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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| ItÂ’s Not the Constitution, Stupid |
| 2012-04-05 |
| h/t Instapundit I don’t think that President Obama believes a word of his remarks about what the Supreme Court can or cannot do about any given piece of legislation. Attorney General Holder said as much today when he agreed that the Supremes are there specifically to protect against laws they consider unconstitutional. Holder’s not picking a fight with his boss. It’s not about that. It’s about power. And freedom. Power, because the president and his people think that, since they are smarter and better than the rest of us, anyone who tries to limit their power is bad, and has to be brought into line. Thus, the tough words of warning to any justice contemplating voting against Obamacare. Freedom, because the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive branch comes at our expense, bit by bit and law by law, precisely as Alexis de Tocqueville feared. As he said, “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.” Tocqueville described the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,” and its task is to watch over us all, and regulate every aspect of our lives: It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. We will not be bludgeoned into submission; we will be seduced. He foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives. His words are precisely the ones that best describe our current crisis: That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #4 The SIRIUS EVENT, but I digress ... |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2012-04-05 22:59 |
| #3 "The Commerce Clause and the The Necessary and Proper Clause also tend to cause death by a thousand cuts to our republic." Yet the argument before the court have nothing at all to do with either in the proper context. |
| Posted by: newc 2012-04-05 19:58 |
| #2 The Commerce Clause and the The Necessary and Proper Clause also tend to cause death by a thousand cuts to our republic. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2012-04-05 18:02 |
#1 Several points.Much of what passes for this sort of behavior is for "our protection". Ben Franklin said that anyone who is willing to trade a little freedom for a little security will wind up with neither. Much of the Constitutional justification for government intrustion into private affairs is through the "general welfare" clause. In my thinking, much of what is passed off as the "general welfare" is actually the "average welfare". There is a difference: in "the general welfare", EVERYONE benefits, while in "the average welfare", some are benefitted only at the expense of others. Note that to make this acceptable, advocates of "the average welfare" do not see governmental waste, inefficiency, and even GRAFT, on their or anyone's part, as downsides: as long as the amount of money in the total system remains the same, the "average welfare" is maintained and is not "bad", provided the target beneficiaries are somewhat better off. To them, the only way the "average welfare" could go down is if someone took the government subsidy, convered it to cash, and burned it. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2012-04-05 11:19 |