For David Rothkopf, the Editor of Foreign Policy Magazine,
“Donald Trump is the Symptom of Our PTSD.” I would like to propose an alternative
analysis. The government of the US no longer cares about obtaining the
consent of the governed and the government no longer bothers with preserving
even the appearance of equal justice. Since 2010, the Democrats' strategy
has been to deadlock Congress and use illegal executive orders, rogue courts
and regulatory excesses to get what they want without Congress. The power
of the purse has been negated by Harry Reid blocking every spending bill until
the last minute, then giving Republicans the choice of giving Democrats more or
less everything that they want or shutting down the government.
The "living Constitution" doctrine, for example,
completely removes the consent of the governed. When the 14th Amendment
was ratified in 1868, homosexual acts were illegal in every state. The
ratifiers did not ratify mandatory same sex marriage. If same sex
marriage had been explicitly part of the 14th Amendment, it would not have
passed.
Regulatory agencies have no separation of powers.
They combine executive, legislative and judicial functions all in one
shop. Due to the Chevron doctrine, the courts defer to regulatory
agencies expertise, so in most cases regulations get minimal judicial review.
It's clear that Congress has no power over regulatory agencies.
It's also clear that President Obama can get them to do whatever he
wants, like regulate the internet as if it was a copper wire telephone utility
in 1934, or maybe a steam locomotive railroad in 1887. The Environmental
Protection Agency declared War on Coal after Congress failed to do so.
Companies who sued to stop the regulations were told they had no standing
to sue, because they had suffered no injury yet.
The courts generally vote a straight party line in
deciding cases. You can tell this because the news reports who appointed
the judges when it reports how the cases are decided. The 4 liberal
justices on the Supreme Court are almost 100% predictable. The judiciary
is no longer independent.
In the last 7.5 years the president has operated outside
the law. Obama decided not to collect
the Employer Mandate taxes which he signed into law as part of Obamacare.
He has had the Supreme Court rewrite Obamacare twice rather than submit
it to Congress for a rewrite. He has unilaterally proclaimed and enforced
the Dream Act by executive order after it failed to pass Congress.
The Department of Justice has become a mockery of its name
similar to George Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Justice department lawyers
have been cited for contempt several times because they presented facts to
judges which later turned out not to be facts. The Justice Department has
not prosecuted Lois Lerner for setting up IRS harassment of Tea Party nonprofit
advocacy groups. It has not prosecuted IRS Commissioner John Koskinen for
obstruction of Congress and perjury in covering up the IRS harassment of Tea
Party groups.
The Justice Department has not prosecuted Hillary Clinton
for mishandling classified information. FBI Director Comey said the crime
requires intent to be prosecuted. It most emphatically does not.
The Justice Department has not even investigated the Clinton Foundation's
pay to play aspects. The Chicago style fix is in.
The Justice Department has not prosecuted big Democrat
fundraiser Jon Corzine, former Senator and Governor of New Jersey, for using
customer money to pay corporate debts in the MF Global brokerage scandal, even
when Mr. Corzine testified under oath to a Congressional Committee that his
financial controls were not good enough for him to know that he was using
customer assets. Failure to have good controls is a violation of Sarbanes
Oxley, and using customer money to pay corporate debts is the biggest no-no in
the brokerage business under the securities laws.
I think Donald Trump's nomination is a desperate attempt
by Republican voters to stop the corrupt mess in Washington. After
electing a Republican House in 2010 and a Republican Congress in 2012 and 2014,
they have nothing to show for it. Congressional Republicans seem to be
intimidated by the mainstream media, who operate as the propaganda arm of the
Democrats without even attempting to look unbiased. Trump's one
qualification was that he is not intimidated by the Pravda Press. I'm not
saying this choice was a wise decision, but I do understand the desperation.
If, as is very likely, Trump loses, the next step will be a
Constitutional Convention called by the states. People are fed up with
the corruption of the Democrats in Washington, DC and their enablers in the
mainstream media. They are willing to look for any alternative that looks
promising.
[After posting the above,
I got some pushback from a liberal commenter.
He said that the Clintons had maintained enough separation from the
Foundation so that they were not in violation of a law prohibiting federal
employees from receiving money from foreign governments. He said a “living Constitution” was needed to
keep the 2nd Amendment as a valid part of the Constitution. He said that Obama’s executive orders were
sailing through the courts easily. He
said the deadlock in Congress was mainly the result of Republicans refusing to
compromise. My response is below.]
The reason for Hillary Clinton's private email server was
so she could coordinate Clinton foundation donations with State Department
favors. Here's a good place to start on the Clinton Foundation:
The purpose of the Second Amendment was to make military
dictatorship, like the one Oliver Cromwell imposed on England after the English
Civil War in 1653, impossible. Here's a link to the history of Oliver Cromwell:
This purpose is clearly explained in Federalist Papers
Number 46. This purpose, to prevent federal military dictatorship is
still valid. Even if it isn't, the Constitution's Article V specifies how
to change the Constitution. It says that 2/3 of each House of Congress must
pass the Amendment and then 3/4 of the states must ratify it. It does not
say that a 5 to 4 vote of the Supreme Court is a valid way to change the
Constitution to get rid of things we don't need anymore. Here's a link:
Here's an account of the litigation around Obama's
executive order implementing the Dream Act. It's written by Illegal
Immigration advocates, so it should be an acceptable source for you. It
doesn't sound like smooth sailing for Obama's executive order. The ruling
that currently stands is that the order violated the Constitutional provision
that the president "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."
