˙ʇuǝɯpuǝɯɐ ʇsɹıɟ ǝɥʇ ɟo ʞɔɐʇʇɐ uɐ uo sʞɹɐqɯǝ ǝɥs ‘sɐǝpı pɹnsqɐ ʎןqıpǝɹɔuı ɟo ʇno unɹ pɐɥ ısoןǝd ʎɔuɐu ʇɥbnoɥʇ noʎ uǝɥʍ ʇsnظ

Yes folks, the woman who suggested passing a bill to find out what is in it now wants to inhibit free speech. During a Democratic forum to discuss amending the Constitution earlier this week Pelosi promoted her “clear agenda” to limit free speech of corporations in an effort to control special interest campaign money, according to Hot Air.

As usual, Pelosi is working on a far-left liberal agenda which is anything but transparent. The limits on free speech and political spending would apply to businesses but not unincorporated unions.

Broken Link

In all of the recent fervor associated with the Supreme Court’s review of the constitutionality of the individual mandate in “Obamacare”, there has been a great deal of discussion about women’s rights. Cancer screening, mammograms and, quite vocally, birth control have all been topics of conversation as it pertains to the Affordable Care Act. While it’s true that women’s health care issues can be more costly and complicated than men’s, and have been subject to exploitation by insurance companies, is putting all of our faith in the government to administer to women’s needs (and indeed the health care needs of all Americans!) really the way to go?

Depending on whether you’re more inclined to agree with the opinions of donkeys or elephants is likely to dictate how you would answer that question. The real problem that I see with that is the answer is subject to change based upon who is making the rules at the time. I have a very hard time believing that liberals would feel so comfortable about the enactment of “Obamacare” if the law were exactly the same, but passed under the Bush administration. You see, the idea of having the government appoint a panel of individuals to make the health insurance decisions for the entire citizenry of the United States is pretty daunting if the person in charge (Secretary of Health and Human Services), has widely divergent views from one’s own. Under “Obamacare”, the HHS Secretary is solely responsible for making these appointments, and that scares the hell out of me!

Many of the same people who are roundly and vehemently supportive of The Affordable Care Act would be horrified if the same power granted Kathleen Sebelius were given to her predecessor, Mike Leavitt. That is just way too much power to be given to any member of the government, much less a presidential appointee. If progressive women were faced with the prospect of having their health care decisions resting in the hands of a man who once drafted legislation to redefine several forms of birth control as abortion, there would be marches throughout the streets. Sure, most women would probably be happy with the appointments made by Mrs. Sebelius, but let me put another hypothetical scenario out there. Let’s say that “Obamacare” is upheld by the Supreme Court and all of its provisions are put into practice, and Mitt Romney wins the presidency. In an easily foreseeable political move, Mr. Romney then appoints Rick Santorum to be the HHS Secretary. That would put Rick Santorum in charge of appointing the advisory panel to make the health care decisions for every woman in America. Scared?

It scares me too! Despite my relatively conservative political views, I would no more want Rick Santorum or Mike Leavitt in charge of my healthcare than I would want Kathleen Sebelius in the same position. We Americans are not inclined to have so much faith in our government. Our country was created when particularly motivated citizens chose to sail across the Atlantic Ocean rather than be subject to a tyrannical regime. In fact, the original ten amendments to The Constitution (The Bill of Rights) reflect that distrust of centralized government. If you look at the amendments, both individually, and collectively you can see very clearly that the founding fathers created these rights with the idea of guaranteeing our freedom from a controlling central government. The problem with having the government in charge of  large portions of our lives is that it must remain ever benevolent. History has shown us that is just not the case. Just within the last decade, there have been two occasions when both houses of congress and the presidency were controlled by a single party. During those times, the party on the outside looking in felt very under-represented.

I, sincerely, believe that my wife and I are the only people who have the right and authority to make the healthcare decisions for our family. The idea that fifteen people appointed by someone, appointed by the President can make the coverage decisions for my children, and indeed the entire population, is stomach turning to me. I find the concept both abhorrent and un-American. My feelings stem not from the legislation’s party of origin, but from the fact that it refuses to respect the origin of our country. The Bill of Rights was made to guarantee individual rights in amendments one through eight, State’s rights in the tenth amendment and limit the power of the federal government in every single one of them. Both liberals and conservatives agree that we need to reform our ridiculously broken health care system, but I don’t think that reform at the expense of liberty is anything other than truly terrifying.

