Obama's 'Constitution'

Obama and the Constitution
Submitted by Bob Beauprez on April 20, 2010


You have to give Barack Obama credit for at least one thing; he sure knows how to get people fired up.

Across America citizens by the tens of thousands rallied at Tea Party events last week against a government out of control and politicians who refuse to listen. Many pointed to a trampling of civil liberties and the Constitution.

Obama’s hostility and disdain for the Constitution, which he laments as a “charter of negative liberties,” is well established. When Obama pledged “to bring about the change that won't just win an election, but will transform America,” he apparently had transforming the Law of the Land squarely in his sights. His actions in only the first year in office are an alarming and unprecedented assault that must have shaken the Framers of the Constitution in their eternal resting places.

Indeed, more than a dozen state Attorneys General along with private organizations have filed suit against the federal government claiming the recently passed ObamaCare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), is unconstitutional by mandating every citizen purchase a commercial product, even one as important as health insurance. The AGs raise the right questions citing Article 1, Section 8 that specifically prescribes Congressional limited authorities, and the Tenth Amendment that reserves “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

"The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage," the lawsuit reads.

Obama caused another flare up by ignoring the Senate’s Advice and Consent Authority in Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution with 15 Easter week recess appointments to federal positions. For sure, other Presidents of both parties have made scores of recess appointments in the past. But one of Obama’s pushed the limit.

Most flagrant was the appointment of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Becker’s nomination “died…in the Senate” when it fell eight votes short of passing cloture in February. But, Obama ignored the Senate action as provided for in the Constitution and forced Becker on the NRLB anyway. Becker is an attorney for the AFL-CIO and SEIU and ardent advocate of doing away with secret ballot elections (Card Check) as currently required by law to organize workers into a labor union. Recognizing the reality that Congress likely cannot pass Card Check legislation, the unions have advocated it be done through the “administrative process” – i.e. by changing the regulation by bureaucratic fiat, essentially deeming a change in the law without ever voting on it – and Becker is likely their designated bureaucrat to get it done.

Just two months into his new job, Obama fired the management at General Motors, a private corporation. He moved swiftly to install his own puppets, confiscate the equity of secured creditors, and redistribute it to labor unions and the government. He did all of this without any identifiable authority in the Constitution or in statutes, no vote from Congress, nor an order from any Court. He just did it – a frightening precedent to establish in the United States of America.

The recent announcement that Justice John Paul Stevens plans to retire this summer will give Obama his second appointment to the Supreme Court. With his first nominee to the SCOTUS, Obama selected a well documented activist judge, Sonia Sotomayor, who arrogantly rejected the Constitutional separation of powers and publicly bragged that “the Court is where policy is made.” Speculation around Obama’s next nominee has largely focused on “how far left” he will go with his selection. It’s a given that his pick will be from the liberal edge of possibilities. Two high profile liberal women are often mentioned, Elena Kagan and Diana Wood. Regardless of who is ultimately selected, it is a foregone conclusion that the nominee will “indulge their own liberal values by deeming what the law is,” rather than applying the Constitution as written.

How do we know? Because, Obama said so.

In a 2001 Chicago public radio interview, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama provided great insight to the frustration and low regard that the man who would become President had even then for the Constitution. Referencing the Earl Warren Supreme Court of the 1950-60s, widely regarded as the most liberal and activist Court in the nation’s history, Obama said “it wasn’t that radical.” He lamented the Warren Court, “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.”

Obama might not have thought the Warren Court pushed the envelope, but President Eisenhower sure did. The activism of that Court caused Ike, who nominated Warren, to reflect on that decision as “the biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made.”

The Warren Court according to Obama, “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.” Flying directly in the face of the Founders, and particularly the vision embodied in The Federalist Papers, Obama decried the Constitution as, “a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.”

Obama’s vision of what government “must do” is centered on what he called even in 2001 “redistributed change.” Even an activist court isn’t sufficiently aggressive for Obama. “The Court’s just not very good at it (redistributed change),” he said. While important in Obama’s overall strategy, he recognizes it is but one of many members in “coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change.”

While we await the name Obama’s next SCOTUS nominee, rest assured they will share his vision and be pledged to further his assault on free-market capitalism in America and our fundamental liberties. Look no further than the closing statement of that radio interview in which he speaks of “bringing about economic change through the courts.” That is the transformation of America – the “change” - of which he spoke.

As if to put an exclamation point on his 2001 interview, Presidential candidate Obama said this six years later during the Presidential campaign when asked about his criteria for judicial nominees:

"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."
Barack Obama: Planned Parenthood Conference, July 17, 2007

Caring for the needy and the disenfranchised, and government’s proper roll, has occupied countless hours of debate within Congress since the nation’s founding. The generosity and benevolence of America for our own as well as countless millions around the world is unprecedented in world history. Some will forever believe we still come up short, while others are convinced we spend and waste too much. Regardless, the Founders clearly established that “all men are created equal” and thus entitled to equal opportunity and treatment – but, not necessarily equal outcome. Protection of equal treatment is principally within the jurisdiction of the courts, while the legislature will forever tug and push at outcomes.

Obama has embraced the “living constitution” ideology of the radical left who don’t like rules, or legal constraints, or limits on government intrusion into our lives and our freedom as envisioned by our Founders. Instead of the wisdom of Hancock, Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams who believed that, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” Obama is more closely aligned with a form of government that denies individual liberty and freedom, centralizes power within the institutions of government rather than the people, confiscates and redistributes personal wealth and property, and is founded on the one fundamental principal of believers in redistributive change; “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Mr. President, there are places in the world where tyrannical governments imposes that dictum on fearful people. But, it is not the United States of America.