You are about to read a list of 45 goals that found their way down the halls of our great Capitol back in 1963. As you read this, 39 years later, you should be shocked by the events that have played themselves out. I first ran across this list 3 years ago but was unable to attain a copy and it has bothered me ever since. Recently, Jeff Rense posted it on his site and I would like to thank him for doing so. http://www.rense.com
Communist Goals (1963) Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, January 10, 1963 .
Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.
At Mrs. Nordman's request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following "Current Communist Goals," which she identifies as an excerpt from "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen:
[From "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen]
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use ["]united force["] to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.
Sources at end.
In the early hours of November 22nd (1963) we learned of the quiet passing of C.S. Lewis and hours later we were brought to our knees when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and our nation mourned.
On June 17, 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that any Bible reciting or prayer, in public schools, was deemed unconstitutional.
While American's have endured great prosperity over the past 40 years we have also lost our moral compass and direction. In reviewing the research, data supports 1963 as a focal point, demonstrating a downward slope in our moral and social decline through 2001.
Sources:
Note by Webmaster: The Congressional Record back this far (2001) has not be digitized and posted on the Internet.
It will probably be available at your nearest library that is a federal repository. Call them and ask them. Your college library is probably a repository. This is an excellent source of government records. Another source are your Congress Critters. They should be more than happy to help you in this matter. You will find the Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto interesting at this point.
Webmaster Forest Glen Durland found the document in the library.
Sources are listed below.
Microfilm: California State University at San Jose Clark Library, Government Floor Phone (408)924-2770 Microfilm Call Number: J 11.R5
Congressional Record, Vol. 109 88th Congress, 1st Session Appendix Pages A1-A2842 Jan. 9-May 7, 1963 Reel 12
1963- The Year That Changed America
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Enviro Wacos Are Coming For You
Is 'Green Goon Squad' at your front door?
Just when you thought the government couldn't get any more invasive than the 2010 Census and requirements under "Obamacare" that your medical records be posted on the Internet, a coming book called "Climategate" by veteran meteorologist Brian Sussman warns that soon there could be a "green goon squad" visiting at your door.
Sussman's book, the newest title by WND books and scheduled for release April 22 "Earth Day," has been charting for several weeks already among Amazon's top 10 preordered titles. It arrives just as people who thought the campaign over global warming was being dropped over revelations of apparent manipulation by researchers in the field are becoming concerned that Washington still has it on the fast-track.
Sussman writes in "Climategate" that not only are promoters of the belief that starting a car in Texas or heating a home in North Dakota contributes to a cataclysmic environmental warping are continuing their campaign, Washington already has parts of it in writing.
In Chapter 10 of his book, he cites the 2009 America Clean Energy and Security Act which already has passed the U.S. House.
"Buried in the 2009 America Clean Energy and Security Act are federally mandated energy-efficient building regulations, which supersede all local and state codes and which will be enforced by a national, green goon squad, funded in part by revenues from energy taxes, as well as by an annual $25 million from the Department of Energy 'to provide necessary enforcement of a national energy efficiency building code,'" he confirms.
"The legislation also authorizes the Secretary of Energy to 'enhance compliance by conducting training and education of builders and other professionals in the jurisdiction concerning the national energy efficiency building code.'
"The plan is modeled on building code enforcement in California. Each time a home is built, remodeled, or – in the case of the federal plan – preparing to be sold, a G-man wearing a federal badge and armed with a clipboard will show up at your house to make sure ... all of your appliances have been updated with the most recent Energy Star-approved internal communication devices, and that the Home Area Network has been properly installed and connected to your new SmartMeter, whether you like it or not," he says.
Be the first to see the full documentation of how your life could be changed by climate-related laws, taxes and regulations, in "Climategate"
"This is not a helpful plan to assist you in meeting your family budget; it's a social engineering scheme, designed and promoted by the federal government to change your behavior," he said. "By having the capability to read your meter many times a day, the utility company is able to effectively establish demand pricing schedules; thus, using too much electricity during the peak periods is going to cost you."
Further, he writes, part of the Big Brother spy system actually already is embedded in the law..
"The term SmartGrid [made law in 2007] refers to a distribution system that allows for flow of information from a customer's meter in two directions: both inside the house to thermostats and appliances and other devices, and back to the utility. … Once the…SmartMeter [is] connected to the SmartGrid, Big Brother will become the new authority figure in your home. Want to do a load of laundry or read at 3 p.m. on a hot afternoon in August? Good luck. With a bureaucratic keystroke, anything attached to your [home] could be selectively turned off – or on – without your approval."
The book details, among other things, the warping of the scientific process over global warming, the massive enrichment of its supporters, President Obama's early and continuing support and the anti-American roots of environmental alarmism.
Sussman, formerly a highly acclaimed San Francisco meteorologist, also is the newest morning host at KSFO Radio (560 AM), the highest-rated talk show in the San Francisco Bay Area and the fourth-largest radio market in the country.
In the original scandal that spawned the name Climategate, the hacked e-mails of Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit in Norwich, England, and others uncovered schemes to employ "tricks" with warming trends, squelch skeptics and defame journals that published them.
But Sussman reveals that Jones' work at the University of East Anglia wasn't alone in its apparent manipulation of research. He charges that James Hansen, director at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, has treated his position as "activist-scientist."
Hansen is quoted in the book with the opinion, "We're leaving a situation for our children and grandchildren which is not of their making, but they're going to suffer because of it. So I think they should start to act up and put some pressure on their elders, and on legislatures, and begin to get some action."
Probably the most visible alarmist over global warming has been former vice president Al Gore, who reportedly has made tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars for himself. Sussman notes that Gore has said "our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands."
Sussman even documents how Obama, as a board member for the Joyce Foundation, voted for a $1.1 million grant to launch a privately owned "Chicago Climate Exchange."
Sussman warns it never has been about weather; it's about control of Americans and everything they do.
"It’s obvious to everyone that this global-warming facade is in meltdown mode," said Joseph Farah, publisher of WND Books and founder and CEO of WorldNetDaily.com. "Now Brian's important book comes along just in time to reveal exactly why this Big Lie was foisted on us – and what we can do to stop it cold."
Earth Day is all the evidence of deception needed, said Sussman. First celebrated in 1970 on the 100th anniversary of the birth of communist leader Vladimir Lenin, it was founded by Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wis.; former Stanford student body president Denis Hayes; and author and Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich.
"Lenin's core political philosophy was linked at the hip with these newly fangled environmentalists who maintained that America's government must be altered, its economy planned and regulated, and its citizens better controlled," writes Sussman. "The environment would be the perfect tool to force these changes, and the most efficient way to gain converts would be through the public school system – the earlier the better."
In one of Obama's first acts during his reign, he pushed for the 2009 "Stimulus Bill," which allows $20 billion for programs relating to energy efficiency. $16 billion for weatherization of private home and $11 billion for "modernizing the nation's power grid."
Among WND's previous reports on the global warming dispute was when Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Joe Barton, R-Texas, cited doubts about the integrity of "climate change" science when he wrote a letter demanding an accounting of U.S. taxpayer support for the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
The controversy exploded late last year when a series of e-mails was hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain that indicate scientists were hiding and manipulating data and trying to marginalize critics.
The revelations were significant, because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signed two findings Dec. 7 that concluded greenhouse gases in the atmosphere "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." The EPA's rulings could mean thousands of dollars in additional taxes for individual consumers.
As the allegations of fraud expanded, Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., has suggested the Justice Department investigate scientists for potentially falsifying data.
The Orange County Register has posted a chart for consumers to try to keep up with all the scandals developing in the "global warming" community.
Among the scandals listed are:
* ClimateGate: The scandal over the CRU e-mails from East Anglia.
* FOIGate: In which British officials are investigating whether East Anglia scientists refused to follow that nation's freedom of information law about their work.
* ChinaGate: In which dozens of weather monitoring stations in rural China apparently have simply disappeared. This would lead to higher temperature averages since city levels frequently are warmer.
* HimalayaGate: In which an Indian climate official admitted in January that he falsely claimed Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 to prod governments into action.
* And PachauriGates I and II, SternGates I and II, AmazonGate (in which a claim that global warming would wipe out rain forests was exposed as a fraud), PeerReviewGate, RussianGate I and II and nearly a dozen others.
WND also reported recently when the St. Louis-based Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world, petitioned the EPA to re-examine its decisions in light of the controversy over the scientists' e-mails.
The company noted the "seriousness of the flaws" in the work.
Given the EPA's "extensive reliance" on those reports, "the "agency has no legal option but to re-examine the Endangerment Finding in light of this new information," the petition said.
On its website, the company said the EPA's earlier ruling "could mean regulation of hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of buildings, farms, businesses and other facilities in the U.S."
Texas officials also have filed a lawsuit accusing the federal government of using "tainted" information to arrive at the EPA conclusion and it asks that the EPA's decisions be set aside. Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, also filed a petition demanding the EPA reconsider its greenhouse gas finding.
The scientific community actually is anything but unanimous on climate change.
The disunity is documented by the Petition Project, launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered. The effort by Art Robinson, a research professor of chemistry and cofounder of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in 1973, now lists tens of thousands of qualified scientists who endorse the following statement:
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
Among the original e-mails hacked from East Anglia and posted online was, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."