You told us in your multitude of yammering, meaningless phrases from your legions of slavish media symbionts that you and your Utopian schemes were inevitable… that we, the American people, the backbone of this greatest nation state in the history of the world, just needed to step away and genuflect before your brilliance and soaring rhetoric. We’ve had three really miserable years to attest for the magnitude of the error of electing you, Barack Hussein Obama. It’s an error we will correct very soon.

I wrote about Obama and his nearly delusional “House of Cards” some time ago. I get lost in the archives so I won’t bother to try and say when. But let’s just say my prognostications were frighteningly accurate. I guess you could say I was one of the deniers, one of those who had vetted our Imperial Majesty before his immaculation (thanks, Rush). What I saw frankly alarmed the hell out of me. The persistent Utopianist and redistributionist themes that ran through everything Obama did made me want to scream, “Open your eyes, you fools. The enemy is at the gates and the watchers are asleep”. I guess I have Barack Hussein to thank for this column, though. Without the dire threat he represents it may not have existed. It took considerable convincing on Dee’s (my editor) part, as it was.

You’ll be glad to know that MaoBama’s mad world is no less delusional than before. Much more so really, though now there’s a hint of desperation and not a little paranoia. As out of touch as the leftist radicals, their surrogates in the media and the unions are with the true mood of the nation, it’s no surprise that they had written off the Patriot Movement. The ‘Tea Partiers’ were a momentary phenomenon of 2010 and now, scattered and powerless, could be disregarded.

Of all the many mistakes that Obama and the goon squad have made (and they are legion), the fundamental misreading of the voices and the mood of the country is going to be the sword which will hamstring Obama’s Communist Utopian America dreams. The Supreme Court can never be taken for granted, but last week had a few surprises that just absolutely took MaoBama and his Attorney General, with all sails, aback… if not dismasted altogether.

The academic pinheads of the MaoBama regime had been sure that the Supremes would take the tack that it was a done deal and not examine the issue too deeply, and then accede to the reality of a government-enforced mandate. That rosy glow lasted about one word into Justice Kennedy’s opening statement and it was downhill from there. It was very entertaining listening to the lames of the Obama lapdog kennel trying to spin it into anything but the disaster it was… and it played out on camera for the entire nation to see.

It ain’t over until they bring on the fat lady, but it looks and feels a whole hell of a lot like at least a few on the Supreme Court remembered that the Constitution and its guarantees are the reason for their existence.

Yes, it’s Obama’s house of cards and it’s beginning to sway precariously. Don’t take your attention off Obama for a second. Desperate and paranoid he may be, but ever more dangerous for that. I do feel that he’s really capable of anything and that’s exactly why we, as American Tea Party Patriots, must be ever more vigilant for it.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2012

Americans who respect the Constitution have been heartened by the oral arguments in the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of Obamacare.  Based on the thrust of the questioning and comments by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Scalia and Alito, there is good reason to hope that not only will the individual mandate be ruled unconstitutional, but that as a result the entire 2,700 page law will be thrown out.

We will not know with certainty until the actual decision is released, which Court observers expect will be in June.  Justice Kennedy has disappointed constitutionalists before, and is capable of cobbling together some narrow reason to let the individual mandate and the entire law survive.  However, assuming the law is ruled invalid, what next?  Historical comparisons are never exact, but those who have studied the rise of the modern federal regulatory state can feel a sense of déjà vu over the events of the last few days.

In the mid-1930s, a series of headline-making Supreme Court decisions overturned not one but many aspects Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Some observers thought the whole Roosevelt program dead, and expected a major Republican comeback in the 1936 elections.  Instead, FDR went on the attack, blaming “economic royalists” for the continuation of the Depression and denouncing the Supreme Court for blocking Democrats’ efforts to use government to “help” Americans recover from the Depression.  One can reasonably argue that the entire Democrat campaign was a massive prevarication, but politically it worked.  FDR won re-election in a landslide, and Democrats made substantial gains in Congress.

In the midst of this political attack, one of the Supreme Court justices who had been voting against the New Deal laws, Owen Roberts (no relation to the current Chief Justice), switched to uphold a New Deal law like one the Court had struck down only a year before.  Shortly thereafter Roosevelt launched his infamous “court-packing” scheme, so Roberts’ vote has since become known as the “switch in time that saved nine.”  However, more important than this, other justices who had been voting against the New Deal laws began to retire.  Although he had not been able to appoint a single justice in his first term, by the end of his presidency FDR had named eight of the nine justices.

