to remove a president from power. But recognizing that removing a president would be very disruptive to our society, they wanted it to be hard to accomplish—so it would only be done in worthy cases, not as a result of partisan hackery. So while articles of impeachment (i.e., accusations of high crimes and misdemeanors) may be filed on just a simple majority of the House of Representatives, it requires a two-thirds Senate supermajority to remove the president from power. No matter how many provable impeachable offenses you have, then, a president will not be removed unless there is a broad-based popular will that he should be ousted. So the legal case for impeachment, the establishment of high crimes and misdemeanors, is not as important as the political case that the impeachable offenses truly warrant removal. Impeachment is essentially a political remedy, not a legal one.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>As a former prosecutor, you have gained some extra insights on this matter, the differences between a legal case and impeachment?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>Yes, I have a chapter in the book that analyzes how different the criminal investigation and trial process is from the substantially political process of impeachment. I don’t mean “political” in a pejorative sense. I mean it in the sense that the Constitution is a division of political power—so I’m talking about the judicial process of ordinary law-enforcement cases versus the process of filing articles of impeachment in the House and conducting a Senate impeachment trial.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> The campaigns to impeach Nixon and Clinton involved very different ingredients than why Obama would need to be impeached, right?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>The lawlessness in which Nixon and Clinton engaged, while certainly qualifying as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” was different not only in degree but kind from Obama’s. Clinton’s conduct was reprehensible but it did not really touch the core of his presidential duties, much less undermine the constitutional framework. Nixon’s was more severe, but it was largely based on a single transaction and was not a systematic assault on our governing framework—in fact, Nixon obeyed a court order, surrendered the tapes, and ultimately resigned from office rather than stonewalling, destroying the tapes (other than the infamous 18-minute gap), putting the country through an impeachment trial, and otherwise using his enormous power to fight to the bitter end.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>You demonstrate that all of this is very much connected to the “fundamental transformation” that Obama promised. Illuminate that for us please.</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>In marked contrast to Nixon and Clinton, Obama is a committed movement leftist who is using his raw power to make good on his vow to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” under circumstances where he does not have a public mandate and governing majority—most Americans, it turns out, like the country and don’t want it transformed. Of necessity, then, if he’s going to transform us, Obama has to do it outside the bounds of the law and traditional notions of presidential duty. It follows that there’s a slew of lawlessness and derelictions of duty.</p>
<p>Indeed, because Obama is a trained community organizer and steeped in Leftist strategies like Piven-Cloward, it follows that he presses his raw power beyond his legitimate authority as far as he thinks he can afford to go politically and that he overloads the system with crisis—so that by the time you barely wrap your brain around the details of one scandal, he’s two or three scandals down the road. There were lots of Clinton scandals, but they were mostly about his personal failings not a strategic challenge to the constitutional framework.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What would the framers of this country think of Obama?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>They’d think he should be impeached and removed, but they’d be more surprised, I imagine, at how drastically the country had changed, and how much the relation between the citizen and the central government had changed. Obama is a known quantity and he’s doing what one who had studied his background and record would expect him to do. And the president’s political opposition in Congress is feckless, but they are not inventing out of whole cloth the possibility of being damaged politically for resisting him. The wild card in the equation is the public. How important to us is it that we are still a republic under the rule of law rather than subjects of presidential whim. That’s hard to say, and that’s what would have surprised the Framers.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>The consequences for this nation if the American people do not give their support for their leaders to pursue impeachment?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>Well, as I argue in the book, the best thing for the country would not be Obama’s impeachment. It would be to create the political conditions—by emphasizing the issue of presidential lawlessness—under which the president sees his interest as following the law, honoring his oath, and finishing his term that way. But if he is not going to do that—and things seem to be getting worse rather than better—something has to be done about it. The Framers gave Congress two tools: the power of the purse and impeachment. If neither of those remedies is going to be used, we are going to be a very different kind of country.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Final thoughts?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>The precedents being set today by Obama’s lawlessness and derelictions of duty are going to be available for exploitation by every future president, regardless of party or ideological bent. This should not be a partisan or a conservative issue. We all have a stake in the president’s not being above the law.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Andrew C. McCarthy, thank you so much for joining Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>It’s been my pleasure, thanks so much.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Constitution or Good Ideas?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/the-constitution-or-good-ideas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-constitution-or-good-ideas</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2014 04:10:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224477</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Which should we be ruled by? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/constitution-2-SC.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224491" alt="Stock Photo of the Consitution of the United States and Feather Quill" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/constitution-2-SC.jpg" width="341" height="226" /></a>Let me run through a few good ideas. I think it&#8217;s a good idea for children to eat healthful, wholesome foods. In the raising of our daughter, before-dinner treats were fresh vegetables, and after-dinner treats were mostly fruits.</p>
<p>I arrive at my gym sometime between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., at least four times a week, to lift weights and use the treadmill. During the warmer months, the treadmill is substituted by a weekly total of 40 to 60 miles on my bike. My exercise regimen is a good idea. Another good idea is to wear a bike helmet while bike riding and wear a seat belt when driving my car. Among many other good ideas is the enjoyment of two, maybe three, glasses of wine with each evening meal.</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;So what, Williams? What&#8217;s your point?&#8221; There&#8217;s no question that all of those actions, with the possible exception of the last, are indeed good ideas. As evidence that my exercise regimen is a good idea, my doctors tell me that at 78 years of age, I&#8217;m in better health and conditioning than most of their male patients many years my junior. My question to you is whether these commonly agreed-upon good ideas should become the law of the land. To be more explicit, should Congress enact a law requiring every able-bodied American to lift weights four times a week and bike 40 to 60 miles each week? Just look at all the benefits of such a law. Americans would be healthier, and that would mean lower health care costs. People would have a longer working life. Men would have the strength to protect their women and children folk from thugs. In a word, there would be no downside to the fitter population that would come from a congressional law mandating physical fitness programs. We might title such a law the &#8220;Improving American Health Act.&#8221; The law would impose fines and penalties on any able-bodied person not found to be in compliance. What congressman would have the callousness to vote against such a beneficial measure?</p>
<p>Needless to say, there would be attacks against the Improving American Health Act, launched mostly by libertarians, conservatives and some Republicans.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These people would argue that Congress has no constitutional authority to enact such a liberty-intrusive law. Their arguments would be on weak grounds. Our Constitution&#8217;s Article 1, Section 8 says, &#8220;The Congress shall have Power To &#8230; provide for the &#8230; general Welfare of the United States.&#8221; Our Constitution further empowers Congress to enact the Improving American Health Act by its Article 1, Section 3 — sometimes referred to as the commerce clause — which grants Congress the power &#8220;To regulate Commerce &#8230; among the several States.&#8221; After all, good health lends itself to more efficient interstate commerce and a larger gross domestic product. Sick Americans adversely affect interstate commerce and are a burden on economic activity.</span></p>
<p>I have no doubt that people who don&#8217;t want to see a healthier America — again, mostly libertarians, conservatives and Republicans — will bring suit before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Congress has no such authority under either the general welfare clause or the commerce clause. Would you prefer that Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., speaking for a majority, concur by saying, &#8220;This court is guided by the U.S. Constitution, and we find no constitutional authority for the Improving American Health Act, despite Congress&#8217; nonsense claims alleging authority under the general welfare and commerce clauses&#8221;?</p>
<p>Or would you prefer that Justice Roberts, speaking for the majority, engage in mental contortions in which he agrees that forcing people to exercise exceeds congressional authority under both the commerce clause and the general welfare clause but says the Improving American Health Act is indeed constitutional under Congress&#8217; taxing authority?</p>
<p>My bottom line question is: Should we be ruled by what are seen as good ideas or by what&#8217;s permissible by the U.S. Constitution?</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Governed by Rules, Not Men</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/governed-by-rules-not-men/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=governed-by-rules-not-men</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Mar 2014 04:01:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220997</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The only way to combat tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/law_hammar_xlarge.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220998" alt="law_hammar_xlarge" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/law_hammar_xlarge.jpg" width="315" height="222" /></a>What kind of rules should govern our lives? I&#8217;d argue that the best rules are those that we&#8217;d be satisfied with if our very worst enemy were in charge of decision-making. The foundation for such rules was laid out by my mother. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>My mother worked as a domestic servant. That meant that my younger sister and I often lunched at home by ourselves during our preteen years. Being bigger and stronger than my sister, I seldom divided the food evenly, especially the desserts. After a tiring day at work, Mom would be greeted by sob stories from my sister about my lunchtime injustices. Mom finally became fed up with the sibling hassles. She didn&#8217;t admonish me to be more caring, fair, sensitive and considerate. She just made a rule: Whoever cuts the cake (pie, bread, meat, etc.) allows the other the first selection. With that new rule in place, you can bet that when either my sister or I divided food, it was divided equally.</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;That&#8217;s a nice story, Williams, but what&#8217;s the point?&#8221; The point is that the principle underlying Mom&#8217;s rule is precisely the kind that is necessary for rules to promote fairness. In general, the rules that we should want are those that promote fairness, whether it&#8217;s our best friend or it&#8217;s our worst enemy who&#8217;s the decision-maker. In the case of Mom&#8217;s rule, it didn&#8217;t make any difference whether I hated my sister&#8217;s guts that day or she hated mine or whether my sister was doing the cutting or I was; there was a just division of the food.</p>
<p>Think for a moment about rules in sports, say basketball. One team loses, and the other wins, but they and their fans leave the stadium peacefully and most often as friends. Why? The game&#8217;s outcome is seen as fair because there are fixed, known, neutral rules evenly applied by the referees.</p>
<p>The referees&#8217; job is to apply the rules — not determine the game&#8217;s outcome. Imagine the chaos and animosity among players and fans if one team paid referees to help it win or the referees were trying to promote some kind of equality among teams.</p>
<p>Billions of dollars and billions of hours are spent campaigning for this or that candidate in our national elections. You can bet that people are not making those expenditures so that politicians will uphold and defend the Constitution; they&#8217;re looking for favors. The Constitution&#8217;s framers gave us reasonably fair and neutral rules of the game. If our government acted, as the framers intended, as a referee or night watchman, how much difference would it make to any of us who occupies the White House or Congress? It would make little difference, if any. It would be just like our basketball game example. Any government official who knew and enforced the rules would do. But increasingly, who&#8217;s in office is making a difference, because government has abandoned its referee and night watchman function and gotten into the business of determining winners and losers. Unfortunately, for our nation, that&#8217;s what most Americans want.</p>
<p>Thomas Paine said, &#8220;Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.&#8221; Our Bill of Rights is an explicit recognition of the Founding Fathers&#8217; distrust of Congress. Just look at its language, with phrases such as &#8220;Congress shall not abridge,&#8221; &#8220;shall not infringe,&#8221; &#8220;shall not deny,&#8221; &#8220;disparage&#8221; and &#8220;violate.&#8221; If the framers did not believe that Congress would abuse our God-given, or natural, rights, they would not have used such language. If, after we die, we see anything like the Bill of Rights at our next destination, we&#8217;ll know that we&#8217;re in hell. To demand such protections in heaven would be the same as saying we can&#8217;t trust God.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Elastic Clause of the Constitution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/j-christian-adams/in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:45:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[J. Christian Adams]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Haven't you heard of the constitutional power that entitles the president to do whatever he wants? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/American-Constitution.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219829" alt="American-Constitution" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/American-Constitution-450x336.jpg" width="315" height="235" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/02/26/in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution/?singlepage=true">PJ Media</a>.</strong></p>
<p>If college students listened to Mark Levin or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rush-Revere-Brave-Pilgrims-Time-Travel/dp/1476755868">Rush Limbaugh</a>, they would receive a better American history education than they are getting from their professors. I <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Emory-College-Republicans/336452723042661">recently spoke at Emory University</a>, where one student defended all of President Obama’s unconstitutional actions by invoking the Elastic Clause of the Constitution.</p>
<p>Citing the Elastic Clause could indeed justify a wide range of administration actions, except for one problem – it doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>But you couldn’t tell that to the student at Emory University who came to my speech last week on Obama’s abuses of power. He persisted in defending the actions through the Elastic Clause, as if the be-all, end-all provision was common knowledge.</p>
<p>From the sound of it, the Elastic Clause must be common knowledge in faculty lounges.</p>
<p>The Elastic Clause, he persisted, gives the president the power to address a wide range of issues through executive prerogative. It allowed the government, he said, to adapt to new circumstances unlike the age when the Founders wrote the Constitution.</p>
<p>Of course the Founders did include an “elastic clause” of sorts, namely Article V, which gives the people and the states the power to amend the Constitution.</p>
<p>But he wasn’t speaking of something quite so stiff and formal. He wasn’t referring to something that required broad assent. He was referring the Elastic Clause that allows the president to swiftly respond to needs as they arise – sort of like Mussolini and Mugabe did.</p>
<p>He was serious. He really believed the Elastic Clause was real. But the constitutional literacy of a different student was even worse. With a straight face, she defended the exercise of executive power and the issuance of executive orders as constitutional because of the inaction of Congress.</p>
<p>“It’s part of the Constitution that if the Congress doesn’t act, then the president can issue executive orders to fix something,” was her argument.</p>
<p>Even more frightening, the person saying this is an officer of the campus Democrats. A little totalitarian in training.</p>
<p>Naturally, this was all quite an eye opener. I’m no fool when it comes to the institutional left and their corrosion of the system. But to have a student debate me over a verifiably fictional constitutional provision, to have a student presume I was the one making things up when I said the Elastic Clause didn’t exist – that blazed new territory.</p>