Just when you thought the government couldn't get any more invasive than the 2010 Census and requirements under "Obamacare" that your medical records be posted on the Internet, a coming book called "Climategate" by veteran meteorologist Brian Sussman warns that soon there could be a "green goon squad" visiting at your door.
Sussman's book, the newest title by WND books and scheduled for release April 22 "Earth Day," has been charting for several weeks already among Amazon's top 10 preordered titles. It arrives just as people who thought the campaign over global warming was being dropped over revelations of apparent manipulation by researchers in the field are becoming concerned that Washington still has it on the fast-track.
Sussman writes in "Climategate" that not only are promoters of the belief that starting a car in Texas or heating a home in North Dakota contributes to a cataclysmic environmental warping are continuing their campaign, Washington already has parts of it in writing.
In Chapter 10 of his book, he cites the 2009 America Clean Energy and Security Act which already has passed the U.S. House.
"Buried in the 2009 America Clean Energy and Security Act are federally mandated energy-efficient building regulations, which supersede all local and state codes and which will be enforced by a national, green goon squad, funded in part by revenues from energy taxes, as well as by an annual $25 million from the Department of Energy 'to provide necessary enforcement of a national energy efficiency building code,'" he confirms.
"The legislation also authorizes the Secretary of Energy to 'enhance compliance by conducting training and education of builders and other professionals in the jurisdiction concerning the national energy efficiency building code.'
"The plan is modeled on building code enforcement in California. Each time a home is built, remodeled, or – in the case of the federal plan – preparing to be sold, a G-man wearing a federal badge and armed with a clipboard will show up at your house to make sure ... all of your appliances have been updated with the most recent Energy Star-approved internal communication devices, and that the Home Area Network has been properly installed and connected to your new SmartMeter, whether you like it or not," he says.
Be the first to see the full documentation of how your life could be changed by climate-related laws, taxes and regulations, in "Climategate"
"This is not a helpful plan to assist you in meeting your family budget; it's a social engineering scheme, designed and promoted by the federal government to change your behavior," he said. "By having the capability to read your meter many times a day, the utility company is able to effectively establish demand pricing schedules; thus, using too much electricity during the peak periods is going to cost you."
Further, he writes, part of the Big Brother spy system actually already is embedded in the law..
"The term SmartGrid [made law in 2007] refers to a distribution system that allows for flow of information from a customer's meter in two directions: both inside the house to thermostats and appliances and other devices, and back to the utility. … Once the…SmartMeter [is] connected to the SmartGrid, Big Brother will become the new authority figure in your home. Want to do a load of laundry or read at 3 p.m. on a hot afternoon in August? Good luck. With a bureaucratic keystroke, anything attached to your [home] could be selectively turned off – or on – without your approval."
The book details, among other things, the warping of the scientific process over global warming, the massive enrichment of its supporters, President Obama's early and continuing support and the anti-American roots of environmental alarmism.
Sussman, formerly a highly acclaimed San Francisco meteorologist, also is the newest morning host at KSFO Radio (560 AM), the highest-rated talk show in the San Francisco Bay Area and the fourth-largest radio market in the country.
In the original scandal that spawned the name Climategate, the hacked e-mails of Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit in Norwich, England, and others uncovered schemes to employ "tricks" with warming trends, squelch skeptics and defame journals that published them.
But Sussman reveals that Jones' work at the University of East Anglia wasn't alone in its apparent manipulation of research. He charges that James Hansen, director at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, has treated his position as "activist-scientist."
Hansen is quoted in the book with the opinion, "We're leaving a situation for our children and grandchildren which is not of their making, but they're going to suffer because of it. So I think they should start to act up and put some pressure on their elders, and on legislatures, and begin to get some action."
Probably the most visible alarmist over global warming has been former vice president Al Gore, who reportedly has made tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars for himself. Sussman notes that Gore has said "our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands."
Sussman even documents how Obama, as a board member for the Joyce Foundation, voted for a $1.1 million grant to launch a privately owned "Chicago Climate Exchange."
Sussman warns it never has been about weather; it's about control of Americans and everything they do.
"It’s obvious to everyone that this global-warming facade is in meltdown mode," said Joseph Farah, publisher of WND Books and founder and CEO of WorldNetDaily.com. "Now Brian's important book comes along just in time to reveal exactly why this Big Lie was foisted on us – and what we can do to stop it cold."
Earth Day is all the evidence of deception needed, said Sussman. First celebrated in 1970 on the 100th anniversary of the birth of communist leader Vladimir Lenin, it was founded by Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wis.; former Stanford student body president Denis Hayes; and author and Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich.
"Lenin's core political philosophy was linked at the hip with these newly fangled environmentalists who maintained that America's government must be altered, its economy planned and regulated, and its citizens better controlled," writes Sussman. "The environment would be the perfect tool to force these changes, and the most efficient way to gain converts would be through the public school system – the earlier the better."
In one of Obama's first acts during his reign, he pushed for the 2009 "Stimulus Bill," which allows $20 billion for programs relating to energy efficiency. $16 billion for weatherization of private home and $11 billion for "modernizing the nation's power grid."
Among WND's previous reports on the global warming dispute was when Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Joe Barton, R-Texas, cited doubts about the integrity of "climate change" science when he wrote a letter demanding an accounting of U.S. taxpayer support for the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
The controversy exploded late last year when a series of e-mails was hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain that indicate scientists were hiding and manipulating data and trying to marginalize critics.
The revelations were significant, because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signed two findings Dec. 7 that concluded greenhouse gases in the atmosphere "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." The EPA's rulings could mean thousands of dollars in additional taxes for individual consumers.
As the allegations of fraud expanded, Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., has suggested the Justice Department investigate scientists for potentially falsifying data.
The Orange County Register has posted a chart for consumers to try to keep up with all the scandals developing in the "global warming" community.
Among the scandals listed are:
* ClimateGate: The scandal over the CRU e-mails from East Anglia.
* FOIGate: In which British officials are investigating whether East Anglia scientists refused to follow that nation's freedom of information law about their work.
* ChinaGate: In which dozens of weather monitoring stations in rural China apparently have simply disappeared. This would lead to higher temperature averages since city levels frequently are warmer.
* HimalayaGate: In which an Indian climate official admitted in January that he falsely claimed Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 to prod governments into action.
* And PachauriGates I and II, SternGates I and II, AmazonGate (in which a claim that global warming would wipe out rain forests was exposed as a fraud), PeerReviewGate, RussianGate I and II and nearly a dozen others.
WND also reported recently when the St. Louis-based Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world, petitioned the EPA to re-examine its decisions in light of the controversy over the scientists' e-mails.
The company noted the "seriousness of the flaws" in the work.
Given the EPA's "extensive reliance" on those reports, "the "agency has no legal option but to re-examine the Endangerment Finding in light of this new information," the petition said.
On its website, the company said the EPA's earlier ruling "could mean regulation of hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of buildings, farms, businesses and other facilities in the U.S."
Texas officials also have filed a lawsuit accusing the federal government of using "tainted" information to arrive at the EPA conclusion and it asks that the EPA's decisions be set aside. Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, also filed a petition demanding the EPA reconsider its greenhouse gas finding.
The scientific community actually is anything but unanimous on climate change.
The disunity is documented by the Petition Project, launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered. The effort by Art Robinson, a research professor of chemistry and cofounder of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in 1973, now lists tens of thousands of qualified scientists who endorse the following statement:
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
Among the original e-mails hacked from East Anglia and posted online was, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."
Get Rid Of Activist Judges
Good Riddance!
by Thomas Sowell
When Supreme Court Justices retire, there is usually some pious talk about their "service," especially when it has been a long "service." But the careers of all too many of these retiring jurists, including currently retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, have been an enormous disservice to this country.
Justice Stevens was on the High Court for 35 years-- more's the pity, or the disgrace. Justice Stevens voted to sustain racial quotas, created "rights" out of thin air for terrorists, and took away American citizens' rights to their own homes in the infamous "Kelo" decision of 2005.
The Constitution of the United States says that the government must pay "just compensation" for seizing a citizen's private property for "public use." In other words, if the government has to build a reservoir or bridge, and your property is in the way, they can take that property, provided that they pay you its value.
What has happened over the years, however, is that judges have eroded this protection and expanded the government's power-- as they have in other issues. This trend reached its logical extreme in the Supreme Court case of Kelo v. City of New London. This case involved local government officials seizing homes and businesses-- not for "public use" as the Constitution specified, but to turn this private property over to other private parties, to build more upscale facilities that would bring in more tax revenues.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the Supreme Court opinion that expanded the Constitution's authorization of seizing private property for "public use" to seizing private property for a "public purpose." And who would define what a "public purpose" is? Basically, those who were doing the seizing. As Justice Stevens put it, the government authorities' assessment of a proper "public purpose" was entitled to "great respect" by the courts.
Let's go back to square one. Just who was this provision of the Constitution supposed to restrict? Answer: government officials. And to whom would Justice Stevens defer: government officials. Why would those who wrote the Constitution waste good ink putting that protection in there, if not to protect citizens from the very government officials to whom Justice Stevens deferred?