Starting from 1937, the increasingly Democrat Supreme Court reversed most of the anti-New Deal decisions, and effectively eliminated all constitutional restraints on federal economic regulation.  This culminated in the 1942 Wickard v Filburn decision which held that if an economic activity might affect interstate commerce the federal government can regulate it.

Wickard is the foundation on which not only Obamacare, but almost every other modern federal economic regulatory scheme is based.  It is the basis for allowing the EPA to regulate the use of tiny parcels of land and to stop any economic activity which might affect a single obscure species found in only one state.  It is the basis for preventing a local farmer who only sells locally from calling his produce “organic” unless she or he complies with reams of federal paperwork.  The examples go on ad nauseam.  At the end of his presidency, FDR boasted that, although he had lost the battle over his court-packing plan, he had won the war of bringing the Supreme Court into line with his New Deal philosophy of vastly expanded federal power.

What lessons do the events of the 1930s have for us today?  First, it is still critical that Obama be defeated.  It is almost certain that any decision against Obamacare will be 5-4.  Justice Scalia is 76 years old and Justice Kennedy is 75.  While Justice Thomas is “only” 63, he is said to be frustrated with his lonely stance of firmly standing by the Constitution’s original meaning (even Scalia can drift from respect for the Constitution’s original meaning).  All Obama has to do is to replace any one of these three in a second term, and the Supreme Court will shift to upholding the leftist agenda by consistent 5-4 votes, including reversing any decision against Obamacare by the current Court.

As many have pointed out, a decision overturning Obamacare may ironically help produce this result if conservatives get complacent over a Supreme Court victory.  Obama will be relieved of the burden of defending the wildly unpopular law, yet will be able to energize his base by denouncing the “Republican” Supreme Court’s obstruction of his efforts to “help” the people.  (On the other hand, there might be a somewhat offsetting advantage if Romney is the Republican nominee, since he is ill-equipped to attack Obamacare.)

Second, a Supreme Court decision against Obamacare could dilute the energy for reducing federal power back to something approaching its original constitutional bounds.  The legal arguments presented against Obamacare assume the validity of all prior Supreme Court decisions.  A decision overturning Obamacare will draw a line against the further expansion of federal power, which is a very good thing, but it will do nothing to roll back the previous expansion of federal power since the New Deal.  The EPA and all of the other alphabet soup of czars and regulatory agencies will remain undisturbed.  Again, complacency and lack of a clear target are the dangers.

(However, there is a somewhat offsetting advantage here also.  The publicity over the Obamacare cases has significantly raised public awareness of Wickard and its ilk, cases which even most lawyers had forgotten about if they were more than a few years out of law school.  This can only help in the larger war of educating Americans on how the federal government has expanded far beyond the limits the framers so carefully built into the Constitution.)

Third, a victory in the Supreme Court will perpetuate the myth that the Supreme Court will protect our freedoms.  As the FDR New Deal cases like Wickard and many since show, the Supreme Court is just as capable of taking away our freedoms as it is of preserving them.  We need to get over the New Deal idea that the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution, and has the right to change its meaning to keep it up-to-date with current social thought.  We can not rely on the Supreme Court.  Only the political victory of Americans who respect the Constitution, reinforced by constitutional amendments restating and re-affirming the Constitution’s original meaning and structure, can permanently assure the restoration of our freedoms and Republic.

To accomplish the first we need to elect constitutionalists to Congress and state and local offices, not just the presidency.  To accomplish the second, we need to reform the amendment process to allow states to initiate and enact amendments without having to go through Congress or the unused and archaic mechanism of a convention. Such a proposal can be found at http://www.timelyrenewed.com/?page_id=317.

James W. Lucas is an attorney and the author of Timely Renewed: Amendments to Restore the American Constitution and the forthcoming Are We the People?: Using Amendment to Take Back Our Constitution from Big Government, Big Business, and the Supreme Court.   He blogs at www.timelyrenewed.com.

This week, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case ofFlorida vs. United States Department of Health and Human Services (for an excellent recap, please see this write-up by the Texas Public Policy Foundation), the lawsuit filed by the State of Florida against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka "ObamaCare." Florida's previous Attorney General, Bill McCollum, filed the complaint on March 23, 2010. The litigation was joined by attorneys general in numerous other states, and some states filed separate lawsuits, but Florida's case has been the linchpin in moving this challenge forward all the way to the Supreme Court. ObamaCare and its unconstitutional power grab have galvanized conservatives across the country and united them in their opposition to the Obama administration. What many people don't know is the back story behind how Florida's lawsuit came to be. I recently came across some interesting information when I was doing some research for one of my last Florida clients before I leave for Massachusetts.