<p>All of this illustrates the dangerous rot occurring on campus, facilitated in large part by the faculty. All signs point to their success. Students are learning the lexicon of the institutional left and producing tragic-comedy like <a href="http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/02/25/black-ucla-law-students-complain-about-equality/">complaining about equalit</a>y at UCLA, and worse. My appearance at Emory was sponsored by the <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a> and the College Republicans. Recognize that groups like these are fighting an uphill battle on campus. But without them, college campuses would be intellectually monolithic.</p>
<p>The talk at Emory wandered into the small discrete psychological components of tyranny as described brilliantly in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Gulag-Archipelago-1918-1956-Investigation/dp/0813332893"><em>Gulag Archipelago</em></a>. No doubt Mr. Elastic Clause and College Democrat Vice President Edict had never heard of the Nobel Prize winning description of where elastic ideas can lead.</p>
<p>Solzhenitsyn’s great book of the 20th century describes the <em>small ideas</em> of totalitarianism, and the camouflaged embryonic consent that individuals give to tyranny over time. Tyranny isn’t just about gruel with potato peelings day after day and bullets to the back of the head.</p>
<p>I presume Mr. Elastic Clause and Ms. College Democrat Officer will never read <em>Gulag</em>, but if they did, they would learn the story of Georgi Osorgin. Osorgin was imprisoned in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovki_prison_camp">Solovetsky Islands</a> in the early 1920s. The date was important because American leftists (such as some Democrats of the 1960s) like to pin the mass murder system only on Stalin. But Solzhenitsyn documents that the gulags were a necessary part of Lenin’s vision of the International Brotherhood. Without terror, his system would not work.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Osorgin was to be shot, but he begged his jailers for a few more days because his wife was coming to visit him at the gulag. Osorgin’s wife visited him, then as her boat pulled away from Solovetsky Island, keeping his part of the bargain, he undressed to be shot. Niceties were part of the gulag in the early days because nobody really knew where the fledgling system was headed.</span></p>
<p>Solzhenitsyn:</p>
<blockquote><p>But still, someone did give them those three days. The three Osorgin days, like other cases, show how far the Solovetsky regime was from having donned the armor of a<em>system</em>. The impression is left that the air of Solovki strangely mingled extreme cruelty with an almost benign incomprehension of where all this was leading, which Solovetsky characteristics were becoming the embryo of the great Archipelago and which were destined to dry up and wither on the bud. After all, the Solovetsky Islands people did not yet, generally speaking, firmly believe that the ovens of the Arctic Auschwitz had been lit right there and that its crematory furnaces had been thrown open to all who were ever brought there. (But, after all, that is exactly how it was!)</p>
<p>People there were also misled by the fact that all their prison terms were exceedingly short: it was rare that anyone had a ten-year term, and even five was not found very often, and most of them were three, just three. And this whole cat-and-mouse trick of the law was still not understood: to pin down and let go, and pin down again and let go again. . . .</p>
<p>Here too, on the first islands of the Archipelago, was felt the instability of those checkered years of the middle twenties, when things were but poorly understood in the country as a whole. Was everything already prohibited? Or, on the contrary, were things only now beginning to be allowed? Age-old Russia still believed so strongly in rapturous phrases! And there were only a few prophets of gloom who had already figured things out and who knew when and how all this would be smashed into smithereens.</p></blockquote>
<p>I explained to the students that a <em>written</em> Constitution, free from the phony Elastic Clause and power for a president to issue edicts, is what keeps them free. It is what lets them have fun and have a good life. Structural constraints on the power of government allow people to experience joy, worship God, build dreams and fulfill potential. Our Constitution does not have an Elastic Clause for a very good reason. It was established to be <em>inelastic</em> absent the consent of three quarters of states. It was established to lay down fundamental ironclad <em>restraints</em> on the power of government, especially the executive branch.</p>
<p>Some are <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/09/23/why-the-fuss-obama-has-long-been-on-record-in-favor-of-redistribution/">trying to redefine freedom</a> away from this ideal and toward freedom from want.</p>
<p>That it is becoming fashionable to reject our particularly American version of freedom deserves an overpowering response.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Inequality Smokescreen</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-inequality-smokescreen/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-inequality-smokescreen</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2014 05:16:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214638</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How progressivism continues to discard the philosophical foundations of the Constitution.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/oi.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214642" alt="US President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the economy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/oi-450x292.jpg" width="315" height="204" /></a>Desperate for a diversion from the disasters of Obamacare, the president has conjured up the old leftist “income inequality” cliché. His court-pundits complain that “the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic,” according to <i>The New Republic</i>, while Berkeley Professor Robert Reich has thundered against “casino capitalism,” blaming it for “the greatest concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together.” Democrats, no doubt cheered by left-over-leftist Bill de Blasio’s election as mayor of New York, and excited by his Occupy Wall Street rants, apparently believe that such class-warfare rhetoric is a political winner. So be prepared for more of the same, and for demands to raise the minimum wage and gouge even more money from the “millionaires and billionaires.”</p>
<p>Fretting over income inequality, however, has little to do with economic reality. It’s a statistical sleight-of-hand that counts only “money income” and ignores non-cash transfers in order to decry how much more income the top 1% are earning compared to everybody else. In fact, when the value of government transfers such as Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit are included in calculating income, <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/123566">income inequality actually declined</a> 1.8% between 1993 and 2009. Equally revealing is the fact that in 2005 those in the bottom 20% of earners consumed almost twice their income, again because of the value of non-cash transfers. And that doesn’t count the underground economy, everything from working for cash to more unsavory occupations. That’s why the statistical <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty">poor enjoy living standards higher</a> than the average European. And that’s the real point––not how much the rich have, but how much everybody else does.</p>
<p>So what is all this hyperventilating about, apart from political demagoguery? Don’t underestimate the sheer ignorance of some people about how free-market capitalism works. They seem to think of wealth in medieval terms, as fixed resources like land, herds, forests, or precious metals that can be divided only so many times, a zero-sum process that requires some to have less for others to have more. Capitalism, of course, creates new wealth that is widely distributed, the riches of one leading to a higher standard of living for many. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is worth $78.5 billion, but his company and related businesses have created 14.7 million jobs globally. For every dollar Microsoft earns, affiliated companies earn $7.79. That’s the genius of capitalism, which allows a few to get rich and in the process make millions of others not necessarily rich, but better off than they were.</p>
<p>More important than ignorance of kindergarten economics, though, is the radical egalitarianism that has always been the bane of democracies since ancient Athens––the notion, as Aristotle said, “that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” Genuine equality––the equality of all under the law, and the equality of opportunity––will not satisfy the radical egalitarian. He must have equality of result, and since the most obvious and galling sign of inequality is that of property and wealth, he will then demand redistribution of property to move closer to that aim.</p>
<p>The American Founders understood this nexus of egalitarianism, the unequal distribution of property, and political strife. As James Madison put it, “The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of Government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results: and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.”</p>
<p>Notice that Madison assumes that the unequal distribution of ability, hard work, virtue, or even luck, all of which create the inequality of wealth, is an unchanging fact of human nature. As a result, those with more wealth, and those with less, will form different factions that will attempt to dominate the government in order to advance their interests. The Founders were particularly wary of the majority dominating the government and using its power to redistribute the property of the better off, at the same time they understood that the rich would use political power to their advantage. As Gouverneur Morris said during the Constitutional convention, “The Rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. The proper security [against] them is to form them into a separate interest. The two forces will then control each other . . . By thus combining and setting apart, the aristocratic interest, the popular interest will be combined [against] it. There will be a mutual check and mutual security.”</p>
<p>Hence the Constitutional order of checks and balances was created on this foundation of clashing interests in order to keep one faction from tyrannizing over everybody else.</p>
<p>Obviously, this harping on income inequality is just another example of how progressivism has discarded the philosophical foundations of the Constitution. Rejecting the unequal distribution of ability and virtue among people that Madison recognized, the Progressives under Woodrow Wilson believed that unjust social and economic institutions accounted for inequality of income, and they wanted to increase the power of the state to correct this injustice. Thus early in the 20<sup>th</sup> century Progressives pursued what in 1918 economist E.R.A. Seligman called “fiscal justice” by successfully pushing for the Income Tax. Seligman was commenting on the 1917 Tax Act, which lowered exemptions and raised rates. This increase came a year after the 1916 Revenue Act, which had nearly doubled the 7% top rate established 3 years earlier by the Sixteenth Amendment, and created an inheritance tax. The <i>New Republic </i>called this expansion “a powerful equalitarian attack upon swollen incomes.” Since then the income tax has become the ever-expanding revenue stream for achieving the progressive aim to “pass the prosperity around,” as Albert Beveridge said at the 1912 Progressive Party presidential nominating convention. A hundred years on, the progressive Democrats are still attempting to use federal taxing power to defy human nature, the free market, and the Constitution in order to mount an “equalitarian attack on swollen incomes” and to “spread the wealth around,” as Obama famously said.</p>
<p>The rhetoric of class warfare, however, exploits a more unsavory dimension of democratic man’s desire for absolute equality, one noticed by Alexis de Tocqueville in <i>Democracy in America</i>. “It cannot be denied,” Tocqueville wrote, “that democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to everyone the means of rising to the same level as others as because those means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.” Equality of opportunity means the chance to rise as high as one’s talents, virtues, and hard work can take him. Too often those who fail will refuse to accept their lack of these qualities and blame those who possess them, and in the “acrimony of disappointment,” Tocqueville writes, find “superiority, how legitimate it may be” to be “irksome in [their] sight.”</p>
<p>This envy and resentment is readily fostered and exploited by politicians seeking support for increasing spending on welfare and entitlements in order to maintain their own power and increase that of the state. Meanwhile, welfare destroys the virtues and habits necessary for success, while punitive taxation, deficit spending, bloated government, and intrusive regulation all hurt economic growth and reduce opportunities for those who do want to better themselves.</p>
<p>Obviously, modern “income inequality” rhetoric is a political smokescreen, which explains its inconsistencies. We do not hear Obama and the Democrats decrying the bloated incomes of progressive actors, television talk-show hosts, rap moguls, or sports stars. Their demonization of Wall Street doesn’t stop them from accepting campaign contributions from investment bankers or working for Goldman Sachs after leaving government. Worse yet, they are completely indifferent to the assault on the Constitutional order this rhetoric represents, or the divisiveness sown among the citizens by stirring up destructive passions like envy and resentment. All they care about is keeping their own power and privilege no matter what the social and economic costs.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>New Egyptian Constitution: A Slap at the Brotherhood</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/new-egyptian-constitution-a-slap-at-the-brotherhood/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=new-egyptian-constitution-a-slap-at-the-brotherhood</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2013 05:47:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How will the pro-Islamist Obama administration respond? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/464D0383-FA87-472C-8669-A8CFDA6876C3_mw1024_n_s1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212210" alt="464D0383-FA87-472C-8669-A8CFDA6876C3_mw1024_n_s" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/464D0383-FA87-472C-8669-A8CFDA6876C3_mw1024_n_s1-450x341.jpg" width="270" height="205" /></a>Egyptians have a new draft constitution to vote upon in a referendum to be held either later this month or in January 2014. It is meant to replace, with amendment language and new provisions, the more Islamist-oriented constitution rammed through by former Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohammed Morsi. &#8220;It is now the right of every Egyptian to declare that this is their constitution,&#8221; said Bishop Bola, the representative of the Coptic Orthodox Church on the panel that was responsible for drafting the new constitution. </span></b></p>
<p>The big loser will be the Muslim Brotherhood, eclipsed by representatives from a more conservative Islamist party and from Al-Azhar University, the seat of Sunni learning, who spoke for Islamists on the drafting panel and have backed the new constitution. The drafting panel also consisted of activists from Tamarod, the secular youth movement that rallied millions of Egyptians who demanded that Morsi step aside, leading to his ouster and replacement by an interim government under the rule of the defense minister, General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi.</p>
<p>The constitution drafters and the interim government leaders hope that there will be a significantly larger turnout of voters to approve this constitution than showed up to approve Morsi’s constitution.  A larger turnout and vote in support of the draft constitution would serve to legitimize the current interim government’s self-proclaimed move towards a more inclusive, democratic regime – at least, that is what the interim government leaders are claiming. Whether presidential or parliamentary elections would be held first following the constitution’s ratification remains an open question, possibly to provide the opportunity for Sisi to run for president and consolidate his influence in advance of more contentious, drawn-out parliamentary elections.</p>
<p>On paper, the new constitution would grant new important rights to Egyptian citizens, including protection against torture, human trafficking and persecution for religious belief. It bans parties founded on religion or sect and mandates equality between men and women, both slaps in the face of the Muslim Brotherhood which tried to remake the country in its own image of an Islamist state. In practice, however, the new constitution is but another in a series of constitutional documents, more honored in their breach than their observance. While the new draft pays lip service to human rights and is more secular in nature than its predecessor, the draft keeps Sharia law as the basis for legislation. Repression of dissent, limitations on freedom to practice one’s own religion, and violence and discrimination against women are likely to remain the grim reality on the streets of Egypt. State institutions such as the military and the police will retain their privileged status.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, the Muslim Brotherhood has already denounced the new draft constitution. It said that &#8220;abusive coupists&#8221; were trying to &#8220;distort Egypt&#8217;s legitimate constitution,&#8221; by which they mean the Islamist-oriented constitution foisted on the Egyptian people last year by a far less inclusive drafting process.  Liberals, secularists and the Coptic Church were on the outside looking in, in contrast to their inclusion in the current drafting process.</p>
<p>The Obama administration appears to be taking a wait-and-see attitude towards the new draft constitution. But, in the meantime, the administration continues to punish the interim regime by cutting off vital military aid, including the delivery of F-16s, M1A1 tank kits, Harpoon missiles and Apache helicopters. It does so on the pretext that the regime’s forcible suppression of dissent and lack of inclusiveness forced the administration to the point that “we could not continue business as usual with respect to our assistance.”</p>
<p>Why not begin resuming at least some deliveries now that the interim government has taken at least a preliminary step on its roadmap towards a more inclusive civil democracy? The excuse appears to be a recently passed law placing restrictions on protest demonstrations, which was aimed at curbing the incessant protests by Islamists supporting Morsi before violence could erupt but has also ensnared some disaffected secularist activists. In a press statement issued on November 25, 2013, Jen Psaki, State Department Spokesperson, said that “this law, which imposes restrictions on Egyptians’ ability to assemble peacefully and express their views, does not meet international standards and will not move Egypt’s democratic transition forward.”  Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, piled on with this tweet on November 26<sup>th</sup>: “New law regulating peaceful protests in #Egypt simply doesn&#8217;t meet intl standards. Gov&#8217;t must protect freedoms, and this law restricts them.”</p>