John Paul Stevens is a classic example of what has been wrong with too many Republicans' appointments to the Supreme Court. The biggest argument in favor of nominating him was that he could be confirmed by the Senate without a fight.
Democratic presidents appoint judges who will push their political agenda from the federal bench, even if that requires stretching and twisting the Constitution to reach their goals.
Republicans too often appoint judges whose confirmation will not require a big fight with the Democrats. You can always avoid a fight by surrendering, and a whole wing of the Republican party has long ago mastered the art of preemptive surrender.
The net result has been a whole string of Republican Justices of the Supreme Court carrying out the Democrats' agenda, in disregard of the Constitution. John Paul Stevens has been just one.
There may have been some excuse for President Ford's picking such a man, in order to avoid a fight, at a time when he was an unelected President who came into office in the wake of Richard Nixon's resignation in disgrace after Watergate, creating lasting damage to the public's support of the Republicans.
But there was no such excuse for the elder President Bush to appoint David Souter, much less for President Eisenhower, with back-to-back landslide victories at the polls, to inflict William J. Brennan on the country.
In light of these justices' records, and in view of how long justices remain on the court, nominating such people was close to criminal negligence.
If and when the Republicans return to power in Washington, we can only hope that they remember what got them suddenly and unceremoniously dumped out of power the last time. Basically, it was running as Republicans and then governing as if they were Democrats, running up big deficits, with lots of earmarks and interfering with the market.
But their most lasting damage to the country has been putting people like John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.
by Thomas Sowell
When Supreme Court Justices retire, there is usually some pious talk about their "service," especially when it has been a long "service." But the careers of all too many of these retiring jurists, including currently retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, have been an enormous disservice to this country.
Justice Stevens was on the High Court for 35 years-- more's the pity, or the disgrace. Justice Stevens voted to sustain racial quotas, created "rights" out of thin air for terrorists, and took away American citizens' rights to their own homes in the infamous "Kelo" decision of 2005.
The Constitution of the United States says that the government must pay "just compensation" for seizing a citizen's private property for "public use." In other words, if the government has to build a reservoir or bridge, and your property is in the way, they can take that property, provided that they pay you its value.
What has happened over the years, however, is that judges have eroded this protection and expanded the government's power-- as they have in other issues. This trend reached its logical extreme in the Supreme Court case of Kelo v. City of New London. This case involved local government officials seizing homes and businesses-- not for "public use" as the Constitution specified, but to turn this private property over to other private parties, to build more upscale facilities that would bring in more tax revenues.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the Supreme Court opinion that expanded the Constitution's authorization of seizing private property for "public use" to seizing private property for a "public purpose." And who would define what a "public purpose" is? Basically, those who were doing the seizing. As Justice Stevens put it, the government authorities' assessment of a proper "public purpose" was entitled to "great respect" by the courts.
Let's go back to square one. Just who was this provision of the Constitution supposed to restrict? Answer: government officials. And to whom would Justice Stevens defer: government officials. Why would those who wrote the Constitution waste good ink putting that protection in there, if not to protect citizens from the very government officials to whom Justice Stevens deferred?
John Paul Stevens is a classic example of what has been wrong with too many Republicans' appointments to the Supreme Court. The biggest argument in favor of nominating him was that he could be confirmed by the Senate without a fight.
Democratic presidents appoint judges who will push their political agenda from the federal bench, even if that requires stretching and twisting the Constitution to reach their goals.
Republicans too often appoint judges whose confirmation will not require a big fight with the Democrats. You can always avoid a fight by surrendering, and a whole wing of the Republican party has long ago mastered the art of preemptive surrender.
The net result has been a whole string of Republican Justices of the Supreme Court carrying out the Democrats' agenda, in disregard of the Constitution. John Paul Stevens has been just one.
There may have been some excuse for President Ford's picking such a man, in order to avoid a fight, at a time when he was an unelected President who came into office in the wake of Richard Nixon's resignation in disgrace after Watergate, creating lasting damage to the public's support of the Republicans.
But there was no such excuse for the elder President Bush to appoint David Souter, much less for President Eisenhower, with back-to-back landslide victories at the polls, to inflict William J. Brennan on the country.
In light of these justices' records, and in view of how long justices remain on the court, nominating such people was close to criminal negligence.
If and when the Republicans return to power in Washington, we can only hope that they remember what got them suddenly and unceremoniously dumped out of power the last time. Basically, it was running as Republicans and then governing as if they were Democrats, running up big deficits, with lots of earmarks and interfering with the market.
But their most lasting damage to the country has been putting people like John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Send the Muslims back Home
Time to restrict Muslim immigration to U.S., send them back home
Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels spent hundreds of hours counseling Muslim youth in Danish prisons, and shared what he learned about Muslim culture in a recently published book, Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist's Experience from Copenhagen. An astonishing 70 percent of the prison population in the Copenhagen youth prison are men of Muslim heritage.
The Danes spend 300,000 euros ($400,000 U.S.) a year on social problems created by Muslim immigrants. It would be a far better use of those funds, he argues, to use them to send Muslim immigrants back to countries which share their fundamental values, where perhaps they can serve as ambassadors for more free and democratic societies in their countries of origin by taking with them some of the ideas and ideals they observed in the West.
Sennels recounts some of the sobering lessons he learned about Islam in an interview with EuropeNews, which you can read here.
His sobering conclusion, with which I agree: the integration of Muslims into Western societies is "impossible."
It's time, he says, to "immediately stop all immigration of people from Muslim countries to Europe until we have proven that integration of Muslims is possible."
And secondly, he believes that we should help current Muslim immigrants "build a new and meaningful life in a society that they understand and that understands them." This means, he says, "to assist them in starting a new life in a Muslim country."
Here are the takeaways for the United States. First, the most compassionate thing we can do for Americans is to bring a halt to the immigration of Muslims into the U.S. This will protect our national security and preserve our national identity, culture, ideals and values. Muslims, by custom and religion, are simply unwilling to integrate into cultures with Western values and it is folly to pretend otherwise. In fact, they remain dedicated to subjecting all of America to sharia law and are working ceaselessly until that day of Islamic imposition comes.
The most compassionate thing we can do for Muslims who have already immigrated here is to help repatriate them back to Muslim countries, where they can live in a culture which shares their values, a place where they can once again be at home, surrounded by people who cherish their deeply held ideals. Why force them to chafe against the freedom, liberty and civil rights we cherish in the West?
In other words, simple Judeo-Christian compassion dictates a restriction and repatriation policy with regard to Muslim immigration into the U.S.
Sennels explodes several myths of Muslim integration along the way.
First, he points out that there is a vast difference in cultural background between those who grow up in a Muslim culture and those who grow up in a culture whose values have been shaped by Christianity. There is, he says, "extremely disproportional anti-social and anti-democratic behavior among Muslims." The Danish Bureau of Statistics discovered that Muslim countries take the first eight places on the top-10 list of criminals' country of origin. Denmark - the home country - comes in number nine on its own list.
Second, he concludes that Muslim criminality is caused by Islam or "Muslim culture" rather than by social problems in the countries to which they immigrate.
For example, a sudden explosion of anger is something that causes shame in a culture shaped by Christianity. But in Islam, it is exactly the opposite. If a man's honor is offended in some way, a Muslim is "simply expected to show aggression and often also verbal or physical revenge." So while anger lowers your status in a place like America, it elevates your status in a Muslim subculture.
Even more telling is the strong identification Muslims have with Muslim culture, an identification that supersedes any affiliation with their new country. In Germany, for instance, only 12 percent of Muslims see themselves as more German than Muslim, while in France and Denmark, only 14 percent of Muslims see themselves as more French or Danish than Muslim.
Chillingly, Sennels discovered that prolonged exposure to Western culture doesn't mitigate this as we might hope. There are "no differences of opinion...among Muslims who are born and raised in Muslim countries and the opinion of their children who are born and raised in Danish society."
Thus Muslim ghettos are nurturing "a powerful and growing opposition to Western culture and values."
The third myth he explodes is that the percentage of Muslims with extremist views is small. His experience, in the wake of the deadly riots by young Muslims in 2008, is quite different. Muslims who did not practice the Islamic religion in their daily lives lit fires and attacked the police, and justified it on the grounds that Danish society, by reprinting the Mohammed cartoons, had "proven itself to be racist and against Islam and Muslim culture."
The fourth myth he explodes is that it is poverty among immigrants which leads to social problems. In reality, he says, it's exactly the reverse. It is the social problems they create for themselves that lead to poverty. He discovered that among most Muslims there is a "very low focus on supporting one's children in school and on one's own education," and a lack of motivation for creating a professional career. All this combines to produce endemic poverty among Muslim immigrants. In a word, what is missing is the Protestant work ethic. And that is because, well, they're not Protestants.
Sennels concludes that "there is no research in Europe" that supports the view the Muslim integration is even attainable. "[F]or the largest part integration...of Muslims is not possible." those who argue otherwise are not "bas(ing) their judgment on facts."
The overarching explanation for the virtual impossibility of Muslim assimilation is that "[t]he Muslim and the Western cultures are fundamentally very different." Muslims, in his extensive experience, are either incapable or unwilling to make the changes in basic personality structure that are necessary. Those that do undergo a "long and exhaustive struggle" internally and "often pay a high personal price on the outer level" (think Rifqa Bary here) "because their Muslim friends and families despise and/or disown them for leaving their culture."
