March 24, 2009
The "Anti-Constitutional" Obama regime
George Will unleashes a rip-snorting, barn-burning jeremiad against the Obama administration and its Congressional enablers for the current "anti-constitutional" government.
Along the way, Will offers examples of how we've gone off the rails, with advice on free-market capitalism from those stalwart Swedes; fiscal responsibility from the totalitarian People's Republic of China; and tips on the importance of the secret ballot and corruption-free rule and good governance from Mexico.
Mexico?
Yeah, Mexico.
¡Aye Carumba!
With the braying of 328 yahoos -- members of the House of Representatives who voted for retroactive and punitive use of the tax code to confiscate the legal earnings of a small, unpopular group -- still reverberating, the Obama administration yesterday invited private-sector investors to become business partners with the capricious and increasingly anti-constitutional government.
[...]
TARP funds have ... semi-purchased, among many other things, two automobile companies (and, last week, some of their parts suppliers), which must amaze Sweden. That unlikely tutor of America regarding capitalist common sense has said, through a Cabinet minister, that the ailing Saab automobile company is on its own: "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."
Another embarrassing auditor of American misgovernment is China, whose premier has rightly noted the unsustainable trajectory of America's high-consumption, low-savings economy. He has also decorously but clearly expressed sensible fears that his country's $1 trillion-plus of dollar-denominated assets might be devalued by America choosing, as banana republics have done, to use inflation for partial repudiation of improvidently incurred debts.
From Mexico, America is receiving needed instruction about fundamental rights and the rule of law. A leading Democrat trying to abolish the right of workers to secret ballots in unionization elections is California's Rep. George Miller who, with 15 other Democrats, in 2001 admonished Mexico: "The secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose." Last year, Mexico's highest court unanimously affirmed for Mexicans the right that Democrats want to strip from Americans.
[...]
[T]he Constitution ... is a cobweb constraint on a Congress that, ignoring the document's unambiguous stipulations that the House shall be composed of members chosen "by the people of the several states," is voting to pretend that the District of Columbia is a state. Hence it supposedly can have a Democratic member of the House and, down the descending road, two Democratic senators.
Congress rationalizes this anti-constitutional willfulness by citing the Constitution's language that each house shall be the judge of the "qualifications" of its members and that Congress can "exercise exclusive legislation" over the District. What, then, prevents Congress from giving House and Senate seats to Yellowstone National Park, over which Congress exercises exclusive legislation? Only Congress's capacity for embarrassment. So, not much.
[...]
Jefferson warned that "great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities." But Democrats, who trace their party's pedigree to Jefferson, are contemplating using "reconciliation" -- a legislative maneuver abused by both parties to severely truncate debate and limit the minority's right to resist -- to impose vast and controversial changes on the 17 percent of the economy that is health care.
When the Congressional Budget Office announced that the president's budget underestimates by $2.3 trillion the likely deficits over the next decade, his budget director, Peter Orszag, said: All long-range budget forecasts are notoriously unreliable -- so rely on ours.
This is but a partial list of recent lawlessness, situational constitutionalism and institutional derangement. Such political malfeasance is pertinent to the financial meltdown as the administration, desperately seeking confidence, tries to stabilize the economy by vastly enlarging government's role in it.
It was famed Baltimore journalist and all 'round curmudgeon H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) who famously observed about the democratic process:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
And boy, oh boy, is Pres. Obama and his enablers in Congress giving it to us good and hard, in the least surprising screw job in the history of the Republic.
Can you feel the Hope 'N Change?
Posted by Mike Lief at March 24, 2009 11:06 AM
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Comments
And now, the French deliver a lecture about our high taxes. THE FRENCH, for the love of . . . However, we can at least be comforted by the fact that the French will give up before too long.
Posted by: The Little Coach at March 25, 2009 07:52 AM