<p>Why didn’t the administration apply the same “international standards” when it kept the arms flowing unabated to the repressive, non-inclusive Morsi regime? The truth is that the administration would have preferred the Islamist Morsi regime to remain in power.</p>
<p>Recall that as millions of anti-Morsi protesters filled the streets of Egypt last June in peaceful demonstrations, Anne Patterson, the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt at the time, said that she and “my government” were &#8220;deeply skeptical&#8221; about the effectiveness of “street action.”  In a little-noticed statement before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on October 29, 2013, A. Elizabeth Jones, Acting Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, said the “decision to remove Morsi” was “troubling.”</p>
<p>President Obama still appears to view the Muslim Brotherhood, whose representatives he invited to his June 2009 speech in Cairo, as the preferred, legitimate rulers in Egypt. It is part of a dramatic pivot that has placed Obama on the side of Islamist authoritarian regimes against more secular, military-supported authoritarian regimes in the region.</p>
<p>In the words of A. Savyon, director of MEMRI&#8217;s Iran Media Project, and Y. Carmon, President of MEMRI, in their analysis of the roots of the U.S.&#8217;s policy change in the Middle East that led to the Obama administration’s disastrous interim nuclear agreement with Iran:</p>
<p>“In previous attempts to appeal to the peoples of the region, that is, in Ankara and Cairo in 2009, Obama presented a vision of an America that is no longer an imperialist power that maintains military bases in the region and intervenes militarily to protect the status quo, but a country that identifies with the aspirations and interests of the Arab and Muslim peoples and disregards their regimes. In Obama&#8217;s perception, the overall U.S. shift in recent years – the pinnacle of which is his attempts at reconciliation with the Iranian regime – does not stem from weakness but is ideologically directed; it dovetails with and intensifies the revolutionary changes taking place in the Arab world since the Arab Spring, with the aim of integrating the U.S. into the Arab and Muslim world of the future.”</p>
<p>The new draft Egyptian constitution, as imperfect as it is, represents an improvement over the Muslim Brotherhood-backed constitution. It was also drafted with more inclusive participation. Egypt will not be a Jeffersonian democracy, no matter who rules. Therefore, given the choice between a nominally more inclusive but authoritarian secular regime committed to fighting terrorism and standing by international treaties, versus an authoritarian jihadist regime that at best turned a blind eye to Islamist violence against Christians and other “infidels” and questioned its existing treaty obligations, the correct choice should be clear. Sadly, the Obama administration appears committed to choosing the wrong side.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Political Debate We Need to Have</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/the-political-debate-we-need-to-have/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-political-debate-we-need-to-have</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 11 Nov 2013 04:29:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federalists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[political debate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[technocrats]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Today, we treat politics as a sport, but it’s really a conflict of ideologies between federalists and technocrats.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/reframe-final.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210219" alt="reframe-final" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/reframe-final.jpg" width="280" height="175" /></a><strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Reprinted from Hoover&#8217;s <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/161046">Defining Ideas</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>[Illustration by Barbara Kelley]</strong></p>
<p>The media and pundits treat politics like a sport. The significance of the recent agreement to postpone the debt crisis until January, for instance, is really about which party won and which lost, which party’s tactics are liable to be more successful in the next election, and which politician is a winner and which a loser. But politics rightly understood is not about the contest of policies or politicians. It’s about the philosophical principles and ideas that create one policy rather than another—that’s what it should be about, at least.</p>
<p>From that point of view, the conflict between Democrats and Republicans concerns the size and role of the federal government, which is no surprise to anyone who even casually follows politics. But more important are the ideas that ground arguments for or against limited government. These ideas include our notions of human nature, and what motivates citizens when they make political decisions. Our political conflicts today reflect the two major ways Americans have answered these questions.</p>
<div>The framing of the Constitution itself was predicated on one answer, best expressed by Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli: “It is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity.” Throughout the debates during the Constitutional convention, the state ratifying conventions, and the essays in the <em>Federalist</em>, the basis of the Constitution was the view that human nature is flawed.</div>
<p>As Alexander Hamilton wrote in <em>Federalist </em>6,men are “ambitious, vindictive and rapacious,” and are motivated by what James Madison called “passions and interests.” These destructive passions and selfish interests were particularly predominant among the masses, whose ignorance of political theory and history left them vulnerable to demagogues. Hence the people “are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men,” as Elbridge Gerry said during the Constitutional convention debates.</p>
<p>This low estimation of the people partly explains the “democracy deficit” in the original Constitution, which allowed the people to elect directly only the House of Representatives. But unlike Plato, who proposed an elite with superior wisdom to run the state justly and efficiently, early Americans believed the flaws of human nature were universal, and all men, no matter their wealth or intelligence, were corruptible. More important, they were firm believers in the tendency of concentrated power to corrupt, for power is “of an encroaching nature,” as George Washington and James Madison said, and is ever striving to increase its scope. Vanity, greed, pride, and selfishness, John Adams wrote, “are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”</p>
<p>Universal human depravity thus precluded any simple form of government whether democratic, monarchical, or aristocratic. The solution of the framers was the mixed government in which the democratic House of Representatives, the aristocratic Senate, (chosen by the state legislatures), and the monarchical president (chosen by the Electoral College) would along with the judiciary divide the powers and functions of government and thus check and balance the tendency of each branch to maximize its power at the expense of the people’s freedom. As James Madison explained in <em>Federalist</em> 51, the “separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government” would allow each branch “to resist the encroachment of the others,” for “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”</p>
<p>Equally important was the principle of federalism, the protection of the power of the states evident in giving state legislatures the responsibility for selecting Senators and the presidential electors. Given the variety of conflicting interests among the states, Madison wrote in <em>Federalist</em> 10, there will be a “greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest,” and “greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority.” Any selfish interest or violent passion “will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states,” and “the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it [the nation] must secure the national Councils against any danger from that source.” Just as the variety of interests and passions among the people will check and balance each other, so too will the variety of state interests check and balance the power of the federal government.</p>
<p>Starting in the late nineteenth century, a different view of human nature and its motivations developed. The Progressive movement rejected the Founders’ assumption of the universal depravity of human nature. Progressives believed human nature could be improved under the environmental pressures of technological, scientific, and economic changes. New “sciences” like sociology and psychology had developed that were discovering the material causes of human behavior whether social, economic, or political. From this knowledge came the technical means of alleviating the social and economic disruptions attending these changes. Masters of this new knowledge and the techniques for applying them, if given power, could apply these insights into governing and managing the state, and solving the new problems that had arisen from industrialization and technological change.</p>
<p>From the Progressive perspective, the Constitution and its structure of checks and balances were outmoded. Industrialization and technological development had created new problems that required a different form of federal government. According to Progressive president Theodore Roosevelt in his 1901 State of the Union speech, “The old laws, and the old customs which had almost the binding force of law, were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so enormously increased the productive power of mankind, they are no longer sufficient.”</p>
<p>Woodrow Wilson made the same argument. Politics must now be understood as a Darwinian process, and the Constitution must evolve to meet new circumstances. “All that progressives ask or desire,” Wilson wrote in 1913 in <em>The New Freedom</em>, “is permission—in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”</p>
<p>The limited government of the Founders, then, was incapable of effective government given the developments in economic and social life that were changing human nature. The national interest could no longer be served by the state governments, the free market, or civil society A bigger and more powerful national government was necessary to control big business and corporations, and to more equitably distribute wealth and improve the general welfare. The clash of the various interests and passions of individuals and factions must be neutralized, and national unity must be created through a national government and its technocratic administration. The individual rights enshrined in the Constitution had to be redefined in terms of the larger society and its welfare.</p>
<p>The right to property, for example, so crucial for the framers, now must be “subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it,” as Theodore Roosevelt said in his famous “New Nationalism” speech delivered during the 1912 presidential campaign. Enforcing this concern for the “general right of the community” required a “policy of a far more active government interference with social and economic conditions.”</p>
<p>In his last State of the Union speech Roosevelt said, “The danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands. It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated” to serve the unified interests of the collective people. Woodrow Wilson concurred. Imagining in <em>The New Freedom</em> the progressive utopia that would come into being once the existing politico-social order had been rebuilt by what Wilson calls political “architects” and “engineers,” he describes it as a structure “where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.”</p>
<p>To achieve these aims, the federal government had to grow, with agencies and bureaus created to administer the laws and regulations presumably made necessary by new economic and social conditions. “There is scarcely a single duty of government which was once simple which is not now complex,” Woodrow Wilson wrote in his essay “The Study of Administration.” He went on to write: “The functions of government are every day becoming more complex and difficult, they are also vastly multiplying in number. Administration is everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings . . . Whatever holds of authority state or federal governments are to take upon corporations, there must follow cares and responsibilities which will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and experience.”</p>
<p>This wisdom, knowledge, and experience will be the purview of those schooled in the new sciences, not the traditional wisdom and practical experience of the people pursuing their various and conflicting interests. As Progressive journalist Walter Lippmann wrote in 1914, “We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned. We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means,” which we can do because “the great triumph of modern psychology is its growing capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern our thought.” The instrument of this process necessarily must be the federal government, now enriched by the Sixteenth Amendment, which in 1913 instituted a national income tax.</p>
<p>The Progressives, then, discarded the Founders’ vision of an eternally flawed human nature, and the Constitutional architecture that balanced and checked the tendency for people and factions to pursue their interests and maximize their power at the expense of others. Now a more powerful federal government––currently comprising over 500 agencies and offices, with 2.3 million employees costing $200 billion annually–– armed with new knowledge and backed by coercive federal power, will organize, regulate, and manage social and economic conditions to improve life and create a more just and equitable society.</p>
<p>But the Founders’ main motive in crafting the government they did was not to create utopia, but to protect the freedom of all from the dangers of concentrated power, whether this power was embodied in the majority or in a minority. As Alexander Hamilton said in <em>Federalist </em>85, “I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man. The result of the deliberations of all collective bodies must necessarily be a compound, as well of the errors and prejudices, as of the good sense and wisdom, of the individuals of whom they are composed.” A powerful minority of federal technocrats unaccountable to the people is no exception to the maxim that “power is of an encroaching nature,” its growth always coming at the expense of freedom.</p>
<p>These are the two visions behind the politics of debt and government spending that are necessary for financing a technocratic big government. The outcome of the budget negotiations next January and February will reflect which idea triumphs: that of government limited to protect the autonomy and freedom of flawed humans, or that of big government creating a better world for perfectible humans through entitlement spending financed by taxes and debt. That is the debate we need to be having.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Mohamed Elibiary Declares Victory Over the Constitution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/mohamed-elibiary-declares-victory-over-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mohamed-elibiary-declares-victory-over-constitution</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Nov 2013 04:52:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[compliant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Department of Homeland Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DHS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mohamed elibiary]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A terror-linked homeland security advisor claims the U.S. is already Islam-compliant. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/20130528122947001_hd.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209259" alt="20130528122947001_hd" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/20130528122947001_hd-450x316.jpg" width="270" height="190" /></a>In his 2002 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver">letter to the American people</a> explaining why he perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden asked, “What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?,” and then immediately answered his own question: “The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.” Wednesday his coreligionist Mohamed Elibiary, a member of the <a href="http://www.dhs.gov/homeland-security-advisory-council-members">Homeland Security Advisory Council</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/MohamedElibiary/status/395921435471777792">declared victory</a>: “I do consider the United States of America an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution.”</p>
<p>It could be a canny new Homeland Security strategy: end the jihad against the U.S. by surrendering to it. If Elibiary can convince the Islamic jihadists who are waging jihad warfare against the United States that America is already “an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution,” they will have nothing left to fight for, at least against us, since the goal of jihad is to impose Islamic law wherever possible, and ultimately over the world entire.</p>
<p>In retrospect, then, Janet Napolitano’s tabbing of Elibiary for the DHS Advisory Council, much as I criticized it at the time, looks like a genius move. The amount of money that the U.S. will save on security costs will be enough in itself to save the economy, and Obama will at least be able to make good on his 2008 campaign promises to mend relations with the Islamic world. It’s peace in our time!</p>
<p>There are still a few things to iron out. Will America as an Islamic country be Sunni or Shi’ite? Whichever one Elibiary and his colleagues choose, they will need to be careful to maintain friendly relations, insofar as it is possible, with the spurned party. After all, if America becomes a Sunni state, Iran might be angered by failing to gain as a Shi’ite partner the powerful nation that Barack <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/06/obama-the-united-states-is-one-of-the-largest-muslim-countries-in-the-world.html">Obama already described</a> several years ago as “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world” – and an angry Iran could be dangerous. The same, of course, can be said of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan if the U.S. goes Shi’ite.</p>