It's often been observed that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. We are watching a dismal historical experiment in uncontrolled Islamic immigration unfold before our very eyes in Europe, and watching European culture disintegrate before our very eyes. Let's learn - and apply - the lessons from Europe. If we do not, it may soon be too late to save what is left of American culture.
Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels spent hundreds of hours counseling Muslim youth in Danish prisons, and shared what he learned about Muslim culture in a recently published book, Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist's Experience from Copenhagen. An astonishing 70 percent of the prison population in the Copenhagen youth prison are men of Muslim heritage.
The Danes spend 300,000 euros ($400,000 U.S.) a year on social problems created by Muslim immigrants. It would be a far better use of those funds, he argues, to use them to send Muslim immigrants back to countries which share their fundamental values, where perhaps they can serve as ambassadors for more free and democratic societies in their countries of origin by taking with them some of the ideas and ideals they observed in the West.
Sennels recounts some of the sobering lessons he learned about Islam in an interview with EuropeNews, which you can read here.
His sobering conclusion, with which I agree: the integration of Muslims into Western societies is "impossible."
It's time, he says, to "immediately stop all immigration of people from Muslim countries to Europe until we have proven that integration of Muslims is possible."
And secondly, he believes that we should help current Muslim immigrants "build a new and meaningful life in a society that they understand and that understands them." This means, he says, "to assist them in starting a new life in a Muslim country."
Here are the takeaways for the United States. First, the most compassionate thing we can do for Americans is to bring a halt to the immigration of Muslims into the U.S. This will protect our national security and preserve our national identity, culture, ideals and values. Muslims, by custom and religion, are simply unwilling to integrate into cultures with Western values and it is folly to pretend otherwise. In fact, they remain dedicated to subjecting all of America to sharia law and are working ceaselessly until that day of Islamic imposition comes.
The most compassionate thing we can do for Muslims who have already immigrated here is to help repatriate them back to Muslim countries, where they can live in a culture which shares their values, a place where they can once again be at home, surrounded by people who cherish their deeply held ideals. Why force them to chafe against the freedom, liberty and civil rights we cherish in the West?
In other words, simple Judeo-Christian compassion dictates a restriction and repatriation policy with regard to Muslim immigration into the U.S.
Sennels explodes several myths of Muslim integration along the way.
First, he points out that there is a vast difference in cultural background between those who grow up in a Muslim culture and those who grow up in a culture whose values have been shaped by Christianity. There is, he says, "extremely disproportional anti-social and anti-democratic behavior among Muslims." The Danish Bureau of Statistics discovered that Muslim countries take the first eight places on the top-10 list of criminals' country of origin. Denmark - the home country - comes in number nine on its own list.
Second, he concludes that Muslim criminality is caused by Islam or "Muslim culture" rather than by social problems in the countries to which they immigrate.
For example, a sudden explosion of anger is something that causes shame in a culture shaped by Christianity. But in Islam, it is exactly the opposite. If a man's honor is offended in some way, a Muslim is "simply expected to show aggression and often also verbal or physical revenge." So while anger lowers your status in a place like America, it elevates your status in a Muslim subculture.
Even more telling is the strong identification Muslims have with Muslim culture, an identification that supersedes any affiliation with their new country. In Germany, for instance, only 12 percent of Muslims see themselves as more German than Muslim, while in France and Denmark, only 14 percent of Muslims see themselves as more French or Danish than Muslim.
Chillingly, Sennels discovered that prolonged exposure to Western culture doesn't mitigate this as we might hope. There are "no differences of opinion...among Muslims who are born and raised in Muslim countries and the opinion of their children who are born and raised in Danish society."
Thus Muslim ghettos are nurturing "a powerful and growing opposition to Western culture and values."
The third myth he explodes is that the percentage of Muslims with extremist views is small. His experience, in the wake of the deadly riots by young Muslims in 2008, is quite different. Muslims who did not practice the Islamic religion in their daily lives lit fires and attacked the police, and justified it on the grounds that Danish society, by reprinting the Mohammed cartoons, had "proven itself to be racist and against Islam and Muslim culture."
The fourth myth he explodes is that it is poverty among immigrants which leads to social problems. In reality, he says, it's exactly the reverse. It is the social problems they create for themselves that lead to poverty. He discovered that among most Muslims there is a "very low focus on supporting one's children in school and on one's own education," and a lack of motivation for creating a professional career. All this combines to produce endemic poverty among Muslim immigrants. In a word, what is missing is the Protestant work ethic. And that is because, well, they're not Protestants.
Sennels concludes that "there is no research in Europe" that supports the view the Muslim integration is even attainable. "[F]or the largest part integration...of Muslims is not possible." those who argue otherwise are not "bas(ing) their judgment on facts."
The overarching explanation for the virtual impossibility of Muslim assimilation is that "[t]he Muslim and the Western cultures are fundamentally very different." Muslims, in his extensive experience, are either incapable or unwilling to make the changes in basic personality structure that are necessary. Those that do undergo a "long and exhaustive struggle" internally and "often pay a high personal price on the outer level" (think Rifqa Bary here) "because their Muslim friends and families despise and/or disown them for leaving their culture."
It's often been observed that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. We are watching a dismal historical experiment in uncontrolled Islamic immigration unfold before our very eyes in Europe, and watching European culture disintegrate before our very eyes. Let's learn - and apply - the lessons from Europe. If we do not, it may soon be too late to save what is left of American culture.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Preserve the Union
The Federalist No. 16: The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the Union
by The Federalist Papers
THE tendency of the principle of legislation for States, or communities, in their political capacities, as it has been exemplified by the experiment we have made of it, is equally attested by the events which have befallen all other governments of the confederate kind, of which we have any account, in exact proportion to its prevalence in those systems. The confirmations of this fact will be worthy of a distinct and particular examination. I shall content myself with barely observing here, that of all the confederacies of antiquity, which history has handed down to us, the Lycian and Achaean leagues, as far as there remain vestiges of them, appear to have been most free from the fetters of that mistaken principle, and were accordingly those which have best deserved, and have most liberally received, the applauding suffrages of political writers.
This exceptionable principle may, as truly as emphatically, be styled the parent of anarchy: It has been seen that delinquencies in the members of the Union are its natural and necessary offspring; and that whenever they happen, the only constitutional remedy is force, and the immediate effect of the use of it, civil war.
It remains to inquire how far so odious an engine of government, in its application to us, would even be capable of answering its end. If there should not be a large army constantly at the disposal of the national government it would either not be able to employ force at all, or, when this could be done, it would amount to a war between parts of the Confederacy concerning the infractions of a league, in which the strongest combination would be most likely to prevail, whether it consisted of those who supported or of those who resisted the general authority. It would rarely happen that the delinquency to be redressed would be confined to a single member, and if there were more than one who had neglected their duty, similarity of situation would induce them to unite for common defense. Independent of this motive of sympathy, if a large and influential State should happen to be the aggressing member, it would commonly have weight enough with its neighbors to win over some of them as associates to its cause. Specious arguments of danger to the common liberty could easily be contrived; plausible excuses for the deficiencies of the party could, without difficulty, be invented to alarm the apprehensions, inflame the passions, and conciliate the good-will, even of those States which were not chargeable with any violation or omission of duty. This would be the more likely to take place, as the delinquencies of the larger members might be expected sometimes to proceed from an ambitious premeditation in their rulers, with a view to getting rid of all external control upon their designs of personal aggrandizement; the better to effect which it is presumable they would tamper beforehand with leading individuals in the adjacent States. If associates could not be found at home, recourse would be had to the aid of foreign powers, who would seldom be disinclined to encouraging the dissensions of a Confederacy, from the firm union of which they had so much to fear. When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation. The suggestions of wounded pride, the instigations of irritated resentment, would be apt to carry the States against which the arms of the Union were exerted, to any extremes necessary to avenge the affront or to avoid the disgrace of submission. The first war of this kind would probably terminate in a dissolution of the Union.
This may be considered as the violent death of the Confederacy. Its more natural death is what we now seem to be on the point of experiencing, if the federal system be not speedily renovated in a more substantial form. It is not probable, considering the genius of this country, that the complying States would often be inclined to support the authority of the Union by engaging in a war against the non-complying States. They would always be more ready to pursue the milder course of putting themselves upon an equal footing with the delinquent members by an imitation of their example. And the guilt of all would thus become the security of all. Our past experience has exhibited the operation of this spirit in its full light. There would, in fact, be an insuperable difficulty in ascertaining when force could with propriety be employed. In the article of pecuniary contribution, which would be the most usual source of delinquency, it would often be impossible to decide whether it had proceeded from disinclination or inability. The pretense of the latter would always be at hand. And the case must be very flagrant in which its fallacy could be detected with sufficient certainty to justify the harsh expedient of compulsion. It is easy to see that this problem alone, as often as it should occur, would open a wide field for the exercise of factious views, of partiality, and of oppression, in the majority that happened to prevail in the national council.