 

 

It’s come down to four Republican candidates. They have survived the rigors of a presidential campaign–and there are many. It’s gotten nasty at times, with candidates attacking candidates of the same party. Something that Reagan warned ominously against. But that was when party was sacred, and the person to beat wasn’t Obama.

It wasn’t that Obama was a good president. After presiding over the biggest deficit in US history, he has the US teetering on the closest approach a country founded with a democratic-republic ever came to pure socialism.

But the remaining “four” Republicans have refused to bow to the minor option of ‘green energy’. More importantly, all are committed to reduce taxes, cut government spending, and cut ‘Big Government’ as a whole.

One is particularly good at business dealings, and money handling. One is a specifically good cost-cutter, spendthrift, and bean counter. The other is a specialized orator, who understands all the ins and outs of daily politics.

One candidate is different, though. He is good at all the aforementioned items, but has special claims to many of them.  Most understood Reagan conservatism was a three-legged stool with economic, social and national defense legs.

This candidate’s repeated calls for a Balanced Budget Amendment, unleashing America’s vast domestic energy, and eliminating restrictive regulations, has put forward more concrete proposals to create middle-income jobs than any other presidential possibility.

He stated the way to stop today’s runaway government is to realize it reflects the collapse of core values, and lacks any glue to keep families together. There is no candidate today clearer on this.

With his increase in popularity, many had anxiety attacks about his perceived spirituality. While trying to discuss his economic plans, the media seems only obsessed with his personal religious opinions.

Typically he always has to confront anti-Catholic prejudice, and accused of being too “far right” to win. He has a reverence for all life, heterosexual marriage, and devotion to a strong family life. He considers amniocentesis as a ‘Death Panel’ on deciding who lives and who dies.

He knows the words “separation of church and state” are not contained in the Constitution, and the phrase from Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists had a much different meaning than what’s construed.

The media hates him for it, and has launched an all-out attack against him. CNN’s John King told him he was a Democrat’s dream. “A lot of Democrats were celebrating, … last night, saying, in their view, you’re on the extreme right on many of these social issues and they think, for them, it’s a good thing that these issues will be front and center.”

Shockingly, ABC’s “GMA” sycophantically promoted “polyamory” (practice of having more than one open romantic relationship at a time) the morning after his electoral tie in Michigan.

Infuriatingly frustrating to the media, most of his campaigning was done with handshakes, gatherings, and door-to-door discussions. ‘Big bucks’ were never affordable for his campaign. 

Previous Obama campaigning shows Romney as the opponent Obama and the liberal machine wanted nominated. It seems that the difference in social issues alone, is what scares them the most.

When you think about it, one other person was typically chastised for His beliefs, and the elite hated Him as well.

As one realizes by now, the only non-named Republican in this race is Rick Santorum. He, and his wife Karen, have seven living children, and leave behind Gabriel who died prematurely after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Their eighth child, Isabella, was diagnosed with Edwards syndrome (Trisomy 18). She was recommended for abortion, having a 10% chance of survival to one year. The Santorums ignored that advice, and now live with their daughter.

What may be the most telling point of all, is one of the least publicized statements by Santorum that has rarely, if ever, been uttered by a politician running for the highest office in the land: “You may not like what I say and you may not like how I say it, but you can always know I will tell Americans the truth.”

Santorum meant what he said on 1/24/12 to that crowd >1000 people at the First Baptist Church (Naples, Fl). The question is, can the people of Naples, and the US, survive knowing that a politician will tell them the truth?

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Kevin Roeten can be reached at roetenks@charter.net.

How many people marry the first person they ever kiss or date or even have sex with? Not that many. The average age an American loses their virginity is 17 while the average age they get married is 27. Nonetheless, despite a decade in the dating pool, experiencing everything from one night stands to years of living with someone, when people finally take the plunge, half of all marriages end up in divorce.

There are lots of things that one might take from that observation, but the thing that is most compelling is that despite their best efforts, people are not perfect. They make mistakes. After spending the first 10 years of their adult lives trying to get it right for what is arguably the most important decision of their lives, half the population still gets it wrong and asks for a “do over”. Despite all efforts to make a good decision, half the time we get it wrong. And that’s with everyone involved seeking a common goal!