<p>Also: will the payment of the jizya, the poll tax that the Qur’an (9:29) demands be paid by the subjugated non-Muslims, be written into the existing tax code, or will it become a new layer of the Washington bureaucracy, bringing with it a new raft of forms for beleaguered American taxpayers, and a new raft of thorny problems for H &amp; R Block? And what of the same verse’s command that the subjugated people display “willing submission” to the Muslims, and “feel themselves subdued”? A huge new bureaucratic apparatus will be needed to ensure that non-Muslims are denied equality of rights with Muslims in every way possible, and the civil rights community will have to turn on a dime to trying to secure equal rights for all citizens to working to deny them for non-Muslims and women.</p>
<p>This will take some doing. Will a cabinet-level Department of the Dhimma be established, perhaps with Elibiary himself as its first Secretary?</p>
<p>Elibiary would certainly protest that all this wasn’t what he meant. The point he was making was substantially that of the Ground Zero Mosque Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, who has claimed that the U.S. Constitution and government are already Sharia-compliant, because – he claims – the Constitution and Islamic law reflect the same values and principles. “The only truly clashing area,” <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/08/ground-zero-mosque-imam-rauf-greater-integration-between-islam-and-the-west-depends-on-incorporation.html">Rauf has claimed</a>, “is the penal code, and no Muslim has the intention of introducing that to America. The penal code is the area that people in the Western world are worried about – but these are things that aren’t even observed today in most of the Muslim world. Apart from the Taliban and a few places like that, where do you see this happening?”</p>
<p>Well, <a href="http://www.nst.com.my/latest/brunei-introduces-tough-islamic-punishments-1.382179">Brunei</a>, which has just introduced Sharia punishments such as stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, and flogging for homosexuality; <a href="http://www.newvision.co.ug/news/647263-yemeni-thief-to-have-hand-foot-amputated.html">Yemen</a> and <a href="http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/09/sharia-court-sentences-two-to-amputation-for-theft/">Nigeria</a>, where thieves were recently sentenced to amputation; and everywhere else where Sharia is fully implemented. But in any case, the claim of Elibiary and Rauf that aside from these punishments the U.S. is essentially Sharia-compliant already depends on its hearers being ignorant of Sharia’s institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims, its denial of the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience, and more.</p>
<p>Elibiary is not ignorant of those things. On the contrary, his record is illuminating of his real agenda. Investigative journalist Charles C. Johnson noted several weeks ago in the <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/06/homeland-security-advisor-supports-convicted-terrorist-fundraiser/">Daily Caller</a> that Elibiary was “an old friend of an activist who was convicted in 2008 of financing the terrorist organization Hamas. In an interview with The Daily Caller, <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/29/muslim-advocates-urge-reduced-fbi-anti-jihad-role/">Mohamed Elibiary</a>, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, reiterated claims he made this summer that former Holy Land Foundation president and CEO Shukri Abu Baker is innocent and a victim of political persecution. Elibiary, who in his <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/homeland-security-advisory-council-members#8">position on the council</a> has regular access to classified information, also said the United States insults Muslim dignity and compared the Muslim Brotherhood to American evangelicals.”</p>
<p>Counter-terror researcher Patrick Poole reported at <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/breaking-homeland-security-adviser-allegedly-leaked-intel-to-attack-rick-perry/">PJ Media</a> in 2011 that “Elibiary may have been given access to a sensitive database of state and local intelligence reports, and then allegedly shopped some of those materials to a media outlet.” According to Poole, Elibiary approached “a left-leaning media outlet” with reports marked For Official Use Only that he said demonstrated rampant “Islamophobia” in the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).  The media outlet declined to do a story, but what was Elibiary doing shopping them Official Use Only documents in the first place?</p>
<p>Poole checked with Steve McCraw, Director of the Texas DPS, who “confirmed that Elibiary has access to the <a href="http://www.dhs.gov/journal/leadership/2008/09/homeland-security-state-and-local.html">Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest</a> (HS SLIC) database, which contains hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports and products that are intended for intelligence sharing between law enforcement agencies.”  Said McCraw of Elibiary:  “We know that he has accessed DPS documents and downloaded them.”</p>
<p>There have been questions about Elibiary’s true allegiances for years. He was <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2004/12/dallas-a-tribute-to-the-great-islamic-visionary-ayatollah-khomeini.html">one of the speakers</a> at a December 2004 conference in Dallas titled “A Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary.”  The visionary in question was none other than the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini.</p>
<p>When I questioned him about his appearance at such a conference, Elibiary claimed that he hadn’t known what kind of conference it was going to be, although he didn’t explain why he went ahead and appeared there anyway once he found out.  Among those who found this explanation wanting was journalist Rod Dreher of the Dallas <i>Morning News</i>, whose skepticism angered Elibiary.  The great moderate subsequently <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2006/06/dallas-muslim-leader-to-columnist-expect-someone-to-put-a-banana-in-your-exhaust-pipe.html">threatened Dreher</a>, telling him:  “Expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe.”</p>
<p>Yet despite all this, Elibiary still got his appointment to the DHS Advisory Council, and was even recently <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/09/muslim-brotherhood-supporter-mohamed-elibiary-gets-promotion-on-homeland-security-advisory-council.html">promoted</a>. Mohamed Elibiary has risen as far as he has without ever being properly vetted because government and law enforcement officials, and the media, are so avid to find a moderate Muslim who will stand against Islamic jihad terrorism that they will accept virtually anyone’s claim to be just that, no questions asked.</p>
<p>And now he has declared victory for the jihad, and proclaimed that the U.S. is an “Islamic country.” Osama bin Laden would have been so proud.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <b>Steven Emerson </b>on the Muslim Brotherhood&#8217;s penetration of our society and government:  <strong><br />
</strong></em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/SaNMPpgPCh4" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>If You Like Your Constitution&#8230;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/if-you-like-your-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=if-you-like-your-constitution</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/if-you-like-your-constitution/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:41:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209005</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[... you can keep your Constitution]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Foden20131030-B.Lie20131029060201.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-209020" alt="Foden20131030-B.Lie20131029060201" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Foden20131030-B.Lie20131029060201-450x340.jpg" width="450" height="340" /></a></p>
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		<title>What Would the Founders Think of Defunding Obamacare?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/what-would-the-founders-think-of-defunding-obamacare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-would-the-founders-think-of-defunding-obamacare</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/what-would-the-founders-think-of-defunding-obamacare/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Sep 2013 04:27:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brooke Baldwin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CNN]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[defunding]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Founding Fathers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=204929</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[CNN's curious constitutional appeal. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/the-constitution.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-204931" alt="the constitution" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/the-constitution-450x299.jpg" width="270" height="179" /></a>A few days ago CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin, speaking about the Republican House bill defunding Obamacare, commented, “Certainly not the way the Founding Fathers maybe drew this thing up.” It’s certainly a surprise to hear an anchor on CNN, an organization biased in favor of progressives, appealing to the authority of the Constitution. For a century the progressives have been telling us that the Constitution is an outmoded document from a different age, and needs to be “modernized” to meet the challenges of a new world.</p>
<p>Listen to Woodrow Wilson in his 1913 book <i>The New Freedom</i>. “I am . . . forced to be a progressive, if for no other reason, because we have not kept up with our changes of conditions, either in the economic or the political field.” A bit later he is more specific about the “political field,” arguing against the Constitution’s central mechanism of checks and balances. “The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life . . . Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop . . . All that progressives ask or desire is permission . . . to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”</p>
<p>This view of the Constitution has been consistent among progressives, and explains much of Barack Obama’s behavior as President. And it directly contradicts the philosophical assumptions behind the Constitution, which are that the defects of human nature, the peoples’ “passions and interests,” as James Madison said, are as constant over space and time as the laws of gravity or motion. Since they can never be eliminated, they can only be balanced and checked by other passions and interests through the institutional structures of the Constitution.</p>
<p>If we probe Baldwin’s appeal to constitutional authority to buttress her attack on the House bill, then, we can see that she knows little or nothing about why the Founders “drew this thing up” the way they did. The key issue is Article <a href="http://1.7.1./">1.7.1.</a>: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.” We need to understand the reasons why the Framers gave the House this responsibility.</p>
<p>To do that, we have to remember that the Constitution is in many ways an antidemocratic document. For many Framers, the example of ancient Athenian democracy and its excesses, and the disorder caused by the overly democratic state governments in the decade between the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, made them wary of giving too much direct power to the volatile, uninformed masses. This fear is explicit in the convention debates. Typical are the comments of Virginia governor Edmund Randolph: “Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our [state] constitutions. It is a maxim which I hold incontrovertible, that the power of government exercised by the people swallows up the other branches. None of the [state] constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.” The Framers’ solution would be the “mixed government” in which the branch directly elected by the people, the House of Representatives, would be balanced and checked by the Senate, indirectly elected through the state legislatures; the President, indirectly elected through the Electoral College chosen by the states; and the federal judiciary, appointed by the President with the Senate’s approval.</p>
<p>Many of the delegates, however, feared the greater powers of the other branches, and their lack of direct accountability to the people. In compensation, they proposed among other powers that money bills should originate in the House, which as Elbridge Gerry said, “was more immediately the representatives of the people, and it was a maxim that the people ought to hold the purse-strings.” The House Representatives, as James Madison would say later, “were chosen by the people, and supposed to be best acquainted with their interests, and ability.” This idea, moreover, was not just compensation for the “democracy deficit” in the rest of the Constitution. Giving the House the “power of the purse” would act as a check on the more powerful Senate. George Mason, arguing against the idea that the Senate should originate money bills, said, “Should the [Senate] have the power of giving away the people’s money, they might soon forget the Source from whence they received it. We might soon have an aristocracy.” Benjamin Franklin agreed: “It was always of importance that the people should know who had disposed of their money, and how it was disposed of.”</p>
<p>We should remember that the Founders’ distrust of human nature extended also to elites that monopolized power, as well as to the masses. Hence “elites” in the government had to be “checked and balanced” as much as the masses. Against those continuing to argue for giving the Senate the power of the purse, George Mason countered, “An aristocratic body, like the screw in mechanics, working its way by slow degrees, and holding fast whatever it gains, should ever be suspected of an encroaching tendency. ––The purse strings should never be put into its hands.” As a compromise to placate the smaller states, the Senate was given the power to add amendments to the money bills originating in the House.</p>
<p>More important are the comments made in <i>The Federalist</i> essays, as these were public, in contrast to the minutes of the debates, and so were meant to convince the average voter. On the issue of originating money bills, James Madison in 58 argued for that power as being a necessary check on the less democratic branches of the government. “The house of representatives can not only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government. They in a word hold the purse, that powerful instrument . . . This power over the purse, may in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.” Clearly, for the Framers the “power of the purse” was intended to be the peoples’ constitutional WMD for checking the other branches when they passed laws or instituted policies contrary to the will of the people.</p>
<p>Contrary to Baldwin, then, the House bill to defund Obamacare is consistent with the intent of the Founders. The law is unpopular, with <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/three-years-later-obamacare-arrives-little-understood-and-not-well-liked/">52% of the people opposing it</a>. Its exceptions and exemptions doled out to political favorites are unjust, its constitutional violations blatant, and its incompetent construction, confused rollout, and unforeseen future costs dangerous for the public fisc and our exploding debt. If ever there was a “grievance” needing “redress,” Obamacare is it. Defunding Obamacare may or not be a wise tactic politically for Republicans, but its consistency with the Constitution and the intentions of the Founders is not in question.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Lost Freedom of Association</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/the-lost-freedom-of-association/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lost-freedom-of-association</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Sep 2013 04:00:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[association]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Discrimination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203122</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Where we went wrong. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/iStock_000005218304Small.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203123" alt="iStock_000005218304Small" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/iStock_000005218304Small-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>Here&#8217;s a question: What is the true test of one&#8217;s commitment to freedom of expression? Is it when one permits others to express ideas with which he agrees? Or is it when he permits others to express ideas he finds deeply offensive? I&#8217;m betting that most people would wisely answer that it&#8217;s the latter, and I&#8217;d agree. How about this question: What is the true test of one&#8217;s commitment to freedom of association? Is it when people permit others to freely associate in ways of which they approve? Or is it when they permit others to freely associate in ways they deem despicable? I&#8217;m sure that might be a considerable dispute about freedom of association compared with the one over freedom of expression. To be for freedom in either case requires that one be brave enough to accept the fact that some people will make offensive expressions and associate in offensive ways. Let&#8217;s explore this with an example from the past.</p>
<p>In 1958, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman, two Virginia residents, traveled to Washington, D.C., to marry. Upon their return to Virginia, they were charged with and found guilty of violation of Virginia&#8217;s anti-miscegenation laws. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, held that laws banning interracial marriages violated the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment. The couple&#8217;s conviction was reversed. Thus, Virginia&#8217;s anti-miscegenation laws not only violated the U.S. Constitution but also violated the basic human right of freedom of association.</p>
<p>Now let&#8217;s ask ourselves: Would Virginia&#8217;s laws have been more acceptable if, instead of banning interracial marriages, they had mandated interracial marriages? Any decent person would find such a law just as offensive — and for the same reason: It would violate freedom of association. Forced association is not freedom of association.</p>
<p>Before you say, &#8220;Williams, where you&#8217;re going with this discussion isn&#8217;t very good,&#8221; there&#8217;s another case from our past.</p>
<p>Henry Louis Mencken, writing in The Baltimore Evening Sun (11/9/48), brought to light that the city&#8217;s parks board had a regulation forbidding white and black citizens from playing tennis with each other in public parks. Today most Americans would find such a regulation an offensive attack on freedom of association. I imagine that most would find it just as offensive if the regulation had required blacks and whites to play tennis with each other. Both would violate freedom of association.</p>