It seems to require no pains to prove that the States ought not to prefer a national Constitution which could only be kept in motion by the instrumentality of a large army continually on foot to execute the ordinary requisitions or decrees of the government. And yet this is the plain alternative involved by those who wish to deny it the power of extending its operations to individuals. Such a scheme, if practicable at all, would instantly degenerate into a military despotism; but it will be found in every light impracticable. The resources of the Union would not be equal to the maintenance of an army considerable enough to confine the larger States within the limits of their duty; nor would the means ever be furnished of forming such an army in the first instance. Whoever considers the populousness and strength of several of these States singly at the present juncture, and looks forward to what they will become, even at the distance of half a century, will at once dismiss as idle and visionary any scheme which aims at regulating their movements by laws to operate upon them in their collective capacities, and to be executed by a coercion applicable to them in the same capacities. A project of this kind is little less romantic than the monster-taming spirit which is attributed to the fabulous heroes and demi-gods of antiquity.
Even in those confederacies which have been composed of members smaller than many of our counties, the principle of legislation for sovereign States, supported by military coercion, has never been found effectual. It has rarely been attempted to be employed, but against the weaker members; and in most instances attempts to coerce the refractory and disobedient have been the signals of bloody wars, in which one half of the confederacy has displayed its banners against the other half.
The result of these observations to an intelligent mind must be clearly this, that if it be possible at any rate to construct a federal government capable of regulating the common concerns and preserving the general tranquillity, it must be founded, as to the objects committed to its care, upon the reverse of the principle contended for by the opponents of the proposed Constitution. It must carry its agency to the persons of the citizens. It must stand in need of no intermediate legislations; but must itself be empowered to employ the arm of the ordinary magistrate to execute its own resolutions. The majesty of the national authority must be manifested through the medium of the courts of justice. The government of the Union, like that of each State, must be able to address itself immediately to the hopes and fears of individuals; and to attract to its support those passions which have the strongest influence upon the human heart. It must, in short, possess all the means, and have aright to resort to all the methods, of executing the powers with which it is intrusted, that are possessed and exercised by the government of the particular States.
To this reasoning it may perhaps be objected, that if any State should be disaffected to the authority of the Union, it could at any time obstruct the execution of its laws, and bring the matter to the same issue of force, with the necessity of which the opposite scheme is reproached.
The pausibility of this objection will vanish the moment we advert to the essential difference between a mere NON-COMPLIANCE and a DIRECT and ACTIVE RESISTANCE. If the interposition of the State legislatures be necessary to give effect to a measure of the Union, they have only NOT TO ACT, or TO ACT EVASIVELY, and the measure is defeated. This neglect of duty may be disguised under affected but unsubstantial provisions, so as not to appear, and of course not to excite any alarm in the people for the safety of the Constitution. The State leaders may even make a merit of their surreptitious invasions of it on the ground of some temporary convenience, exemption, or advantage.
But if the execution of the laws of the national government should not require the intervention of the State legislatures, if they were to pass into immediate operation upon the citizens themselves, the particular governments could not interrupt their progress without an open and violent exertion of an unconstitutional power. No omissions nor evasions would answer the end. They would be obliged to act, and in such a manner as would leave no doubt that they had encroached on the national rights. An experiment of this nature would always be hazardous in the face of a constitution in any degree competent to its own defense, and of a people enlightened enough to distinguish between a legal exercise and an illegal usurpation of authority. The success of it would require not merely a factious majority in the legislature, but the concurrence of the courts of justice and of the body of the people. If the judges were not embarked in a conspiracy with the legislature, they would pronounce the resolutions of such a majority to be contrary to the supreme law of the land, unconstitutional, and void. If the people were not tainted with the spirit of their State representatives, they, as the natural guardians of the Constitution, would throw their weight into the national scale and give it a decided preponderancy in the contest. Attempts of this kind would not often be made with levity or rashness, because they could seldom be made without danger to the authors, unless in cases of a tyrannical exercise of the federal authority.
If opposition to the national government should arise from the disorderly conduct of refractory or seditious individuals, it could be overcome by the same means which are daily employed against the same evil under the State governments. The magistracy, being equally the ministers of the law of the land, from whatever source it might emanate, would doubtless be as ready to guard the national as the local regulations from the inroads of private licentiousness. As to those partial commotions and insurrections, which sometimes disquiet society, from the intrigues of an inconsiderable faction, or from sudden or occasional illhumors that do not infect the great body of the community the general government could command more extensive resources for the suppression of disturbances of that kind than would be in the power of any single member. And as to those mortal feuds which, in certain conjunctures, spread a conflagration through a whole nation, or through a very large proportion of it, proceeding either from weighty causes of discontent given by the government or from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm, they do not fall within any ordinary rules of calculation. When they happen, they commonly amount to revolutions and dismemberments of empire. No form of government can always either avoid or control them. It is in vain to hope to guard against events too mighty for human foresight or precaution, and it would be idle to object to a government because it could not perform impossibilities.
PUBLIUS
by The Federalist Papers
THE tendency of the principle of legislation for States, or communities, in their political capacities, as it has been exemplified by the experiment we have made of it, is equally attested by the events which have befallen all other governments of the confederate kind, of which we have any account, in exact proportion to its prevalence in those systems. The confirmations of this fact will be worthy of a distinct and particular examination. I shall content myself with barely observing here, that of all the confederacies of antiquity, which history has handed down to us, the Lycian and Achaean leagues, as far as there remain vestiges of them, appear to have been most free from the fetters of that mistaken principle, and were accordingly those which have best deserved, and have most liberally received, the applauding suffrages of political writers.
This exceptionable principle may, as truly as emphatically, be styled the parent of anarchy: It has been seen that delinquencies in the members of the Union are its natural and necessary offspring; and that whenever they happen, the only constitutional remedy is force, and the immediate effect of the use of it, civil war.
It remains to inquire how far so odious an engine of government, in its application to us, would even be capable of answering its end. If there should not be a large army constantly at the disposal of the national government it would either not be able to employ force at all, or, when this could be done, it would amount to a war between parts of the Confederacy concerning the infractions of a league, in which the strongest combination would be most likely to prevail, whether it consisted of those who supported or of those who resisted the general authority. It would rarely happen that the delinquency to be redressed would be confined to a single member, and if there were more than one who had neglected their duty, similarity of situation would induce them to unite for common defense. Independent of this motive of sympathy, if a large and influential State should happen to be the aggressing member, it would commonly have weight enough with its neighbors to win over some of them as associates to its cause. Specious arguments of danger to the common liberty could easily be contrived; plausible excuses for the deficiencies of the party could, without difficulty, be invented to alarm the apprehensions, inflame the passions, and conciliate the good-will, even of those States which were not chargeable with any violation or omission of duty. This would be the more likely to take place, as the delinquencies of the larger members might be expected sometimes to proceed from an ambitious premeditation in their rulers, with a view to getting rid of all external control upon their designs of personal aggrandizement; the better to effect which it is presumable they would tamper beforehand with leading individuals in the adjacent States. If associates could not be found at home, recourse would be had to the aid of foreign powers, who would seldom be disinclined to encouraging the dissensions of a Confederacy, from the firm union of which they had so much to fear. When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation. The suggestions of wounded pride, the instigations of irritated resentment, would be apt to carry the States against which the arms of the Union were exerted, to any extremes necessary to avenge the affront or to avoid the disgrace of submission. The first war of this kind would probably terminate in a dissolution of the Union.
This may be considered as the violent death of the Confederacy. Its more natural death is what we now seem to be on the point of experiencing, if the federal system be not speedily renovated in a more substantial form. It is not probable, considering the genius of this country, that the complying States would often be inclined to support the authority of the Union by engaging in a war against the non-complying States. They would always be more ready to pursue the milder course of putting themselves upon an equal footing with the delinquent members by an imitation of their example. And the guilt of all would thus become the security of all. Our past experience has exhibited the operation of this spirit in its full light. There would, in fact, be an insuperable difficulty in ascertaining when force could with propriety be employed. In the article of pecuniary contribution, which would be the most usual source of delinquency, it would often be impossible to decide whether it had proceeded from disinclination or inability. The pretense of the latter would always be at hand. And the case must be very flagrant in which its fallacy could be detected with sufficient certainty to justify the harsh expedient of compulsion. It is easy to see that this problem alone, as often as it should occur, would open a wide field for the exercise of factious views, of partiality, and of oppression, in the majority that happened to prevail in the national council.
It seems to require no pains to prove that the States ought not to prefer a national Constitution which could only be kept in motion by the instrumentality of a large army continually on foot to execute the ordinary requisitions or decrees of the government. And yet this is the plain alternative involved by those who wish to deny it the power of extending its operations to individuals. Such a scheme, if practicable at all, would instantly degenerate into a military despotism; but it will be found in every light impracticable. The resources of the Union would not be equal to the maintenance of an army considerable enough to confine the larger States within the limits of their duty; nor would the means ever be furnished of forming such an army in the first instance. Whoever considers the populousness and strength of several of these States singly at the present juncture, and looks forward to what they will become, even at the distance of half a century, will at once dismiss as idle and visionary any scheme which aims at regulating their movements by laws to operate upon them in their collective capacities, and to be executed by a coercion applicable to them in the same capacities. A project of this kind is little less romantic than the monster-taming spirit which is attributed to the fabulous heroes and demi-gods of antiquity.