That provision should be called the King James II clause, because it was
drafted to prevent the kinds of things he did to flout parliament. Obama
is merely imitating him. Here's the link:
Basically you are the victim of a "liberal"
education. Your effort to shout me down by stacking up manure is not
going to work. I grew up in Montana and I learned how to deal with lots
of manure very young.
[After my post
above, the liberal commenter got upset.
He insisted I read a Politifact article about the Clinton Foundation. He mentioned how many emails Bush
deleted. He said the 2nd
Amendment was obsolete because it was written when the US Army had only 5,000
men. He said that the 14th
Amendment was too vague for anybody to know what it meant. He mentioned Loving v. Virginia and Griswold
v. Connecticut as two cases which would be overturned by my interpretation of
the 14th Amendment. He
complained about my insulting his “liberal” education. My response to his response to my response is
below.]
I read the Politifact article on the Clinton Foundation.
It was a whitewash followed by a split decision. The polite fiction
was that the Clintons did not receive any direct benefits from the foundation.
The foundation was used as a slush fund to support friends of Bill and
Hill as a campaign organization in waiting, so the polite fiction was more
fiction than polite. The lawyers were of differing opinions.
Politifact, not surprisingly, chose to take the opinions most favorable
to the Clintons as gospel. Politifact is part of the media bias you've
heard so much about. Having "fact" in your name does not make
Politifact any less biased that having "truth" in Pravda's name made
Pravda any more truthful.
"All anybody got was a meeting" is LOL funny as
a lame excuse. If George W. Bush was selling meetings through a Bush
Foundation, would you still argue that?
On the 2nd Amendment, the point, which escaped you, is
that "the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
That's not a conditional statement. It doesn't depend on the whims
of local government. It doesn't depend on a "living Constitution."
It's right there in plain English. There is no room for wishful
interpretation to accommodate modern conditions here. Any other spin on
this is organic fertilizer. Heller was rightly decided. If people
don't like it, they can amend the Constitution using either of the two
procedure specified in Article V. Getting the Supreme Court to find
another penumbra is not going to work. Attempts to confiscate some of the
300 million privately held guns in the US will lead to widespread violence.
Any Supreme Court case which moves in that direction is really a big
risk, considering how angry the Deplorables are right now.
The 14th Amendment was about RACE. The Republicans
who wrote it wanted to prevent state laws and state courts from mistreating recently
freed black slaves. To pretend otherwise is to back the Humpty Dumpty
school of jurisprudence:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty
said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what
I choose it to mean—neither more
nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said
Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”
The great benefit of the rule of law is that it's predictable.
People can make long term investment decisions based on a predictable
legal environment. The great drawback of the "living
Constitution" is that it's not predictable at all. Supreme Court
cases are more like NFL games. On any given day, depending on what
Justice Kennedy had for lunch, the Court can overturn thousands of years of
tradition and law on a 5 to 4 vote. It's even more ridiculous when you
consider that the "full faith and credit" clause could have been used
to rule that any marriage legally performed in one state had to be recognized
in all states. Stretching the Constitution out of shape wasn't even
necessary to legalize same sex marriage.
Virginia v. Loving was a case about interracial marriage. It
was decided correctly based on the 14th Amendment. The decision said that
interracial marriage could not be outlawed by the State of Virginia. This
is exactly what the 14th Amendment was designed to do.
Griswold v. Connecticut should have been decided using the 9th and
10th Amendment. The states do not have the right to interfere in bedrooms
just because the Constitution does not forbid it. Inventing a right to
privacy based on the 5th and 14th Amendments, when it was never there, opened
the door to a slippery slope where the Court is finding all sorts of other
things in the Constitution that weren't there.
My link to the Dream Act case shows that the courts have not
upheld all of Obama's illegal executive orders. You said, incorrectly,
that they had. "Obama's executive orders have been dismissed by the
courts." Ain't true. Obama didn't just violate the intent of
the Constitution. He violated the letter of the Constitution repeatedly.
If George Bush decided not to collect taxes on oil companies until next
year, would that be OK? If not, why is it OK that Obama decided not to
collect the taxes of the Employer Mandate passed in the Affordable Care Act?
As a straight white Republican male, I am assumed to be an
ignorant uneducated racist sexist warmongering fascist pig. Since I'm a
Vietnam Era veteran, I'm also assumed to be a crazed trained killer who could
lash out at any moment. Since making these assumptions seems fair to
liberals, I don't understand why any liberal would be upset if similarly broad
assumptions were made about them. None of them bother to notice my two
Master's degrees or my black sister in law, the best thing that ever happened
to my little brother. I've just decided to strike first with insults.
It makes me feel better about myself.
I assume that "liberal" education leaves things out,
like English history from 1600 - 1750 for example, because that knowledge would
tend to undermine key liberal ideology. You don't want people to notice
the similarity between Divine Right Monarchy and being "on the Right Side
of History" with the "Fierce Urgency of Now." You
especially don't want people to notice that Barry the Brilliant and King
Charles I have a lot in common, both being tyrants who tried to rule without
legislatures. You also don't want people to read John Locke's Two
Treatises of Government. It wouldn't be good if people thought they
actually had a say in consenting to government. It's better for liberals if
government just does what's best for people, because the people are too dumb to
know what's good for them.
The original article I reacted to.