<p>Most Americans probably agree there should be freedom of association in the cases of marriage and tennis, but what about freedom of association as a general principle? Suppose white men formed a club, a professional association or any other private association and blacks and women wanted to be members. Is there any case for forcing them to admit blacks and women? What if it were women or blacks who formed an association? Should they be forced to admit men or whites? Wouldn&#8217;t forced membership in either case violate freedom of association?</p>
<p>What if you wanted to deal with me but I didn&#8217;t want to deal with you? To be more concrete, suppose I own a private company and I&#8217;m looking to hire an employee. You want to deal with me, but I don&#8217;t want to deal with you. My reasons might be that you&#8217;re white or a Catholic or ugly or a woman or anything else that I find objectionable. Should I be forced to hire you? You say, &#8220;Williams, that&#8217;s illegal employment discrimination.&#8221; You&#8217;re absolutely right, but it still violates peaceable freedom of association.</p>
<p>Much of the racial discrimination in our history was a result of legal or extralegal measures to prevent freedom of association. That was the essence of Jim Crow laws, which often prevented blacks from being served in restaurants, admitted into theaters, allowed on public conveyances and given certain employment. Whenever one sees laws or other measures taken to prevent economic transactions, you have to guess that the reason there&#8217;s a law is that if there were no law, not everyone would behave according to the specifications of the law.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama: As a Constitutional Lawyer, I Don&#8217;t Need to Follow the Law</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-as-a-constitutional-lawyer-i-dont-need-to-follow-the-law/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-as-a-constitutional-lawyer-i-dont-need-to-follow-the-law</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 28 Jul 2013 15:31:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198483</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["Ultimately, I’m not concerned about their opinions — very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Obama-Arrogant-Look.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-198485" alt="Obama-Arrogant-Look" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Obama-Arrogant-Look.jpg" width="400" height="320" /></a></p>
<p>There&#8217;s a reason why Obama&#8217;s people keep him away from press conferences. Once he starts getting asked a few tough questions, the illusion that his people try to construct through their talking points of a caring leader who wants bipartisan support to help people, begins to collapse, and<a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-on-unilateral-action-lawyers-i-dont-need-lawyers./article/2533569"> the underlying arrogant man seeps through</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>In an interview after his speech Wednesday in Galesburg, Illinois, Obama was asked if he consulted White House lawyers before unilaterally delaying the employer mandate in Obamacare.</p>
<p>“People questioned your legal and constitutional authority to do that unilaterally — to delay the employer mandate,” asked the Times’ Jackie Calmes. “Did you consult with your lawyer?”</p>
<p>“Jackie, if you heard me on stage today, what I said was that I will seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security,” Obama began.</p>
<p>“No, but specifically — ” Calmes interjected.</p>
<p>“But where Congress is unwilling to act,” Obama continued, “I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people.”</p>
<p>&#8220;And if Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case. But there’s not an action that I take that you don’t have some folks in Congress who say that I’m usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency. And I don’t think that’s a secret. But ultimately, I’m not concerned about their opinions — very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.</p>
<p>&#8220;I am concerned about the folks who I spoke to today who are working really hard, are trying to figure out how they can send their kids to college, are trying to make sure that they can save for their retirement. And if I can take steps on their behalf, then I’m going to do so. And I would hope that more and more of Congress will say, you know what, since that’s our primary focus, we’re willing to work with you to advance those ideals. But I’m not just going to sit back if the only message from some of these folks is no on everything, and sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>We can skip over Obama cynically blaming Congress as an entity for a law that he and his allies rammed through, and portions of which he decided to suspend on a whim.</p>
<p>Obama is being asked, reasonably enough, if he got a legal opinion. His response makes it clear that not only did he not get a legal opinion, but he thinks that a legal opinion is superfluous and if anyone in Congress thinks otherwise, they don&#8217;t matter, because they&#8217;re not lawyers.</p>
<p>The arrogance stems from the fact that Justice Roberts blinked over Obamacare and approved the most blatantly illegal and unconstitutional power grab since the FDR days,  giving Obama the confidence he needs to do whatever he likes.</p>
<p>Obama never really paid attention to legal opinions before either. The legal opinions told him he couldn&#8217;t invade Libya. He laughed them off and got away with it.</p>
<p>And so we have a man who at times seems borderline illiterate declaring his unilateral power to ignore the law because he&#8217;s a Constitutional lawyer.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Assault on the Constitution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamas-assault-on-the-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-assault-on-the-constitution</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:45:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[An expert panel of legal scholars unmasks the president's lawless agenda. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor’s note: Below is the video of the panel discussion “The Assault on the Constitution,” featured at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2013 West Coast Retreat. The event was held February 22nd-24th at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California. A transcript of the discussion follows.</em></p>
<p><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/61521425" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/61521425">The Assault on the Constitution</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> I know as we&#8217;re together this weekend, we talk a lot about &#8220;we, the people.&#8221;  And of course, that presumes that &#8212; our system of government has been structured such that it presumed that we would be &#8212; we, as the people, would be sovereigns, that we would self-govern, that we would understand our responsibility when it comes to self-rule.  But that also presumes that we would have a structure and a Constitution that was based on an appropriate separation of powers, but also, within that structure, that there would be transparency and there would be accountability.  And of course, the way our Founders set it up, as everything moves through the process, and as policy is developed, there are various points at which the voter is supposed to be able to inject some accountability and opinion and response to what&#8217;s happening.</p>
<p>But instead &#8212; implicitly the last term, and more explicitly this term &#8212; we have a President who has become the or-else President.  If Congress, or if the people, will not do it, the or-else will be the EPA.  Or the or-else will be &#8212; I will do it through the National Labor Relations Board.  Or the or-else will be one of the other agencies or the executive orders or the recess appointment.  Or, at this point, it is a matter of using the club of the taxpayers&#8217; own money to tell us that if this sequester deal is not done, that we will feel the pain of having first-responders not available, we will wait longer in TSA lines.</p>
<p>So as we come to a point where it seems that the President is willing to stop at nothing to impose his will on us as the people who are supposed to be sovereign, we meet today with a group of constitutional experts to discuss what are the possibilities, and as I speak at various places around the area where I live.  And the response often is &#8212; well, the President can&#8217;t do that.</p>
<p>Well, today we&#8217;re here to talk about, constitutionally, what the structure is, what the President &#8212; where those lines might&#8217;ve been that he crossed.  And I&#8217;ve asked the panelists to focus specifically on what went wrong and what can be done about it.</p>
<p><strong>Gail Heriot:</strong> I&#8217;ve got some bad news for the employers among you.  Just about any method for hiring employees is illegal under current antidiscrimination laws.  And I really wish I were exaggerating.  The best thing for employers to do is keep their heads down and try not to get caught in the crosshairs of the bureaucrats who enforce antidiscrimination laws.  And if that sounds utterly lawless to you, that&#8217;s because it is utterly lawless.</p>
<p>To be fair now, this was not all the Obama Administration&#8217;s doing.  It has been building over time.  But the Obama Administration has taken it to new heights, among other things, by aggressively pushing disparate impact theory, which is the subject of my remarks today.  I could talk to you about a lot of other race and gender issues, but there&#8217;s only so much time here.</p>
<p>Of course, disparate impact theory itself isn&#8217;t new.  It originated 40 years ago in the area of employment discrimination.  But the Obama Administration is both ramping it up and spreading it to education, housing and lending discrimination as well.  So now landlords, lenders and educators can have the same uncomfortable position as employers.  Everything they do can be a violation.</p>
<p>But let me stick to employment law first.  Because I believe it&#8217;s a tribute to the resilience of the American people that anybody gets hired today.</p>
<p>We all, of course, remember when Martin Luther King looked forward to the day that his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.  But the law today is actually just the opposite.  Under the 1979 Supreme Court case of United Steelworkers versus Weber, employers can indeed discriminate in favor of minorities.  Many of us are so used to this today that we forget how clearly and unequivocally it contradicts both the text and legislative history of Title VII.</p>
<p>On the other hand, under the new EEOC Disparate Impact Guidance issued last year, it is illegal, in most cases, for an employer to decline to hire an applicant because he has a criminal record.  Let me just say that one more time.  It is illegal, in most cases, for an employer to decline to hire an applicant because he has a criminal record.</p>
<p>In other words, considering race is fine.  The EEOC actually encourages that.  But considering the content of the applicant&#8217;s character as revealed by his criminal record is not allowed unless it can be justified by business necessity, a term that the EEOC has never quite defined, other than to say that it&#8217;s a very high standard.  It&#8217;s not the employer&#8217;s judgment that matters in these things &#8212; perish the thought.  It is the judgment of the EEOC that determines what is permissible.</p>
<p>Now, the weird thing is that the idea appears to have been to benefit young black males, who are more likely to have a criminal record than, say, elderly Asian females.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But that appears to be backfiring.  There&#8217;s also, at this point, considerable empirical evidence that young black males may be worse off under the new guidelines.  If an employer cannot check criminal background, he may err on the side of caution and decide not to hire from pools that he believes may be of higher risk.  So the only people that actually benefit for sure are the federal employees who get to administer the law.</p>
<p>Some of you may be scratching your heads and wondering how it can be a violation of Title VII, which after all bans employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion and national origin.  How can it be a violation to consider the job applicant&#8217;s criminal record?  I hope, at least, that sounds odd to you.  Because if it doesn&#8217;t, then we&#8217;re in very, very bad shape.  If it&#8217;s not obvious that discretion should be in the hands of the employer and not in the EEOC, then all is lost.</p>
<p>But to those who support the new guidelines, they look at this and they see it&#8217;s just a &#8212; you know, they believe it&#8217;s a very ordinary application of Title VII.  And the problem is they&#8217;re not entirely wrong on that.  Once you accept the disparate impact theory as an appropriate theory of liability under Title VII, you can see how they get there.  That&#8217;s the problem.</p>
<p>So let me say a little bit about disparate impact theory, for the non-lawyers here.  Beginning in the 1960s, the EEOC took the very peculiar position that Title VII prohibits not just conscious discrimination, and not just unconscious discrimination, but also job qualifications that have a disparate impact that can&#8217;t be justified by business necessity.  Intent to discriminate doesn&#8217;t matter under this theory.  What matters is that some groups are affected by the requirement more than other groups are.</p>
<p>In the 1971 case, Griggs versus Duke Power Company, the Supreme Court tentatively accepted this analysis.  And when they started thinking, wait, what are the ramifications of this, and they started to back away from it in the 1980s, Congress responded by amending Title VII to recognize the theory.  So at least on the surface, that&#8217;s the law now.  If you can&#8217;t prove that you have a business necessity for adopting a qualification that has a disparate impact on some group, then you can get yourself in a lot of trouble.  And a lot of employers have gotten themselves into a lot of trouble.</p>
<p>The problem with all this is that all job qualifications have a disparate impact on some group.  Lifting heavy weights &#8212; that&#8217;s going to have a disparate impact on women.  Jobs that require fine handiwork &#8212; that&#8217;s going to have a disparate impact on men.  Jobs requiring experience in the donut industry will benefit Cambodian Americans at the expense of other ethnic groups.  Job qualifications requiring knowledge of spring wheat cultivation &#8212; Scandinavian Americans are going to have an advantage; the rest of us are in trouble.  And that means, of course, that Lutherans will have an advantage.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I would happily write a check for $1,000 to anyone in this room who can name any job qualification, one that actually will separate successful job applicants from unsuccessful job applicants, that won&#8217;t have a disparate impact on some religious, some ethnic, or some racial or gender group.  It&#8217;s always going to be something.</p>
<p>So the upshot of this is that all employment qualifications are illegal, unless you can manage to convince the EEOC that they are necessary.  And the EEOC, as I said, is deliberately vague about what constitutes business necessity, other than to say that it&#8217;s a really high standard.</p>
<p>So no employer who announces that they have any clear job qualifications can really feel safe.  The result is that most employers must have unclear and amorphous qualifications.  And if anybody ever figures out what those qualifications are, then they&#8217;re going to be in trouble for that one, too.  If anyone thinks that this is good for American competitiveness &#8212; that virtually all things that an employer can do will get him in trouble &#8212; all I can do is urge them to think again about that.</p>
<p>Now, at one point, the EEOC, as well as Congress &#8212; the Congress that passed the 1991 amendments &#8212; responded to this by &#8212; don&#8217;t worry, you know, we&#8217;re really only concerned with disparate impacts that have negative impact on women, African Americans, and maybe Hispanics and a couple of other groups.  Even with that limitation, however, every job qualification is going to have a disparate impact somewhere to one of these groups.</p>
<p>But more importantly, if that&#8217;s how the system works, then it&#8217;s unconstitutional, unless it can be justified under strict scrutiny, unless it can be shown to have a compelling purpose.  And it&#8217;s not at all clear that Congress or the EEOC can demonstrate the various things needed in order to pass constitutionality for a law that has a deliberate racial impact to it.</p>
<p>In one of the most recent Supreme Court cases dealing with disparate impact, Ricci versus DeStefano, Justice Scalia writing in concurrence practically begged somebody to bring a case that would present this issue of disparate impact theory&#8217;s constitutionality.  Nevertheless, promoting disparate impact theory has been a priority for the Obama Administration.</p>
<p>Take, for example, the Department of Education&#8217;s school discipline initiative.  It is a fact, ladies and gentlemen, that African-American children are disciplined in school more often than white children.  And it is also a fact that white children are disciplined in school more often than Asian children.  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan believes this is discrimination.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>In an emotional speech given on the 45th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, he promised to aggressively combat it.  But what his armies of Department of Education bureaucrats are really doing is mistaking aggregate rates of discipline for racism on the part of classroom teachers.  And ultimately, the Department has had to rely upon disparate impact theory.</p>
<p>The Oakland, California School System has agreed, under pressure from the Department of Education, to targeted reductions in the overall use of student suspensions, targeted reductions in suspensions of African-American students in particular; also Latino students and students receiving special education services.  These are discipline quotas plain and simple.</p>
<p>And the danger should be obvious.  First of all, what if an important reason that African-American students are being disciplined more than white students, and white students are being disciplined more than Asian students, is that they are actually misbehaving more often?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Think about it.  Study after study has shown that children who grow up in fatherless households are much more likely to misbehave in school.  Out-of-wedlock birthrate is now about 75 percent for African Americans, more than 25 percent for whites, but only about 15 percent for Asians.  For that not to have a profound effect on rates of discipline would take a miracle.</p>
<p>Second, what if the cost of failing to discipline these students is that they themselves will get a less good education, or that fellow African-American students, who are trying to learn good classroom behavior &#8212; they are going to be the ones who are victimized by this?</p>