Even in those confederacies which have been composed of members smaller than many of our counties, the principle of legislation for sovereign States, supported by military coercion, has never been found effectual. It has rarely been attempted to be employed, but against the weaker members; and in most instances attempts to coerce the refractory and disobedient have been the signals of bloody wars, in which one half of the confederacy has displayed its banners against the other half.
The result of these observations to an intelligent mind must be clearly this, that if it be possible at any rate to construct a federal government capable of regulating the common concerns and preserving the general tranquillity, it must be founded, as to the objects committed to its care, upon the reverse of the principle contended for by the opponents of the proposed Constitution. It must carry its agency to the persons of the citizens. It must stand in need of no intermediate legislations; but must itself be empowered to employ the arm of the ordinary magistrate to execute its own resolutions. The majesty of the national authority must be manifested through the medium of the courts of justice. The government of the Union, like that of each State, must be able to address itself immediately to the hopes and fears of individuals; and to attract to its support those passions which have the strongest influence upon the human heart. It must, in short, possess all the means, and have aright to resort to all the methods, of executing the powers with which it is intrusted, that are possessed and exercised by the government of the particular States.
To this reasoning it may perhaps be objected, that if any State should be disaffected to the authority of the Union, it could at any time obstruct the execution of its laws, and bring the matter to the same issue of force, with the necessity of which the opposite scheme is reproached.
The pausibility of this objection will vanish the moment we advert to the essential difference between a mere NON-COMPLIANCE and a DIRECT and ACTIVE RESISTANCE. If the interposition of the State legislatures be necessary to give effect to a measure of the Union, they have only NOT TO ACT, or TO ACT EVASIVELY, and the measure is defeated. This neglect of duty may be disguised under affected but unsubstantial provisions, so as not to appear, and of course not to excite any alarm in the people for the safety of the Constitution. The State leaders may even make a merit of their surreptitious invasions of it on the ground of some temporary convenience, exemption, or advantage.
But if the execution of the laws of the national government should not require the intervention of the State legislatures, if they were to pass into immediate operation upon the citizens themselves, the particular governments could not interrupt their progress without an open and violent exertion of an unconstitutional power. No omissions nor evasions would answer the end. They would be obliged to act, and in such a manner as would leave no doubt that they had encroached on the national rights. An experiment of this nature would always be hazardous in the face of a constitution in any degree competent to its own defense, and of a people enlightened enough to distinguish between a legal exercise and an illegal usurpation of authority. The success of it would require not merely a factious majority in the legislature, but the concurrence of the courts of justice and of the body of the people. If the judges were not embarked in a conspiracy with the legislature, they would pronounce the resolutions of such a majority to be contrary to the supreme law of the land, unconstitutional, and void. If the people were not tainted with the spirit of their State representatives, they, as the natural guardians of the Constitution, would throw their weight into the national scale and give it a decided preponderancy in the contest. Attempts of this kind would not often be made with levity or rashness, because they could seldom be made without danger to the authors, unless in cases of a tyrannical exercise of the federal authority.
If opposition to the national government should arise from the disorderly conduct of refractory or seditious individuals, it could be overcome by the same means which are daily employed against the same evil under the State governments. The magistracy, being equally the ministers of the law of the land, from whatever source it might emanate, would doubtless be as ready to guard the national as the local regulations from the inroads of private licentiousness. As to those partial commotions and insurrections, which sometimes disquiet society, from the intrigues of an inconsiderable faction, or from sudden or occasional illhumors that do not infect the great body of the community the general government could command more extensive resources for the suppression of disturbances of that kind than would be in the power of any single member. And as to those mortal feuds which, in certain conjunctures, spread a conflagration through a whole nation, or through a very large proportion of it, proceeding either from weighty causes of discontent given by the government or from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm, they do not fall within any ordinary rules of calculation. When they happen, they commonly amount to revolutions and dismemberments of empire. No form of government can always either avoid or control them. It is in vain to hope to guard against events too mighty for human foresight or precaution, and it would be idle to object to a government because it could not perform impossibilities.
PUBLIUS
Tax on Tax
Obamacare's next trick: the VAT
By Charles Krauthammer
With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.
We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks -- the unfunded $200 billion-plus "doctor fix," the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only six years of outflows) -- is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.
It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare preempts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare's $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.
This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health-care costs.
Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, "health-care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost." But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.
Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody's is warning that the Treasury's AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.
Hence his deficit-reduction commission. It will report (surprise!) after the November elections.
What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.
But this won't be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health-care costs -- which are locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.
That's where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude -- if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).
It's the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.
American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.
Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama's triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan's strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes -- then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.
Obama's strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast and then feed it. Spend first -- which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.
And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.
As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.
Ultimately, even that won't be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health-care rationing.
It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.
By Charles Krauthammer
With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.
We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks -- the unfunded $200 billion-plus "doctor fix," the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only six years of outflows) -- is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.
It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare preempts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare's $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.
This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health-care costs.
Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, "health-care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost." But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.
Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody's is warning that the Treasury's AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.
Hence his deficit-reduction commission. It will report (surprise!) after the November elections.
What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.
But this won't be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health-care costs -- which are locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.
That's where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude -- if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).
It's the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.
American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.
Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama's triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan's strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes -- then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.
Obama's strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast and then feed it. Spend first -- which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.
And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.
As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.
Ultimately, even that won't be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health-care rationing.
It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Democrats Unconstitutional Vote Grab
Restoring Voting Rights of Convicted Felons and H.R. 3335
by Hans von Spakovsky
Heritage Foundation
Thank you for the invitation to testify before the Subcommittee on the subject of felons and the rights of states to prevent convicted criminals from voting.
I am Hans A. von Spakovsky, a Senior Legal Fellow and Manager of the Civil Justice Reform Initiative in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org). I was a Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission for two years and, of particular relevance to the subject of this hearing, I am a former career Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. I am also a former member of the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission as well as the Registration and Election Board of Fulton County, Georgia. I currently serve on the Electoral Board of Fairfax County, Virginia, and on the Virginia Advisory Board to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. All of the views and opinions I express in my testimony are my own and should not be construed as representing any official position of the Heritage Foundation or any other organization.
Various consequences attach to a criminal felony conviction. First, there may be (and usually are) prison or jail sentences. Second, there are other direct penalties such as fines, court costs, restitution, and possible probation and parole requirements. Finally, there are various disabilities such as the inability to own a gun, to work as a police officer, to serve in certain elected offices or to serve on a jury. In short, the initial time in prison is not, and has never been, the only way a felon pays his debt to society for breaking the law and endangering his fellow citizens and the public.
H.R. 3335 represents an unconstitutional intrusion into the rights of the states. Congress simply does not have the constitutional authority to force states to restore the voting rights of convicted felons. There are also good public policy reasons why this should not be done. While some states automatically restore the right to vote after a felon has completed all of the terms of his sentence, others require individual applications. States are entitled to make their own decisions on this issue. That includes implementing procedures that ensure that those who break the law to injure or murder their fellow citizens, to steal, or to damage our democracy by committing election crimes or engaging in public corruption like bribery, have paid their debt to society and, even more importantly, have shown that they can be trusted to exercise all of the rights of full citizenship.
H.R. 3335 states that the right of an individual to vote in any federal election cannot “be denied or abridged because that individual has been convicted of a criminal offense unless such individual is serving a felony sentence in a correctional institution or facility at the time of the election.” The definition of “correctional institution or facility” contained in the bill does not include “any residential community treatment center (or similar public or private facility).”
Thus, H.R. 3335 would force all states to immediately restore the ability to vote to convicted felons the moment they are out of prison – even if they are simply out on parole, are in a half-way house or have not completed other requirements of their sentence such as paying restitution to the victims of their crimes or fines and civil penalties imposed on them. In other words, states would be forced to allow criminals to vote before they have even completed the primary terms imposed on them as a punishment by their fellow citizens through our justice system. So at least some individuals who have shown no compunction whatsoever about breaking the law will be given the ability to help make the law.
However, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment specifically provides that states may abridge the right to vote of citizens “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” The Fourteenth Amendment simply recognized a process that goes back to ancient Greece and Rome. The claim that state laws that take away the right of felons to vote are all rooted in racial discrimination is simply historically inaccurate – even prior to the Civil War when many black Americans were slaves and could not vote, a majority of states took away the rights of voters who were convicted of crimes.
It is true that some Southern states tried to use these laws during Reconstruction and afterward to disenfranchise blacks, but those laws have all been changed and amended. The case cannot be made today that such laws are in any way applied in a discriminatory fashion. When they have been, they have been struck down, as the Supreme Court did to Alabama’s law in Hunter v. Underwood, 471 U.S. 222 (1985). However, that case involved Alabama’s 1901 Constitution that disenfranchised persons convicted not just of felonies, but of misdemeanors “involving moral turpitude,” a catchall that was used by state officials specifically to target black Alabamians.
Even the “Findings” in this bill do not claim that felon voting laws are administered in a racially discriminatory fashion; only that they have a “disparate impact” because of the higher incarceration rate of certain minorities. In the Hunter case, however, the Supreme Court specifically noted that “[p]roof of racially discriminatory intent is required to show a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.” No such showing of intentional discrimination can be made with regard to such state laws today and they cannot be held unconstitutional even if they have a “racially disproportionate impact.” Criminals lose their right to vote because of their own conscious actions in violating the law, not because of their race.
