Congressman Pete Stark informs us that the federal government is largely without limits:
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As I predicted back in December, the fight over Obamacare has moved to the states. Several big developments have hit recently which do not bode well for supporters of unconstitutionally government-run health care.
First, a Federal District Court Judge Henry Hudson rejected the government’s attempt to dismiss Virginia’s lawsuit against Obamacare (full decision here). The establishment line was that legal challenges to Obamacare were just partisan grandstanding, and that of course government has the power to tax a non-economic non-activity through the Commerce Clause. They were wrong as Judge Hudson noted that Obamacare’s constitutional argument “literally forges new ground and extends Commerce Clause powers beyond its current high watermark.” Whether or not the court eventually reaches the right conclusion and declares Obamacare’s individual mandate to be unconstitutional remains to be seen, but this is an important first step.
On top of this, the voters in Missouri turned out yesterday to give Obamacare their disapproval.
Tuesday’s 71 to 29 percent blowout vote on Proposition C left no doubt where voters stand as they handed President Obama’s health care law a stunning rejection.
The proposition attempts to protect Missourians from the new federal mandate to buy insurance.
It also tries overturning the new federal prohibitions on insurance companies selling insurance directly to people.
This is just the beginning of the long fight against massive government expansion and government-run healthcare. But so far, the battles are being won by the side of smart policy and Constitutional governance.
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This great video from the Institute for Justice highlights an issue which more people need to know about: civil asset forfeiture. It allows the police to steal your property without ever getting a conviction. Once they’ve grabbed your property, the burden is on you to prove that you’ve done nothing wrong.
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The Institute for Justice looks back at the disastrous Kelo decision.
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Vitriolic left-wing Senator Al Franken has bought into the conservative courts myth. This myth is popular only so far as the courts have not yet completely embraced left-wing “progressive” interpretations of the Constitution that in reality render its existance entirely meaningless. Rather, such views only dominate academia, the political class and almost all levels of the court system below SCOTUS, where it only captures at least 4 of the 9 justices.
Nevertheless, he’s now on the attack against “conservative activism:”
The first-term senator launched a full-throated attack on originalism, the judicial philosophy often upheld by conservatives as an example for model nominees for the federal courts.
“Originalism isn’t a pillar of our constitutional history. It’s a talking point,” Franken said, adding a jab at Chief Justice John Roberts for his famous comparison between judges and baseball umpires during Roberts’s confirmation hearings.
“How ridiculous,” Franken said. “Judges are nothing like umpires.”
Like Al Franken is nothing like a Senator?
The idea that there is “conservative activism” on the court is what is ridiculous. How often are left-wing overreaches from the executive and legislative branches actually struck down? Not often. The fact that we even have to debate whether SCOTUS will strike down the clearly unconstitutional individual mandate shows just how passive the post-New Deal courts are when it comes to enforcing constitutional restrictions on the schemes of Al Franken and co.
Al Franken wants the courts to roll over and let his big government comrades expand their power without resistance. Unfortunately, they’ve done largely that for most of the last century. A court that actively defended the Constitution, as opposed to the left-wing activism of writing laws from the bench, would be a dream come true.
Not good enough, not smart enough, and people just don't like you.
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Reminding us again how important it is to place judges on the Supreme Court that actually adhere to the doctrine that the Constitution is the law of the land, another important case is before the court. The Ninth Circuit wrongly sided with the teacher’s unions and others with a vested interest in defending education’s status quo of failure, but now the Supreme Court has a chance to correct this error.
From an Institute for Justice press release:
Leave a comment…This week, the Court agreed to decide whether Arizona’s scholarship tax credit program violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. That will thrust school choice back into the national spotlight to a degree not seen since 2002, when IJ defended the Cleveland school choice program in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that vouchers are constitutional.
…The ACLU claims that the state, by giving taxpayers the choice to donate to both religious and nonreligious School Tuition Organizations, is unconstitutionally advancing religion in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because most taxpayers to date have donated to religiously affiliated charities.
Mellor said, “This case is most notable for what it does not involve: state action advancing religion. Arizona structured its tax credit program to be completely neutral with regard to religion. Neither taxpayers nor parents have any financial incentive to donate to a religiously affiliated scholarship organization over a nonreligious scholarship organization or to select religious over nonreligious schools.”
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President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court comes as no surprise. I’m working on an op-ed already so I’m not going to go into it too much here, but I wanted to touch briefly on one aspect of the nomination: her lack of any judicial experience whatsoever.