<p>I&#8217;m told I have 30 seconds left, so I&#8217;d better hurry up.  If how and when to discipline little Johnny when he acts up in class is not a local issue, then I don&#8217;t know what is.  And you got to remember, when the Department of Education issues a rule that says hey, do not discipline African-American students unless you have good reason to do so, that is naturally going to be understood by the school districts of &#8212; don&#8217;t do it, unless you&#8217;re confident you can persuade some federal investigator, whose judgment you have no reason to trust, that you are going to have good reason when you do it.  That in turn is communicated to the principals as &#8212; don&#8217;t do it unless you jump through the following procedural hoops designed to allow us to prove to that federal investigator that we did the right thing.</p>
<p>And when it gets to the classroom teacher, what is it?  It&#8217;s from the principal &#8212; don&#8217;t do it.  It will only get us in trouble.  That&#8217;s the way bureaucracy works.</p>
<p>But my time is up.  So you&#8217;re going to have to ask me questions about what we can do about this.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>John Eastman: I&#8217;m going to start by talking about a decision by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals a couple weeks ago, holding that the President&#8217;s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were unconstitutional.  And I’m going to use that to set the ground on a broader problem that is being manifested in Washington by this administration, in part encouraged by some missteps by the last administration that gave them the opening to do that.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the language of the Constitution.  I always like to go back to the actual language.  Because unlike Georgetown professor Louis Seidman &#8212; who a couple weeks ago said our Constitution has become obsolete and we ought not to pay any attention to it anymore &#8212; I actually think it matters.  And I think it still governs, and I think it still controls the powers of government.</p>
<p>Article 2 Section 2 Clause 3, very simple &#8212; says &#8212; &#8220;The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.&#8221;  Now, that language is fairly straightforward.  People of ordinary means should be able to figure it out.  Even people of extraordinary means, like the President of the United States ought to be able to figure that out.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>It only applies to vacancies that happen during the recess.  And it&#8217;s during the recess, not during any temporary adjournment.</p>
<p>Now, we&#8217;ve had a bit of mission creep over the years.  Originally, this was understood as an emergency power.  If we&#8217;re in the middle of a war, and the Senate&#8217;s not in session, and it&#8217;s going to take them months to get on their horses and get back into session; and the Secretary of War dies, I need to fill that vacancy pretty quickly.  And so the President was given the power to avoid the confirmation process when a confirmation process could not occur, so that the continuity in government in critical positions would not be undermined.  That&#8217;s all the power was the there for.</p>
<p>Over time, we started treating it as if &#8212; for vacancies that didn&#8217;t arise during the recess, but we hadn&#8217;t gotten around to nominating somebody until the Senate was out of recess, we could use it for that.  And then, gradually, it wasn&#8217;t just the recess between the annual sessions of Congress, but any extended recess during a session of Congress.  So they went out for a month in August, or three weeks at Easter time.  That would be long enough for the President to fill a vacancy.</p>
<p>And then they started equating the recess not as a month or two intra-session but almost as if it was any three days, longer than three days.  Because there&#8217;s another provision in the Constitution that says neither house can adjourn for more than three days without the permission of the other house.  So we started treating a recess as anything longer than an adjournment of three days.</p>
<p>Now, when President Bush was in office, and the Senate was about to go out of session, or into a recess or a long adjournment over Christmas, Harry Reid decided he didn&#8217;t want the President making recess appointments.  And so they came up with a mechanism to stay in session pro forma by meeting every third day.  And the President looked at this and said &#8212; I don&#8217;t have constitutional authority to fill any vacancies because they are technically still in session.</p>
<p>Now, when President Obama had a couple of appointments he wanted to make to the National Labor Relations Board who were about the most radical, hard-line, pro-labor appointments you could imagine, and it was clear that they could not get through the confirmation process because they were so radical, he decided to make those appointments even though the Senate was technically in session.  And his claim was &#8212; well, they&#8217;re not doing any work, because they&#8217;re only in pro forma session.  But among the work they didn&#8217;t do was to pass a statute extending the payroll tax reduction that he signed.</p>
<p>So I don&#8217;t know how he could say with a straight face that &#8212; they&#8217;re not in session because they&#8217;re not doing any work, and yet they gave me a significant piece of legislation that I signed.  One or the other of those is unconstitutional.</p>
<p>Now, the District of Columbia went back to the original language of the Constitution and said what the President did here is unconstitutional.  And here&#8217;s the way the general counsel, or the National Labor Relations Board&#8217;s chairman responded to that court order the Friday after the court order came down.  He said that the Board would not comply with it.  It will not deter the Board from getting on with its work.  Only with respect to that particular issue, that particular case, would they comply and not continue with the enforcement proceedings.</p>
<p>But the holding that their appointments were unconstitutional &#8212; that none of the work they&#8217;d been doing for the last year, therefore, was constitutional; that none of the enforcement actions were legal &#8212; didn&#8217;t matter to them.  We&#8217;re just going to ignore the court order and proceed as if nothing happened.</p>
<p>Another agency, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, was appointed &#8212; the chairman of that was appointed exactly the same way on exactly the same day, and therefore exactly the same unconstitutionality in the appointment.  And they said &#8212; well, that was a different agency, so that court ruling doesn&#8217;t apply to us at all.  And they continue to operate as if the court has not spoken on what the Constitution requires.</p>
<p>Now, it&#8217;s just not those.  I mean, this has become a mainstay of the administration.  There&#8217;s a law, not just a recommendation or a request, but a law that requires the administration to submit a proposed budget by a specific day.  They have never complied with that law.</p>
<p>Treasury nominee Jack Lew &#8212; when he was Budget Director, there was a law passed that said the Budget Director had to provide a report addressing the financial solvency of Medicare, to respond to the Trustee&#8217;s report that we are insolvent in Medicare.  He refused to comply with that law.</p>
<p>In the fall of 2012 the Pentagon told defense contractors to ignore the law that required them to warn employees that &#8212; under the sequestration and the Fiscal Cliff stuff, they were obligated to warn of the potential likelihood that they would be furloughed or laid off.  The Department of Defense told them that they would be prosecuted if they complied with the law, and that if anybody sued them for violating the warn act, that the Department of Defense would use taxpayer funds to pay for that litigation and any fines that were leveled against them.</p>
<p>This goes on and on and on.  There&#8217;s a claim now that any state that chooses not to adopt a health exchange &#8212; that the federal government will come in and create one on its own.  Well, there&#8217;s no provision of the 2,700-page healthcare law that allows that.</p>
<p>Now, I said that this kind of lawlessness that&#8217;s starting to pervade began a little bit in the Bush Administration.  And we ought to make sure it never happens again.  You remember the bailout, the TARP, the financial asset bailout program.  And the Bush Administration decided they wanted to use some of those funds to bail out General Motors.  But the law clearly did not allow for that.  So the President proposed to amend the law and propose a piece of legislation in the House of Representatives that would do that.  The House took that bill up, chose not to pass it; which meant that there was no legal authorization for the bailout of General Motors.  The President went ahead and did it anyway.</p>
<p>So when we see the current President talking into the monitor or whatever &#8212; do this, do this right now, but if you don&#8217;t, I&#8217;ll do it myself &#8212; he had a bit of precedent for that.  Now, it was minor precedent compared to what he&#8217;s (inaudible) with.  But what happens is, when you demonstrate the disregard for the law, that takes root.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve seen it elsewhere.  We&#8217;ve seen it in the DREAM Act.  The President has [used] his power not to prosecute &#8212; for the first time said &#8212; I&#8217;ll use that not just to prosecute individual cases of illegal immigration and deportation, but I will wholesale suspend the operation of that law.  And then I will go the next step and give people legal status while they&#8217;re here.  None of that is legally authored.</p>
<p>When he couldn&#8217;t get Cap and Trade through the Congress, he decided to allow his Environmental Protection Agency to give us exactly the same thing or worse over at EPA.  And I&#8217;ll just give you an example of what they&#8217;ve been doing over there.</p>
<p>In fact, in Washington, DC, they now have a phrase for what happened in December over at EPA.  They call it &#8212; I forgot what they call it &#8212; they call it Black December or something.  I&#8217;ll find it here in my notes in a moment.</p>
<p>But over at EPA, they have come through with so many regulations that business is not able to keep up with everything that&#8217;s going on.  There are 10 major new rules that have been proposed in just the last couple of months, that have either already been passed or look like they&#8217;re about to be passed.  The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, the Electric Utility Maximum Available Control Technology Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants, the Industrial Boiler Maximum Available Control Technology Standards, the Portland Cement Kiln Maximum Available Control Technology Standards, the Cooling Water Intake Structure Rule, the Coal Combustion Residuals &#8212; on and on and on.</p>
<p>All told, these things are going to add about $1 trillion in compliance costs to our economy, costing us hundreds of thousands of jobs.  The estimate &#8212; just four of those rules alone are going to cost us more than 80 gigawatts of electric power, or about eight percent of the entire generating capacity of the country.</p>
<p>Now, they couldn’t get Cap and Trade through the Congress, but they are now so over-regulating that they&#8217;re going to basically not even give you the option of buying the Cap and Trade credits to continue to produce; you&#8217;ll just be shut down altogether.  And again, all without any act of Congress.  This is being done by simple executive fiat at the administration.</p>
<p>Now, bad as these things are &#8212; and I share Gail&#8217;s sentiment about how bad they are on the arenas that she was talking about as well &#8212; in fact, she only talked about education; they&#8217;re doing the same thing in the housing arena.</p>
<p>Gail Heriot: I didn&#8217;t get to that.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>John Eastman: Yeah.  You can&#8217;t build a house right now, because you will be violating the new disparate impact rules that came out of the Housing and Urban Development Rule.</p>
<p>However bad each one of those things are standalone for the detriment to the economy, the destruction of liberty; I think there&#8217;s a pervasive problem that goes much deeper and is much more profound.  And I want to close with talking about that.</p>
<p>Because Abraham Lincoln addressed this issue a century and a half ago, when he gave in 1837 one of his early speeches, the Lyceum Address, to the Young Men&#8217;s Lyceum.  And he was criticizing some of the lawlessness around the land that was taking root as people were fighting over slavery and what have you.  And however much an opponent of slavery he was, he said he counseled against the risk of developing a notion of lawlessness.</p>
<p>He says if we&#8217;re going to destroy ourselves &#8212; it&#8217;s never come to come from abroad &#8212; if destruction will be our lot, we must ourselves be its author.  As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide.  He says &#8212; I hope I&#8217;m over-wary.  But if I&#8217;m not, there is, even now, something of ill omen amongst us.  I mean, the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country.</p>
<p>Lincoln understood that if we lose the respect for the rule of law, these other things that we&#8217;re losing, the other policy judgments are going to pale in comparison.  The ability to rebuild, to restructure, to restore our constitutional order, are going to be thrown out the window because of these policy fights.</p>
<p>And Lincoln&#8217;s prescription &#8212; and I&#8217;ll close with this, because I&#8217;m now out of time &#8212; how do we fortify against it, he says?  The answer is simple &#8212; let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the last particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others.</p>
<p>Congress needs to impose on the Executive, through appropriation processes or what have you, that there will be sanctions &#8212; criminal, civil, impeachment or whatever &#8212; for every violation of the law in the least particular.  We need to restore that sense of the rule of law if we&#8217;re going to restore our country to its greatness.</p>
<p>Thanks so much.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Manny Klausner: We&#8217;re talking about the assault on the Constitution.  And it deserves more than a few minutes of our time.  So I&#8217;m going to run real quickly over a couple of areas in terms of what we&#8217;ve done in the Center &#8212; through the Individual Rights Foundation, the legal arm of the Center &#8212; in the Obamacare litigation.  The Individual Rights Foundation joined a brief &#8212; together with John&#8217;s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, with the Heritage Foundation, with the Reason Foundation and other groups &#8212; to file an amicus brief opposing the constitutionality of Obamacare.  And I&#8217;ll tell you a little bit about that brief.</p>
<p>Both from the standpoint of what&#8217;s called the presumption of constitutionality &#8212; normally there&#8217;s a doctrine in constitutional law that if a law is duly passed by legislative body, if it&#8217;s challenged as unconstitutional, the law is given a presumption of constitutionality by the court.  And the burden, then, is on the opponent of the law to knock it down.  I&#8217;m going to talk a little bit about that in the context of Obamacare.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll also talk about the history of other major landmark social legislation that was passed, where there was tremendous polarization, tremendous controversy; and the approach that was used to pass other major pieces of social legislation.</p>
<p>And then, I want to talk a little bit about where we go from here.  Because Karen suggested to all of our panelists we have to go away giving you something positive.  And the question is &#8212; what is there that&#8217;s positive?  And I actually have a view that there&#8217;s something good that can happen very soon to our cause, to our movement, that&#8217;ll make us smile.  And we don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s going to happen.  And I&#8217;m basically talking about the sequestration battle, which is really a manufactured crisis, and how President Obama is doing what John Fund just called &#8212; he&#8217;s going the full Alinsky, and he&#8217;s &#8212; [this parade of horrors], and the earth will collapse, and all these horrible things will happen if the sequester goes through, which &#8212; I think it&#8217;s likely to go through &#8212; and why that is potentially good news for us.</p>
<p>But let me start, just by way of a preface, mentioning one of the great &#8212; one of my favorite years in the history of the world was 1776.  And the reason for that is that there were two historic events that occurred in 1776 that have a strong bearing on what we are all about as Americans and what brings us here today.  And that is, in 1776 in Scotland, Adam Smith published &#8220;The Wealth of Nations.&#8221;  It was really the first full-blown treatise on the free market, and how free exchange works for everybody&#8217;s benefit.  You don&#8217;t enter into an agreement with somebody unless you think you&#8217;re going to benefit from that.  And the same is true for the person that you&#8217;re entering into the agreement with.</p>
<p>And this is the advantage.  It&#8217;s the harmony of interests in a free society where consent is the watchword, where people are asked &#8212; do you want to do something, do you want to sign something?  And not &#8212; it&#8217;s the total opposite of coercion and government mandates.</p>
<p>The other thing that happened in 1776 was the Declaration of Independence.  And it&#8217;s one of the great statements for personal liberty and against the idea that governments can act tyrannically in an unchecked and unfettered way.  And the Declaration of Independence has had extraordinary impact throughout the world.  But it still guides many of us in America; alas, not the ruling party these days.</p>
<p>But I wanted to mention here (technical difficulty) one of my favorite wines is Chateau Margaux, as one of the great Debordieus.  The winemaker of Chateau Margaux &#8212; during the period when a lot of Americans were saying &#8212; I&#8217;m not going to drink French wine anymore, I&#8217;m going to spill it out in the gutter, in the sewer, and everything like that &#8212; I used to say &#8212; well, let me check it out first, and I&#8217;ll see what we ought to do with it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;m not saying I&#8217;ll drink any wine.  I choose wine for a lot of events.  And I always like to say &#8212; we always are on a budget, we like to choose wine that&#8217;s a good wine and good value and that people enjoy.  But it has to have some affinity if I&#8217;m doing it for an ideological group.  Like the Federalist Society or the Reason Foundation &#8212; I don&#8217;t just choose any wine.  As I like to say, no matter how good the wine, no matter how reasonable the cost, how great the value, (technical difficulty) &#8211;</p>