It should be kept in mind that the Fourteenth Amendment, like the Fifteenth Amendment, was one of the key post-Civil War amendments sponsored and passed by Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and abolition, to help secure the rights of black Americans, including their right to vote. Those same members of Congress deliberately and intentionally protected the right of states to withhold the right to vote from those citizens convicted of serious crimes against their fellow citizens.
Under our Constitution, if Congress is not acting pursuant to a specific grant of power in Article I, it is acting unconstitutionally. The federal government does not have the inherent power to do whatever it wants – we have a government of limited and enumerated powers. See U.S. v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995). There simply is no authority in Article I for Congress to force states to allow felons to vote, particularly in light of the language of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In fact, Section 2 of Article I says that voters for members of the House of Representatives “shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” The Seventeenth Amendment provides the same state qualification for voters for members of the Senate. In other words, the qualifications or eligibility requirements that states apply to their residents voting for state legislators must be applied to those same residents voting for members of Congress, which explicitly places in the hands of the states the ability to determine those qualifications.
This is confirmed by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers, Nos. 52 and 60. James Madison states, for example, in Federalist No. 52, that to have left such qualifications open to “the regulation of the Congress” would be improper. States also disqualify children, noncitizens, and the mentally incompetent. States cannot limit voting qualifications based on race or sex because of the explicit prohibitions of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments – but in contrast, the Fourteenth Amendment specifically allows them to limit those qualifications based on criminal convictions.
Congress is given the authority in Section 4 of Article I to alter the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives” but that power does not extend to the “qualifications” of voters. The qualification of a felon to vote cannot even remotely be compared to a regulation governing the time, place or manner of an election.
Congress has even less authority when it comes to presidential elections. Article II, Section 1, provides that states “shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” the electors of the Electoral College. Congress can only determine “the Time of choosing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes.” Thus, Congress clearly has no authority under these provisions to tell the states that they must allow felons to vote in presidential (or congressional) elections.
The Equal Protection Doctrine of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment also provides Congress with no authority on this issue. The “Findings” in H.R. 3335 state that “equal protection for Americans to vote in Federal elections” requires a uniform federal rule for felons. However, the Supreme Court threw out an equal protection challenge to California’s felon disenfranchisement law in 1974, concluding that “those who framed and adopted the Fourteenth Amendment could not have intended to prohibit outright in §1 of that Amendment that which was expressly exempted from the lesser sanction of reduced representation imposed by §2 of the Amendment.” Richardson v. Ramirez, 418 U.S. 24, 43 (1974).
Finally, Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970), in which the Supreme Court upheld a federal statute changing the voting age from 21 to 18 just prior to the ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and the elimination of residency requirements for federal elections also provides no basis for believing that Congress has any constitutional authority for H.R. 3335. The opinion in Mitchell was a fractured decision, in which eight Justices rejected the argument that Congress had the authority under Article I to make such changes – only Justice Black thought Congress had that inherent authority. Four of the justices based their opinion on the age change on the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The residency requirement was thrown out based on the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it infringed on an individual’s national right as a citizen to travel. While such a residency requirement would discriminate against individuals living in the same state by allowing older residents to vote while preventing newer residents from voting, a disparity in felon voting laws does not discriminate among voters in the same state.
Because the Fourteenth Amendment gives states the right to bar felons from voting, there is no equal protection violation because some states have different rules for when felons recover their right to vote (two states even allow felons to vote while they are in prison). As in the Richardson case, it cannot be argued that the Privileges or Immunities Clause in Section 1 can take away from the states a right specifically granted them in Section 2.
Finally, as the Eleventh Circuit said in Johnson v. Florida, 405 F.3d 1214 (2005), when it concluded that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act did not apply to Florida’s voting rules for felons, any contrary view would raise “serious constitutional problems because such an interpretation allows a congressional statute to override the text of the Constitution [in the Fourteenth Amendment].” Johnson at 1229 (“Congress has expressed its intent to exclude felon disenfranchisement provisions from Voting Rights Act scrutiny.” Id. at 1234).
Even if Congress had the constitutional authority to pass this legislation, which it does not, there are sound public policy reasons why it should not. The loss of civil rights is part of the sanction that our society has determined should be applied to criminals. Many black communities unfortunately suffer from high rates of crime, yet this bill would have a pernicious effect on the ability of law-abiding citizens to reduce crime in their own communities. These laws are overwhelmingly supported by the public, a clear sign that they do not want their ability to influence the decisions made by elected officials on controlling crime diluted by convicted felons or individuals on parole.
While some states automatically restore the rights of felons when they have completed their sentences, other states have more individualized procedures. Virginia, for example, has set up an application process for felons to apply for the restoration of their civil rights, including the right to vote. Virginia’s process allows for an individualized review in which the state can determine whether a felon has fully paid his debt to society and changed his ways. He cannot apply for restoration until he has been released from supervised probation for three years for nonviolent crimes or five years for violent, drug, or election-related crimes. That is perfectly reasonable and common-sense – particularly since a large majority of felons are rearrested and re-incarcerated within a short time after they are released from prison.
In Virginia, the felon must also show that he has paid all court costs, fines, and restitution to their victims. This proposed bill would completely ignore and override this process, particularly at the expense of victims who are still owed restitution, and grant relief on a wholesale basis, without considering whether someone is really entitled to restoration of his rights.
Finally, what is particularly odd about this proposed legislation is the fact that it is limited only to restoring the ability of convicted criminals to vote. The findings in Section 2 of H.R. 3335 state that this legislation will reintegrate “offenders into free society, helping to enhance public safety.” The findings also say felon disenfranchisement laws serve “no compelling State interest” for felons “who are living and working in the community.” If that is correct, than why does this legislation not propose to restore all of the other civil rights that a convicted criminal loses in many states?
If convicted criminals can now be trusted to exercise the right to vote, as the legislation concludes, and if restoring that ability will help integrate such criminals back into society, then why are their rights to public employment not restored? Many states prohibit felons from working as police officers or school teachers – if they can be trusted with the right to vote, why do the sponsors of this legislation not trust them to work as teachers in our public schools?
State and federal laws also prohibit felons from owning a gun (see e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)). If public safety will be enhanced by providing felons with the ability to vote as the legislation claims, why does this bill not also amend federal law to allow them to once again own a gun? Are we to believe that they can be trusted to vote but not to own a handgun? Are we to believe that the sponsors of this legislation think that a convicted child molester can be trusted to vote but cannot be trusted to be a teacher in a public school? Are we to believe a convicted drug dealer can be trusted to vote but cannot be trusted to be a police officer? Or is the true motivation here based more on the fact that their vote is important to winning close elections?
The problem with the supporters’ narrow focus is obvious. The sponsors apparently trust felons enough to require the automatic restoration of their right to vote, but don’t trust them enough to automatically restore their right to own a gun or all of their other civil rights that were taken away when they were convicted of murder or robbery or rape or bribery.
The American people and their freely elected state representatives must make their own decisions in their own states on when felons should have their civil rights restored, including the right to vote. The Constitution specifically gives that authority to the states and any legislation passed by Congress taking away that power is unconstitutional and bad public policy.
by Hans von Spakovsky
Heritage Foundation
Thank you for the invitation to testify before the Subcommittee on the subject of felons and the rights of states to prevent convicted criminals from voting.
I am Hans A. von Spakovsky, a Senior Legal Fellow and Manager of the Civil Justice Reform Initiative in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org). I was a Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission for two years and, of particular relevance to the subject of this hearing, I am a former career Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. I am also a former member of the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission as well as the Registration and Election Board of Fulton County, Georgia. I currently serve on the Electoral Board of Fairfax County, Virginia, and on the Virginia Advisory Board to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. All of the views and opinions I express in my testimony are my own and should not be construed as representing any official position of the Heritage Foundation or any other organization.
Various consequences attach to a criminal felony conviction. First, there may be (and usually are) prison or jail sentences. Second, there are other direct penalties such as fines, court costs, restitution, and possible probation and parole requirements. Finally, there are various disabilities such as the inability to own a gun, to work as a police officer, to serve in certain elected offices or to serve on a jury. In short, the initial time in prison is not, and has never been, the only way a felon pays his debt to society for breaking the law and endangering his fellow citizens and the public.
H.R. 3335 represents an unconstitutional intrusion into the rights of the states. Congress simply does not have the constitutional authority to force states to restore the voting rights of convicted felons. There are also good public policy reasons why this should not be done. While some states automatically restore the right to vote after a felon has completed all of the terms of his sentence, others require individual applications. States are entitled to make their own decisions on this issue. That includes implementing procedures that ensure that those who break the law to injure or murder their fellow citizens, to steal, or to damage our democracy by committing election crimes or engaging in public corruption like bribery, have paid their debt to society and, even more importantly, have shown that they can be trusted to exercise all of the rights of full citizenship.
