Kagan Hearings Must Foucs on the Constitution
The tediously predictable hype for Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, has begun.
We’re told she’s compassionate, brilliant, and in the President’s words “one of the nation’s foremost legal minds.” She “understands that Court rulings affect ordinary people.”
But the media are silent on the most important question: Does she believe the Constitution places any absolute limits on government power?
Soon the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold dramatic, televised hearings to consider her appointment. The Republicans should seize the opportunity, ignore the usual banalities, and lay before the nation a vigorous and forceful examination of the U.S. Constitution and the proper role of government and the courts under that Constitution.
In his speech announcing his appointment of Ms. Kagan, President Obama praised retiring Justice John Paul Stevens:
For nearly 35 years, Justice Stevens has stood as an impartial guardian of the law, faithfully applying the core values of our founding to the cases and controversies of our time.
If only it were true! But it isn’t. During Stevens’ tenure the Supreme Court has handed down scores of rulings that contradict, and even mock “the core values of our founding,” as found in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The Justices have willfully misinterpreted phrases and clauses to facilitate expansion of the power, scope and cost of the government far beyond the limits the founders wrote into the Constitution.
Today, politicians from across the ideological spectrum speak of the Constitution as if its text were a cryptogram to be decoded only by the nine robed oracles, and only one issue at a time, with no consistent principles. Senators and Representatives openly conduct the business of Congress as if there were no Constitutional restraints on governmental power. Their assumption is that any idea or scheme becomes Constitutional when it attracts 218 House votes, 51 Senate votes and the President’s signature. Years later it may be challenged and the Supreme Court may rule on it. But in the meantime they tell us it’s not their place to “second guess” what the Justices might decide.
A recent example is the new, 2,500 page Health Care law that includes a requirement called the “individual mandate” that all persons buy health insurance from private companies. Few public officials are willing to flatly state their belief that it either is or is not Constitutional. Most say “it may not be…” or “it probably is…”
How can they not know? The Constitution is not hard to read or understand and nowhere does it authorize Congress to make such a demand of citizens. The individual mandate is plainly Unconstitutional. Yet the Democrats passed it into law, and Obama signed it, hoping that five of the nine justices will, based on some specious pretext, agree on a ruling that permission to use force against people in this manner is hidden in the text or in some obscure precedent.
So far, the Kagan controversies reported by the media are trivialities. Does she respect the military? Is she friends with Goldman Sachs? Republicans should lead a departure from the usual red herrings and focus on her view of the Constitution. She should be forced to answer fundamental questions starting with:
This teabagger version of the Constitution is dangerous.
You don’t understand that without the programs and protections you claim are “unconstitutional” we’d all be at the mercy of a corporate plutocracy. No retirement income. no health care. no protection against rancid food or poison water. No roads, no infrastructure.
This is not the small agrarian society that the founding fathers lived in. This is a vast, complex society and economy that can’t just run on its own and regulate itself with no direction from government.
The Constitution was written to change with the times. Thats the genius of it.
Only an idiot would think a high tech, industrialized nation with all the competing interests that have to be integrated can be governed in the same way as dispersed, rural society that was economically dependent on slavery.
The founders were smart enough to write a living document that adapts to change. But you aren’t smart enough to figure it out!
“This is a vast, complex society and economy that can’t just run on its own and regulate itself with no direction from government.”
Let’s see. At the center of the biggest financial calamity in the nations history we have Fannie and Freddie, with politicians and regulators dictating its policies, and asleep at the wheel.
And we have even more bailouts for Fannie and Freddie coming, as they continue to pursue the same policies that got them into trouble in the first place.
Yeah, I see your point.
“Only an idiot would think a high tech, industrialized nation with all the competing interests that have to be integrated can be governed in the same way as dispersed, rural society that was economically dependent on slavery.”
Just a jumble of words. Care to make the case for what you said? Or just spew the pablum.
We’re waiting. And please be specific.
Drew:
A Jumble of words?
What is it you don’t understand? In 1776 we had 13 sparsely populated colonies and almost everyone was a farmer.
You can’t see the difference between 1776 and 2010? Did George Washington have an Blackberry? Were there international corporations acting like no laws applied to them? Were corporations destroying the ocean, the air, the water?
Really, if you cant see any difference there’s no point in trying to explain it to you.
Pablo -
“Really, if you cant see any difference there’s no point in trying to explain it to you.”
I’ll take this as confirmatory evidence of your inability to actually make a coherent case. Like I said, just a jumble of words. I’ll give you a second chance. Can you draw and make logical arguments about the existance of Blackberries and international corporations that make the Constitutional principle, as written, irrelevant or faulty?
BTW – How old are you?
[...] Kagan Hearings Must Foucs on the Constitution | Liberty Works | [...]
[...] Kagan Hearings Must Foucs on the Constitution | Liberty Works | [...]