<p>(Audio bleeding over presentation)</p>
<p>&#8211; in the media, in the churches &#8211;</p>
<p>(Audio bleeding over presentation)</p>
<p>&#8211; the students are being indoctrinated.  And instead of learning about limited government, we&#8217;re talking about limitless government, and how government can cure all sorts of ills.  And so, you know, Gail and John mentioned this morning a litany of things that you just wonder &#8212; what&#8217;s a person to do &#8212; if you&#8217;re trying to follow the law and provide jobs, do things that earn money &#8212; what do you do without breaking the law these days?  And this is &#8212; we have good lawyers here.  A lot of the answers you get are not very comforting.</p>
<p>But we have this whole battle that unfortunately has broadened itself to the zenith.  When FDR was President, he may have believed in government spending and Keynesian approaches to the Depression.</p>
<p>It turned out to be so brutally inappropriate and counterproductive that it developed (technical difficulty) panic or another depression during the ongoing business cycles that were bad in America and throughout the world, FDR, through his policies, turned his approach into what became called the Great Depression, because it lasted so long.  And his Secretary of the Treasury said, in 1938 or &#8217;39, when Hans Morgenthau was testifying before a committee of Congress, Morganthau said &#8212; listen, we tried everything we could come up with, everything we could think of, and nothing worked.</p>
<p>And Obama, when he ran for office the first time, said &#8212; my hero is FDR, and I&#8217;m going to be more FDR than FDR was.  And that was actually a very kind [and] kind of duplicitous way of saying something.  Because Obama is &#8212; as David Horowitz has taught us, he&#8217;s an acolyte of Saul Alinsky.</p>
<p>If you haven&#8217;t read David&#8217;s handbook on Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama, get it, spend 20, 30 minutes with it.  It will open your eyes.  For those of you that have read it, we are seeing, we are seeing in action, Obama using all the teachings from the Alinsky playbook.</p>
<p>So when you talk about rules of ethics, as Alinsky said &#8212; if you tell the people what you want &#8212; this is from Alinsky &#8212; like the Socialist Workers Party or the Black Panthers &#8212; you tell the people what you really want, you&#8217;ll never get it in America.  People won&#8217;t give you that.  So instead, what you have to do &#8212; because our cause is so important, and the end justifies the means, because we believe in a total transformation &#8212; those who have wealth and power have it illegitimately; it&#8217;s immoral.  Those are the people Machiavelli spoke to in &#8220;The Prince,&#8221; how to keep your power and wealth.  Saul Alinsky wrote his book, &#8220;Rules for Radicals,&#8221; to tell people how to get the wealth.</p>
<p>The word &#8220;transformation&#8221; is a code word.  Because you have to transform &#8212; this is massive redistribution on every scale.  Americans would never go for it.  Therefore, Alinsky said, truth is off the table when it comes to ethics.  The end justifies the means (technical difficulty) the words of the opponents.</p>
<p>(Audio bleeding over presentation)</p>
<p>&#8211; healthcare.  But it was a crisis, they had no choice.  You have this series of manufactured crises, government by crisis.</p>
<p>So what I&#8217;m saying is, the people are sucked into this because Obama is an extraordinarily good salesman for his bag of tricks.  And a lot of people get deluded, even if they had learned the fundamentals of what makes a country prosperous and what the value of liberty is.</p>
<p>So I think we have a real hard task for us.  I know because of the time limits I won&#8217;t get to say too much about sequestration.  But I will tell you, if there&#8217;s nothing else you do about sequestration, enjoy it in advance.  Because this manufactured panic is, I think potentially, going to begin to erode this extraordinary success that Obama has in snowing a lot of people.</p>
<p>So just quickly now &#8212; and how much time do I have at this point?  Let me just summarize real quickly.</p>
<p>I talked about the presumption of liberty and the presumption of constitutionality.  And we made the argument in our brief that we filed, in our amicus brief &#8212; this is a copy of the brief, a great document &#8212; wrote it particularly for Justice Kennedy because we thought he was going to be the swing vote.  It turned out that Kennedy was totally solid as he voted.  But we made the argument that there were certain procedural requirements that have to be engaged in &#8212; at a minimum, you should read the bill.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Famously, Nancy Pelosi told us &#8212; well, once we pass it, you can read it and find out what&#8217;s in it.  And there were so many monstrous irregularities that were really &#8212; one of the interests we had was trying to get courts to refocus on the presumption of constitutionality, so when there are extreme irregularities &#8212; a 2,000-page bill &#8212; people don&#8217;t really have a chance to read it, it&#8217;s rushed through, with all kinds of games that are played &#8212; we argued, basically, it was not entitled, that [it] undermined the presumption of constitutionality.</p>
<p>In addition, we argued &#8212; and the legislature didn&#8217;t even consider the constitutional arguments that were raised before they passed the bill.  In addition to the presumption of unconstitutionality, we felt that the whole legislative process was systematically flawed.  There were special deals for different states &#8212; you know, the Nebraska compromise.  And a lot of these things &#8212; we thought there was good authority that those alone should put a problem in there for the court to sustain the law.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m just going to mention real quick &#8212; there were &#8212; prior landmark social legislation were passed, ultimately with wide margins.  They reflected a broad consensus, even though there was massive disagreement and controversy.  That includes the Social Security Act, includes Medicare and Medicaid, it includes the Civil Rights Act, it includes the Voting Rights Act; and other major legislation &#8212; Americans with Disabilities Act.  These went through the legislative process.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not saying they&#8217;re good for those of us who believe in limited government.  But what I am saying is that at least they were orderly.  And when you had Social Security &#8212; instead of displacing what states were then doing to help people who were out of work or needed welfare, the legislation was crafted and molded during the process so that it didn&#8217;t supplant and it augmented what the states were doing.  None of that happened in Obamacare.</p>
<p>My time is up.  We&#8217;ll have time in the Q&amp;As to say a little more.  But I want you all to keep your eye on this sequestration battle.  This will be fun.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> I really came because I don&#8217;t really know what the hell just happened in November and what we&#8217;re supposed to do about it.  So my mother, who is a psychiatrist &#8212; I had a wonderful childhood &#8212; both of my parents were psychiatrists &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; was on the National Review cruise with me in November.  And so her diagnosis of the party &#8212; so she was in this profile the New York Magazine did of the whole cruise.  Me and Ralph Reid were kind of the stars of it, but that was because Ralph took the reporter, I think, scuba diving and touching turtles with their feet.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And my mom was a psychiatrist.  [This guy] really fixated on my mom.  So my mom diagnosed our party.  She said we&#8217;re going through the whatever stages of grief after you suffer a loss.  So I don&#8217;t even know them, because I try not to know anything about psychiatry.  But there was like denial &#8212; so she said we&#8217;re in grieving.  And then she said, after six months, you come out of it.  So she said &#8212; and six months from now, you&#8217;re all going to be very happy, especially if you take lots of Prozac &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; which I think is the usual diagnosis from all psychiatrists.</p>
<p>But I really don&#8217;t &#8212; and I was really struck &#8212; one of the things that David said during his remarks really struck me &#8212; I really don&#8217;t know what to do about Asians.  I mean, if you talked about a group that should align so tightly with the Republican Party &#8212; evangelical, small business, conservatives, harmed by affirmative action &#8212; you would&#8217;ve thought Asians would still be &#8212; the last minority group would stick with the Republican Party.  Yet they voted more than Hispanics for Obama.  I really don&#8217;t understand that.  And so I&#8217;m hoping to come here and learn, and hear all your reasons why my minority group in particular has lost its moorings.</p>
<p>Let me just use the substance of my remarks to try to put some of a bigger picture behind what we&#8217;re seeing with Obama&#8217;s presidency and tie together some of the things you just heard.  Because I think if you &#8212; just a very quick way to understand the Obama presidency is to think about &#8220;Seinfeld,&#8221; through which all great American lessons can be learned.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I actually tell all the foreign students in my classes at Berkeley to watch &#8220;Seinfeld&#8221; for a quick primer on American society.</p>
<p>If you remember, there&#8217;s one episode, which I think was one of the funniest episodes I ever saw, where Jerry and his friends meet their exact opposites.  Right?  It&#8217;s called Bizarro Jerry instead of Jerry.  There was a mirror-image opposite of each of the main characters, right?  It was called Bizarro World, which is from Superman, where everything was the reverse.  Sort of like the vision of the end of the world in &#8220;Ghostbusters,&#8221; where right is left, up is down, cats and dogs sleeping together &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; Yankees fans and Red Sox fans living in harmony, right?  This is, in many ways, what the Obama presidency represents.  It&#8217;s strange &#8212; it&#8217;s the exact opposite Bizarro World presidency than the one the framers intended.</p>
<p>Because the framers didn&#8217;t want a weak office in all dimensions.  They wanted it to be very strong in foreign affairs, in national security.  That was the President&#8217;s primary job.  That&#8217;s the reason you would give all that power to one person.  At the same time, when it came to domestic affairs, they expected the President&#8217;s main job was to execute the laws passed by Congress.  The President clearly was supposed to play a secondary position in domestic affairs.  The only power he really had was the veto.  And it was [equalified] &#8212; one that could be overcome by two thirds of the House and Senate.</p>
<p>If you look at the Federalist Papers, which make for good reading &#8212; or, at least, I make my students read it &#8212; Federalist number 70 says energy in the Executive is the leading character of the definition of good government.  And the Federalist Paper says &#8212; what does that mean?  It says the President&#8217;s two jobs are the steady administration of the laws domestically and the protection of the community from foreign attacks.</p>
<p>And then, the Federalist Papers &#8212; Federalist number 74 went on to say &#8212; and peculiarly, the President&#8217;s job is the direction of war.  Doesn&#8217;t say things about proposing the next reform bill for economic recession, overhauling healthcare, fiddling with employment policies, deciding how our labor law policy is going to be.  If you think of &#8212; a lot of things you hear about what Obama has done is actually flip that upside-down by trying to perform the leading role in domestic affairs; in fact, to have a wartime mentality about domestic affairs.  That&#8217;s why Manny&#8217;s quite right &#8212; you always need to have manufactured crises domestically, because you want to maintain this idea of imminent disaster, and then Obama uses that to invoke greater presidential power.</p>
<p>Think about the way he negotiates.  It strikes me as irresponsible.  You know, (inaudible) someone to study the presidency, I think it&#8217;s actually the first time this has happened.  Or he negotiates by saying &#8212; unless you do what I want, I will do nothing and let the country come to ruin.  Right?  That is his argument about the debt ceiling, about sequestration.</p>
<p>Unless you cave &#8212; and think about immigration &#8212; unless you cave, I&#8217;m not going to deport any more immigrants.  I&#8217;m just going to let everybody in, and I&#8217;m not going to deport anybody.  I will win by doing nothing and let great harm &#8212; can you imagine a Lincoln or Eisenhower, or FDR, negotiating with Congress by threatening not to use their power to forestall some great harm to the country?  It&#8217;s the exact opposite of what the framers had in mind.</p>
<p>And I think that&#8217;s where you can see the theme that links all of the last three presentations together &#8212; is President Obama is refusing to execute the laws.  He&#8217;s refusing to stop the harms coming to the country domestically, which Congress has already prepared for and had passed laws to deal with.  It&#8217;s really quite the opposite of what the framers had in mind.  Instead, in the spaces he leaves open, he throws out his proposals.  And then he takes action through administrative agencies which are quite contrary to what Congress had in mind when it delegated the powers to the Executive.</p>
<p>At the same time &#8212; I don&#8217;t think I can fill this in for [panelists] &#8212; think about what he&#8217;s done in foreign affairs, where the framers wanted the President to be the most energetic, right, the most in a leadership position.  I would say &#8212; despite the one great achievement I think of in his presidency in foreign affairs was killing Osama bin Laden.  In fact, what you&#8217;ve seen is a withdrawal of presidential leadership.</p>
<p>Congressman Bachmann&#8217;s speech yesterday was quite on point.  If you took a step back and thought about all the things she had said that John Brennan had done &#8212; and I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s just John Brennan.  I think &#8212; he is the Deputy National Security Advisor to the President.  It&#8217;s the President ultimately who&#8217;s responsible for all of those decisions.</p>
<p>What they are trying to do is to reduce the President&#8217;s leadership in national security affairs and hand it over to the courts.  Right?  Mirandizing Umar Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up the airline &#8212; why is that so important?  It&#8217;s so important because what the Obama Administration is trying to do is turn over the war on terror to the court system, make it like law enforcement, where we all know the rules, right?  We all know the procedures of law enforcement system, because we all watch &#8220;Law and Order.&#8221;  Because &#8220;Law and Order&#8221; is on some channel every hour of the day.  Right?</p>
<p>But all Americans know &#8212; oh, you get arrested, then you get a lawyer &#8212; you get Mirandized, you get a lawyer, you get to see the judge.  Then you have a trial.  And so it&#8217;s very familiar and comfortable to turn things over to that system.  But that is not the system we have ever used in our history in wartime, and it&#8217;s hard to imagine, at least for me, how a country could effectively fight an enemy as dangerous and intelligent and as lawless as al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>So I&#8217;ll just give you some examples.  President Obama comes into office.  He wants to close Guantanamo Bay, transfer all the prisoners to an unused state prison in Illinois.  Only the Obama Administration would see terrorism as a Job Works program.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But nonetheless, what are they going to do?  They&#8217;re trying to mainstream terrorism.  Close military commissions, move all the prisoners to New York City for trial, where the annual security costs of those trials would&#8217;ve been more than it cost to operate and run and build the Guantanamo Bay prison.</p>
<p>And then the last step &#8212; the drone paper that we&#8217;ve all heard about.  The thing that bothers me is not that our country uses drones.  In fact, it&#8217;s not really any different legally, or as a policy matter, from the use of manned aircraft, shooting people using long-range missiles, even artillery, or even snipers.  To me, it&#8217;s just a difference in the technology.  But the ability to kill the enemy from afar should be a welcome development, not a feared development.  The thing that bothers me so much about it is the effort to slip in all these law enforcement ideas into what should normally be the decision of the generals and the President, as it always has been in wartime.</p>
<p>So think about the White Paper just very briefly &#8212; President Obama&#8217;s leaked paper said we would use drones to attack members of the enemy abroad.  I think domestically is a much more difficult and different question, but we use it abroad.  And first we have to decide we aren&#8217;t able to capture them.  And they have to be imminently about to harm Americans.  And they get due process rights.  Right?  No American President in any war in the past has ever &#8212; no nation at war has ever thought in the past that their right to use force to kill members of the enemy has ever been limited by any of these characteristics.</p>
<p>When you join the enemy and fight against us, we can use force against you at any time in any place.  Right?  That&#8217;s why you can bomb the enemy behind the front lines.  And you can bomb people who are working in the support areas of the enemy, not just wearing a uniform and carrying a gun.  I hate to say it, but Radar O&#8217;Reilly in &#8220;Mash&#8221; is a fair target in wartime.  That&#8217;s why snipers can shoot at great distance without trying to capture the enemy and read them their due process rights, and see &#8212; are you imminently about to hurt me?  Those are all concepts that come from law enforcement.  Those are the rules that govern police officers who walk the beat in downtown Los Angeles.  It&#8217;s not the rules that have ever governed the military.</p>
<p>And I&#8217;ll close.  The wrong &#8212; the effects of that will be &#8212; one, to slow down our military&#8217;s ability to react quickly and take advantage of intelligence &#8212; intelligence, I might add, that President Obama has used up these last four years and has not replenished because of his failure to capture any more al-Qaeda leaders.  But it will also &#8212; it&#8217;s also an effort to limit future Presidents.  That&#8217;s the dangerous thing in the longer term is that he has tried to push the presidency into the domestic role at the same time he&#8217;s trying to chain it down and limit it in a world, I&#8217;m afraid, that&#8217;s growing increasingly dangerous.</p>