H.R. 3335 states that the right of an individual to vote in any federal election cannot “be denied or abridged because that individual has been convicted of a criminal offense unless such individual is serving a felony sentence in a correctional institution or facility at the time of the election.” The definition of “correctional institution or facility” contained in the bill does not include “any residential community treatment center (or similar public or private facility).”
Thus, H.R. 3335 would force all states to immediately restore the ability to vote to convicted felons the moment they are out of prison – even if they are simply out on parole, are in a half-way house or have not completed other requirements of their sentence such as paying restitution to the victims of their crimes or fines and civil penalties imposed on them. In other words, states would be forced to allow criminals to vote before they have even completed the primary terms imposed on them as a punishment by their fellow citizens through our justice system. So at least some individuals who have shown no compunction whatsoever about breaking the law will be given the ability to help make the law.
However, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment specifically provides that states may abridge the right to vote of citizens “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” The Fourteenth Amendment simply recognized a process that goes back to ancient Greece and Rome. The claim that state laws that take away the right of felons to vote are all rooted in racial discrimination is simply historically inaccurate – even prior to the Civil War when many black Americans were slaves and could not vote, a majority of states took away the rights of voters who were convicted of crimes.
It is true that some Southern states tried to use these laws during Reconstruction and afterward to disenfranchise blacks, but those laws have all been changed and amended. The case cannot be made today that such laws are in any way applied in a discriminatory fashion. When they have been, they have been struck down, as the Supreme Court did to Alabama’s law in Hunter v. Underwood, 471 U.S. 222 (1985). However, that case involved Alabama’s 1901 Constitution that disenfranchised persons convicted not just of felonies, but of misdemeanors “involving moral turpitude,” a catchall that was used by state officials specifically to target black Alabamians.
Even the “Findings” in this bill do not claim that felon voting laws are administered in a racially discriminatory fashion; only that they have a “disparate impact” because of the higher incarceration rate of certain minorities. In the Hunter case, however, the Supreme Court specifically noted that “[p]roof of racially discriminatory intent is required to show a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.” No such showing of intentional discrimination can be made with regard to such state laws today and they cannot be held unconstitutional even if they have a “racially disproportionate impact.” Criminals lose their right to vote because of their own conscious actions in violating the law, not because of their race.
It should be kept in mind that the Fourteenth Amendment, like the Fifteenth Amendment, was one of the key post-Civil War amendments sponsored and passed by Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and abolition, to help secure the rights of black Americans, including their right to vote. Those same members of Congress deliberately and intentionally protected the right of states to withhold the right to vote from those citizens convicted of serious crimes against their fellow citizens.
Under our Constitution, if Congress is not acting pursuant to a specific grant of power in Article I, it is acting unconstitutionally. The federal government does not have the inherent power to do whatever it wants – we have a government of limited and enumerated powers. See U.S. v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995). There simply is no authority in Article I for Congress to force states to allow felons to vote, particularly in light of the language of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In fact, Section 2 of Article I says that voters for members of the House of Representatives “shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” The Seventeenth Amendment provides the same state qualification for voters for members of the Senate. In other words, the qualifications or eligibility requirements that states apply to their residents voting for state legislators must be applied to those same residents voting for members of Congress, which explicitly places in the hands of the states the ability to determine those qualifications.
This is confirmed by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers, Nos. 52 and 60. James Madison states, for example, in Federalist No. 52, that to have left such qualifications open to “the regulation of the Congress” would be improper. States also disqualify children, noncitizens, and the mentally incompetent. States cannot limit voting qualifications based on race or sex because of the explicit prohibitions of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments – but in contrast, the Fourteenth Amendment specifically allows them to limit those qualifications based on criminal convictions.
Congress is given the authority in Section 4 of Article I to alter the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives” but that power does not extend to the “qualifications” of voters. The qualification of a felon to vote cannot even remotely be compared to a regulation governing the time, place or manner of an election.
Congress has even less authority when it comes to presidential elections. Article II, Section 1, provides that states “shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” the electors of the Electoral College. Congress can only determine “the Time of choosing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes.” Thus, Congress clearly has no authority under these provisions to tell the states that they must allow felons to vote in presidential (or congressional) elections.
The Equal Protection Doctrine of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment also provides Congress with no authority on this issue. The “Findings” in H.R. 3335 state that “equal protection for Americans to vote in Federal elections” requires a uniform federal rule for felons. However, the Supreme Court threw out an equal protection challenge to California’s felon disenfranchisement law in 1974, concluding that “those who framed and adopted the Fourteenth Amendment could not have intended to prohibit outright in §1 of that Amendment that which was expressly exempted from the lesser sanction of reduced representation imposed by §2 of the Amendment.” Richardson v. Ramirez, 418 U.S. 24, 43 (1974).
Finally, Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970), in which the Supreme Court upheld a federal statute changing the voting age from 21 to 18 just prior to the ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and the elimination of residency requirements for federal elections also provides no basis for believing that Congress has any constitutional authority for H.R. 3335. The opinion in Mitchell was a fractured decision, in which eight Justices rejected the argument that Congress had the authority under Article I to make such changes – only Justice Black thought Congress had that inherent authority. Four of the justices based their opinion on the age change on the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The residency requirement was thrown out based on the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it infringed on an individual’s national right as a citizen to travel. While such a residency requirement would discriminate against individuals living in the same state by allowing older residents to vote while preventing newer residents from voting, a disparity in felon voting laws does not discriminate among voters in the same state.
Because the Fourteenth Amendment gives states the right to bar felons from voting, there is no equal protection violation because some states have different rules for when felons recover their right to vote (two states even allow felons to vote while they are in prison). As in the Richardson case, it cannot be argued that the Privileges or Immunities Clause in Section 1 can take away from the states a right specifically granted them in Section 2.
Finally, as the Eleventh Circuit said in Johnson v. Florida, 405 F.3d 1214 (2005), when it concluded that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act did not apply to Florida’s voting rules for felons, any contrary view would raise “serious constitutional problems because such an interpretation allows a congressional statute to override the text of the Constitution [in the Fourteenth Amendment].” Johnson at 1229 (“Congress has expressed its intent to exclude felon disenfranchisement provisions from Voting Rights Act scrutiny.” Id. at 1234).
Even if Congress had the constitutional authority to pass this legislation, which it does not, there are sound public policy reasons why it should not. The loss of civil rights is part of the sanction that our society has determined should be applied to criminals. Many black communities unfortunately suffer from high rates of crime, yet this bill would have a pernicious effect on the ability of law-abiding citizens to reduce crime in their own communities. These laws are overwhelmingly supported by the public, a clear sign that they do not want their ability to influence the decisions made by elected officials on controlling crime diluted by convicted felons or individuals on parole.
While some states automatically restore the rights of felons when they have completed their sentences, other states have more individualized procedures. Virginia, for example, has set up an application process for felons to apply for the restoration of their civil rights, including the right to vote. Virginia’s process allows for an individualized review in which the state can determine whether a felon has fully paid his debt to society and changed his ways. He cannot apply for restoration until he has been released from supervised probation for three years for nonviolent crimes or five years for violent, drug, or election-related crimes. That is perfectly reasonable and common-sense – particularly since a large majority of felons are rearrested and re-incarcerated within a short time after they are released from prison.
In Virginia, the felon must also show that he has paid all court costs, fines, and restitution to their victims. This proposed bill would completely ignore and override this process, particularly at the expense of victims who are still owed restitution, and grant relief on a wholesale basis, without considering whether someone is really entitled to restoration of his rights.
Finally, what is particularly odd about this proposed legislation is the fact that it is limited only to restoring the ability of convicted criminals to vote. The findings in Section 2 of H.R. 3335 state that this legislation will reintegrate “offenders into free society, helping to enhance public safety.” The findings also say felon disenfranchisement laws serve “no compelling State interest” for felons “who are living and working in the community.” If that is correct, than why does this legislation not propose to restore all of the other civil rights that a convicted criminal loses in many states?
If convicted criminals can now be trusted to exercise the right to vote, as the legislation concludes, and if restoring that ability will help integrate such criminals back into society, then why are their rights to public employment not restored? Many states prohibit felons from working as police officers or school teachers – if they can be trusted with the right to vote, why do the sponsors of this legislation not trust them to work as teachers in our public schools?
State and federal laws also prohibit felons from owning a gun (see e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)). If public safety will be enhanced by providing felons with the ability to vote as the legislation claims, why does this bill not also amend federal law to allow them to once again own a gun? Are we to believe that they can be trusted to vote but not to own a handgun? Are we to believe that the sponsors of this legislation think that a convicted child molester can be trusted to vote but cannot be trusted to be a teacher in a public school? Are we to believe a convicted drug dealer can be trusted to vote but cannot be trusted to be a police officer? Or is the true motivation here based more on the fact that their vote is important to winning close elections?
The problem with the supporters’ narrow focus is obvious. The sponsors apparently trust felons enough to require the automatic restoration of their right to vote, but don’t trust them enough to automatically restore their right to own a gun or all of their other civil rights that were taken away when they were convicted of murder or robbery or rape or bribery.
The American people and their freely elected state representatives must make their own decisions in their own states on when felons should have their civil rights restored, including the right to vote. The Constitution specifically gives that authority to the states and any legislation passed by Congress taking away that power is unconstitutional and bad public policy.
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