So the question is: If, with everyone involved seeking to do what’s in their and their partner’s best interests, we get it wrong half the time, how often does government, with its myriad players involved, many promoting conflicting, even mutually exclusive positions, get things wrong? No doubt far more often that individuals earnestly seeking a lifetime of happiness.

Unfortunately with government, unlike marriage, rarely, even in the face of abject failure, does a law or regulation get thrown out. Once a law is on the books, they almost never come off regardless of their cost or efficacy. Of course if it were only a few laws there wouldn’t be much of a problem. It’s not a few. In terms of actual federal laws, today there are somewhere in excess of 20,000 on the books. That is nothing when compared with the regulations those laws have spawned.

The Code of Federal Regulations is the list of all of the regulations of the United States – which are based on the bills passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. Today the Code contains over 150,000 pages of regulations. And those regulations are growing fast. In 1970, 183 years after the Constitution was ratified, the Code contained 53,000 pages. Today, a mere 40 years later we’ve actually added 100,000 more. And the pace is actually increasing and becoming more onerous.

If these regulations had little impact on our lives it wouldn’t matter if there were millions of them. Unfortunately their impact is anything but little. Federal regulations alone (and there are lots more laws at the local level) cost Americans over $1 trillion per year, or approximately 7% of our GDP and more than we actually pay in income taxes. And those are just the direct impact costs. Imagine how many companies are never started, how many would be entrepreneurs settle for secure government jobs, or how many companies fail because of the phalanx of federal regulations? No doubt the number is huge.

This leviathan of government regulation is made all the more worse because it has spawned an army of millions of federal government employees and lobbyists, none of whom wants to put themselves out of work. The intractable problem of government growth and increasing regulation will not solve itself. It’s going to take brute Constitutional force.

A Constitutional Amendment should be passed that states that all federal laws have an implicit sunset provision of 10 years unless it passes each house of Congress by at least 60%. It would also stipulate that all federal regulations would sunset after 10 years, regardless of the margin of passage of the underlying law. The effect of this Amendment would be a greatly diminished the number of zombie like federal regulations that never die, regardless of their cost, efficacy or unintended consequences. Each sub 60% law would have to be re-authorized each decade.

The most obvious impact of this change would be that politicians and bureaucrats would no longer be able to spin yarns about milk and honey without any accountability. At the time of reconsideration, each sub 60% bill (or every regulation) would have a decade’s worth of hard data to analyze, making it far more difficult to hoodwink the public with rosy scenarios that have no basis in reality. The beauty of this proposal is that it would force legislators and regulators to defend a law’s actual results rather than opine on its promised virtues. Given that most government programs cost more than projected, rarely work as promised, and often have significant unintended consequences, a decade should be a long enough time to inflict any law or regulation on the country and her citizens.

This proposed Amendment would apply to all existing laws and regulations, giving each 10 years from the day of ratification before it expired. The result of this would be immediate and twofold: It would dramatically slow the growth of government and regulations while simultaneously beginning to make government more efficient. By forcing politicians and bureaucrats to focus on defending their existing laws and regulations (AKA power) it would immediately diminish their incentive to create new programs. At the same time, given that politicians and bureaucrats would have to argue against a law’s or a regulation’s actual consequences rather than it’s promised benefits, it would force them to focus their attention on producing demonstratively positive results rather than just spending more money or accumulating more power.

In the Omega Glory episode of Star Trek Captain Kirk and company come upon a planet where the inhabitants are speaking the garbled versions of the words of the Pledge of Allegiance. The people don’t know the actual words or even what they mean but do so because that was what has survived through the generations. In a similar way, when laws and regulations (and the bureaucracy they spawn) calcify and become completely detached from the original goal for which they were established, they cease to be proper tools of government and instead become simply another instrument of government power and coercion. By putting in place a mechanism for objectively evaluating the success or failure of government actions in relation to the problems they were intended to address, this Amendment would both demand real accountability on the part of government as well as give citizens a reason to remain engaged in its workings.

I can think of no better mechanism for putting Thomas Jefferson’s words into action:

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

Glen Bradley is a true grassroots candidate. We need your financial help in the upcoming three way primary. Just $10 will fund the Campaign for the primary if we have 3000 people donate. Pass this on to your  friends and FB page. Encourage your friends to donate to the candidate the will Restore the NC Constitution.

$10 could be 1 lunch and 1 cup of coffee. We need your support.

We are ready to print flyers and do a targeted mailing.

Please consider a small donation for the true Constitutional candidate, Glen Bradley.

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Rep. Glen Bradley on the Record (2011-2012)