<p>So to close &#8212; Karen actually said end with something optimistic, which actually has not been my experience with a lot of Horowitz conferences, I hate to say &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; which makes them charming and unique.  Because, you know, I live in Berkeley, La-la Land, where if you just want something optimistic, there&#8217;s always something to smoke or to swallow which will help you that way.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So maybe there&#8217;s something for pessimism.</p>
<p>But I guess what I would close with saying is that I think what we can do is we can support the office of the presidency, not necessarily the person who is holding the office at any one time.  And what we can focus on &#8212; I think it will also cohere with the good of the country &#8212; is to try to reinvigorate this idea of the presidency as limited at home but strong abroad, and will also have the effect of trying to channel what the presidency does in the right directions for the country, and not necessarily attack the man who happens to hold the office for just this four years.</p>
<p>So, thank you very much for bearing with me.  I look forward to your questions.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Gail Heriot: </strong> There&#8217;s one thing that I&#8217;m very optimistic about, and that is litigation.  I haven&#8217;t always been optimistic about litigation.  I co-chaired the Prop 209 campaign here in California, many years ago at this point.  At the time, I thought the best thing to do was, on issues of this, go to the voters.  And I still believe that can be very important.</p>
<p>But at this point in time, I think that this is the season for litigation.  Right now, pending before the Supreme Court is a petition for certiorari in a case called Mount Holly versus Mount Holly Association, or something like that.  And it will present the issue of whether or not the Fair Housing Act can support disparate impact theory as a basis for going under that act.</p>
<p>And at the same time, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as I think John mentioned, just issued rules on disparate impact in housing law.  Today is the day to try to get the Supreme Court to go our way, to think about what sort of lawsuits can be carefully constructed.  Because there&#8217;s nothing worse than a dumb lawsuit.  What we need to do is to get our best lawyers together and try to decide what kind of cases can be shepherded through the court system.  Because we have a good chance of winning there.  And so that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m looking at right now.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong>  Thank you.</p>
<p>I think the others kind of had a chance to frame their prescriptive solution and advice ideas a bit, and they can incorporate more into answers to questions.  So we&#8217;re ready for questions.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Hi, this is for Gail.  Gail, this is a layup for you &#8212; are there any legal foundations that you&#8217;d recommend where people can go and contribute because they&#8217;re bringing those lawsuits we&#8217;re talking about?  Or is there a lack of &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Gail Heriot:</strong> That&#8217;s actually a layup for John.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Or are there a lack of them, and that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re saying is the problem?</p>
<p><strong>Gail Heriot:</strong> You know, there are public interest law firms that are very much of the conservative bent.  The Center &#8212; I can&#8217;t remember the initials here &#8212; CCJ.  I have worked with CCJ.  In fact, John and I put together quite a few amicus briefs in the last year or so.  I&#8217;ve worked also with Tom Caso, who works with John.  So they have done some fabulous work.  I greatly recommend CCJ.  There&#8217;s also the Center for Individual Rights in Washington, which has done some great work.  There are a number of these firms.  And I think we need to get them some business here, to help them out, decide what law suits ought to be brought.</p>
<p>You know, if you go back, during the big civil rights era &#8212; Thurgood Marshall and a number of the civil rights attorneys that worked on cases like Brown versus the Board of Education &#8212; they were very deliberate about what law suits should be brought, in what order.  And we need to be able to do that as well.  We need to sit down and say &#8212; okay, case number one, case number two, case number three, case number four.  You know, those are the ones that need to be brought.</p>
<p>And I would think that a case that responds to Justice Scalia&#8217;s statement in Ricci versus DeStefano about his questions over the constitutionality of disparate impact under Title VII &#8212; I mean, he&#8217;s begging for it.  Why has it taken &#8212; it&#8217;s already been, what, three, almost four, years since he made that statement.  And we need to have law suits out there.  We need to do it.</p>
<p><strong>John Eastman:</strong> Can I pick up on that a little bit?  Because Ed Meese, who&#8217;s retiring the end of this month from Heritage, has for the last 10 or 15 years brought the leaders of all of the conservative and libertarian public interest law firms together twice a year to coordinate strategy.</p>
<p>And so in the voting rights arena, for example, we laid out an agenda to take advantage of the court having questioned the ongoing constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires every jurisdiction to run and beg permission from the Department of Justice before they make any change in their voting policies.  And it looks like this year, we will win that battle.</p>
<p>Last year, Justice Alito wrote an opinion questioning the constitutionality of the entire public union funding mechanism.  We&#8217;re having people opt out of their mandatory dues going to politics rather than having to choose to opt in, and because of that success, teeing up a lot of litigation that will follow on Justice Alito&#8217;s holding in that case.  So we&#8217;re being strategic.</p>
<p>But we are vastly outmanned and out-resourced.  So anything you can do to help on those things will have a leveraging effect that will pay huge dividends.</p>
<p><strong>John Eastman:</strong> I just wanted to make one more comment that I suppose is obvious at this point.  And that is, we have a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.  And they do in fact write opinions that seem to be sending us messages &#8212; bring us this kind of case.  The Voting Rights Act case &#8212; you know, if you look at the most recent decision, they were begging for it, again.  They made it very clear that they thought there was a serious constitutional issue here.  And we need to spend more time looking at those opinions and responding to them.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Having escaped from Communist Hungary many years ago, I love this country, and I love the freedom and the Constitution.  And don&#8217;t know exact proper word to say &#8212; and maybe it&#8217;s a stupid question &#8212; but is there any way that we can sue people in Congress, and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Obama, in order to get rid of the lawlessness that has been pervading this country?</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> John Yoo, do you want to comment on that?</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> That&#8217;s just the thing &#8212; it&#8217;s not illegal to be stupid in the United States.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> [Can't sue them] because they&#8217;re not smart enough.  I don&#8217;t &#8212; I mean, John might want to &#8212; you can&#8217;t sue the members of Congress for not adopting the policies that you would prefer, or for doing what your vision of the job is.  I&#8217;m afraid that you would want to act through the political process.  That doesn&#8217;t mean you can&#8217;t make arguments that are based in the Constitution.  I mean, one thing I think we often forget &#8212; I was hoping to press home in my remarks &#8212; was that we shouldn&#8217;t associate everything with constitutional law having to do with litigation, although it&#8217;s very important we do litigation.</p>
<p>But you think about the Tea Party itself.  I thought it was a wonderful movement because they were just recalling all of us to remember our basic constitutional principles and to force them through the electoral process, not through litigation.</p>
<p>And so I think you can make those arguments.  But it&#8217;s not &#8212; the lawsuit is the wrong forum.  Think about some of our great arguments about slavery, about the National Bank, and so on.  Most of those took place in Congress, about what the Constitution meant first.  And so I think that&#8217;s the more effective way to make that kind of argument than to run to court.</p>
<p><strong>John Eastman:</strong> But I do think we need to put some teeth into this stuff.  And here, the House of Representatives, which we hold, can do a lot more than it is.  For example, yesterday, the Department of Justice filed a brief in the Defense of Marriage Act case siding with the plaintiffs, attacking the constitutionality of a statute that it was their obligation to defend; and that they did defend at the trial court.  Now, how many of you lawyers in the room, halfway through a case, get up and walk over to the other side of the courtroom and start attacking the positions based on concessions you&#8217;d made when you were technically sitting on the other side of the case?</p>
<p>Now, I think the Supreme Court is going to hit them over the head with a two-by-four for that.  But it seems to me that the House of Representatives could do something here as well, and would say something like &#8212; no funding, no appropriations shall be used &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>&#8211; and make it a criminal violation for them to do so.  The House has to start building a backbone here and start exercising the power that it does have, to keep a check on the Executive when it is acting lawlessly.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Two things &#8212; we actually just got back from Israel.  We were with a group called Shurat HaDin, which is the law center that stopped the flotilla movement.  And they are suing &#8212; they&#8217;re representing clients in Israel, Americans living in Israel, suing Hillary Clinton and the State Department for funding taxpayer money to Hamas and other terrorist organizations.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> But that wasn&#8217;t my real question.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>What was behind Ruth Bader Ginsberg&#8217;s trip to Egypt to talk down our Constitution?</p>
<p><strong>Karen Hugo:</strong> John Eastman?</p>
<p><strong>John Eastman:</strong> Yeah, look, she&#8217;s being honest on the progressive agenda for a century.  They thought for a century that the Constitution was the problem, not the greatest governing document ever written in human history.  And they have been systematically trying to undermine its value.  Why?  Because our founders recognize that you got to have a powerful government in order to provide for security.  But if it&#8217;s too powerful, it can become the dangerous threat to security that you&#8217;re trying to provide against.  And so they devised this Constitution that separates power, and checks and balances.  That makes it hard to get things done.</p>
<p>Well, those that want to do all sorts of things with government find that those checks and balances are limiting and constraining.  And they&#8217;ve been working a century to get rid of those checks and balances.  And people like Justice Ginsberg and Professor [Mike] Seidman at Georgetown have now come out of the closet in saying we&#8217;re not going to comply with the Constitution anymore.</p>
<p>It seems to me that in there is an opportunity for us.  Because that doesn&#8217;t sell well with most Americans today.  I mean, they&#8217;ll think you run over their back yard, you know, their grass next to the sidewalk, they think you violated their constitutional rights.  They&#8217;re wrong about that, but they think the first resort is to say something about the Constitution, because they love it so much.</p>
<p>And what Ginsberg did there, and what Professor Seidman did a couple weeks ago, a month ago; is a huge opportunity for us to re-craft the conversation and restore us to constitutional justice.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> We&#8217;re going to try to fit in two more questions real quickly.  John, did you have a quick comment on that?</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> Oh no, I&#8217;ll yield.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> Okay.  Okay, Jeff?</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Well, thank you.  And you guys are all fabulous.  It&#8217;s been a pleasure to listen to you.</p>
<p>I had a question to Gail.  And perhaps, since we got such knowledgeable legal folks &#8212; I know there are a lot of my friends that say &#8212; you know, we lost control of the schools when prayer got kicked out.  Well, the timing was around the same time.  And I&#8217;m a firm believer in the power of prayer.  But it also came at the same time we started losing discipline in the school.  And you can look around the world.  There are some very disciplined schools that do fantastic, but they&#8217;re basically a-religious.</p>
<p>So it seemed to me that&#8217;s where we started having problems.  My mother was brilliant, she was an eighth grade teacher.  My sister taught for 30 years, my wife&#8217;s taught.  I&#8217;ve been around education.  It seems like the bigger problem is losing discipline.</p>
<p>So a thought occurred to me when I got to Congress &#8212; you know, when I was a judge and chief justice, I had what&#8217;s called judicial immunity.  You may not like my rulings, but if I&#8217;m doing my job, you can&#8217;t sue me.  Well, I got sued a lot, but they all got thrown out.</p>
<p>So I got to thinking &#8212; why shouldn&#8217;t educators have that?  If they never had to worry about being sued for doing their jobs, if it went back to the days like when I was growing up &#8212; where if you wanted a teacher fired, you didn&#8217;t file a lawsuit, you went to the school board meeting, and you tried to convince them &#8212; that kind of thing.  And if you didn&#8217;t like what they did, you ran for the school board.</p>
<p>So I filed a bill, creating educational immunity for any teacher, any educator.  I thought the NEA and other groups would jump onboard; that would help their union folks.  And that might be one area where a conservative could have support from a group like that.  They never got onboard, they never encouraged its passage.  And without groups like that, you know, it wasn&#8217;t going anywhere.  But it just seemed like if you could restore that power, where they don&#8217;t have to worry about lawsuits, unless there&#8217;s a crime committed, that it would really help.</p>
<p>But I&#8217;m curious &#8212; do you think it&#8217;s worth &#8212; I&#8217;ve only filed it in one of the four Congresses I&#8217;ve been in, because it got no support.  What do you think of the idea?</p>
<p><strong>Gail Heriot:</strong> Well, you are immune from lawsuits as a member of Congress, but you&#8217;re not immune from elections.  And so there&#8217;s a mechanism for controlling your behavior, and that is that you can be voted out.</p>
<p>The problem with making individual teachers immune is that &#8212; what&#8217;s the mechanism for controlling them?  And I agree with you entire &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> (Inaudible &#8212; microphone inaccessible)</p>
<p><strong>Gail Heriot:</strong> Yeah, I agree with you entirely that suing teachers is really not an optimal idea.  But the problem that we live with now is that teachers can&#8217;t be gotten rid of, even if they fail to teach.  So there may, however, be some room for looking carefully at some of the crazy private rights of action under Title VI.</p>
<p>Title VI is the part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that bans race discrimination, et cetera, in organizations that receive federal funds.  And, you know, quite a few years after that, courts decided that there was a private right of action under that.  And I think that has not worked out really well.  I don&#8217;t think it was originally planned.  But it&#8217;s in the case law now.  I would look to that kind of area to see if there&#8217;s not some situations where you can limit the ability to sue school districts.  That might have some of the effect you&#8217;re looking for.</p>
<p>Because during the 1970s, there was a real structured, very careful effort on the part of left organizations to essentially own the schools through litigation.  And they &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> (Inaudible &#8212; microphone inaccessible)</p>
<p><strong>Gail Heriot:</strong> It&#8217;s still there, yeah.  And that&#8217;s how a lot of schools were ruined.  I mean, during &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> That&#8217;s why they don&#8217;t discipline.</p>
<p><strong>Gail Heriot:</strong> Absolutely, it is.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> (Inaudible &#8212; microphone inaccessible)</p>
<p><strong>Gail Heriot:</strong> Yeah.  Yeah.  And I think that&#8217;s where we need to look, and pinpoint that, and not a general sort of freedom from lawsuits for teachers, but rather look to the substantive areas that are the problem, and see if there&#8217;s not some way to do that.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> Last question.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Yes, this is for Professor Yoo.  Short question &#8212; there has been talk, in quotes, that Obama has no intension of leaving the presidency and that he will at some point try to repeal &#8212; I don&#8217;t know what the number is, but the constitutional amendment that limits to two terms.  What do you think the likelihood of that would be?</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> Oh, you know, he couldn&#8217;t stay in office another term unless we repealed the amendment limiting it to two terms.  I can&#8217;t think there would be any support &#8212; certainly not two thirds of the Congress and three quarters of the states &#8212; to remove the two-term limit, although I remember &#8212; if you remember, in 1999 &#8212; I remember Bill Clinton was &#8212; or the Clinton White House talked about the idea.  It would be fun, though, to have Obama around.  Unfortunately, he&#8217;s going to be around a long time; he&#8217;s just not going to be President.  I mean, it would kind of be fun to have him around.  But I&#8217;m looking forward to Joe Biden being President.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s fair that Obama should get all the fun, and we can&#8217;t just make &#8212; I mean, Biden&#8217;s going to be a lot of material for us.  We should look forward to it, not run away from it.</p>
<p><strong>Manny Klausner:</strong> This is occasion to form Common Cause with Hillary Clinton.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> On that cheery note, thank you for attending and your input.  And enjoy lunch.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
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