No doubt this opens up a potential avenue of attack against her nomination, though she is all but certain to be confirmed. So how important is judicial experience? It certainly hasn’t always been a requirement, as a total of 40 Supreme Court Justices have been confirmed after being nominated with no prior experience. Yet the last such example was William Rehnquist, who was appointed by Nixon almost 40 years ago.
The practice of appointing Supreme Court members without judicial experience has gradually declined since the nation’s founding, when it was quite common. It’s only natural that the judiciary would institutionalize over time, forming a standard career path or expected procession for judicial nominees. Due to this, the nomination of an Kagan has become somewhat unusual.
I don’t think that fact necessarily means she’s not qualified. There’s a usefulness to the kind of institutionalization the judiciary has experienced and most of the time it ought to be respected, but it’s also easy for such institutions to become insular and stale. A nominee who has not proceeded along that expected institutional path might well have a fresh perspective to offer. Regardless of judicial experience, the most important qualifier should continue to be a nominee’s demonstrated fidelity to the Constitution.
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On Saturday the New York Times printed a collection of op-eds from various “legal experts,” describing “the kind of justice the court needs.” Here’s the list they came up with:
- A Politician
- A Veteran
- A Young Person
- An Evangelical
- A Nonbeliver
- An Immigrant
- A Gay Person
- An Asian
- A State Politico
- A Great Heart
The scourge of identity politics has so permeated our society that not a single one of these “legal experts” thought to recommend “A Good Judge.”
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Finding for a group tellingly named the Freedom From Religion Foundation, U.S. District Judge Barbara B. Crabb wrote:
It goes beyond mere “acknowledgment” of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context. . . . In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.
Nevermind the question of law for a second, as a matter of fact this is simply incorrect. According to the U.S. code:
The President shall issue each year a proclamation designation the first Thursday in May as a National Day of Prayer on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals.
Is it really true that the sole purpose of this law is to “encourage all citizens to engage in prayer?” Isn’t a non-binding declaration that people may do something a rather useless means to encourage people to do so? The plain text of the law suggests a different purpose, that of coordinating those who are already predisposed to prayer.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that the government ought not take sides in matters be left to individual conscience, though I highly doubt this judge is willing to apply such a worthy principle in most other areas, such as ones where government action is far more direct and intrusive. But this is a stark departure from what has been routinely accepted in the past. So I’m having difficulty finding where a non-binding directive acknowledging what people may do (and by extension, what they may freely choose to not do) is a burden on anyones conscience.
Which brings us back to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I know nothing about this group beyond what their chosen name tells me, which is quite a bit as it implies a rather radical view of religious freedom, one seemingly not shared by the men who wrote the First Amendment. There is no granted freedom from religion in the U.S. any more than there is a freedom from speech you don’t like or from people who smell funny. However, if exposure to other religious views is so intolerable for certain people, they do have the freedom to keep to themselves and live a life isolated from the rest of society, at least insofar as the government’s more intrusive laws allow them.
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Unable to pass “net-neutrality” legislation through the normal democratic process, those looking to expand government control of our lives to one of the last remaining bastions of freedom, the internet, turned to the unelected bureaucrats at the FCC to take action. Without statutory authority, they eagerly leapt forward to take charge of regulating the internet. The courts have now rebuffed this illegal powergrab.
Net neutrality rules are a “solution” seeking a problem. No one has shown any cause for why they are needed. But that hasn’t stopped liberals from responding with doom and gloom to the courts rightful ruling that the FCC’s attempted reach exceeded its grasp. Megan Tady, a Google lobbyist at the Huffington Post, calls the ruling “the biggest blow to our nation’s primary communications platform,” quixotically warned the courts not to “take away our internet.” As if maintaining the exact same rules which has allowed the internet to grow and thrive would somehow suddenly threaten its very existence. She didn’t bother to explain how that could be so.
The hyperventilating at Mother Jones was even worse. There, we were ominously warned that the FCC is the “last hope” of the internet. Give me a break.
The left just cannot believe that there is any mechanism other than government to provide institutional accountability. There is and it’s called free choice. Why do they have so little faith in American consumers that they assume anyone would tolerate censorship on the internet? If a company were to block websites people want to see, then they would use a different company. Clean, simple, and no expensive government rules necessarily.
If you look at who actually practices censorship of the internet throughout the world, you’ll see that it is only governments. Why are American liberals so intent to hand the wolves the keys to the hen house, under the guise of protecting the hens, when there isn’t even any evidence that they are in danger?
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
