Social justice sociopaths?
The Debasement of Our Professional and Political Classes – By Victor Davis Hanson
The left-wing professional and political classes bequeathed a number of new protocols during the Trump derangement years. And it will be interesting to watch whether the Republicans abide by them in November should they take back the House and perhaps the Senate—and the presidency in 2024 as well.
Will they follow the New Testament’s turn-the-other-cheek forbearance, or go for Old Testament style eye-for-an-eye retribution?
What Are the New Rules?
Will Republican magnanimity suffice to shame the Democrats to be more professional in the future? Or will tit-for-tat deterrent reciprocity alone ensure a return to norms? Specifically, will Biden be impeached Trump-style, after losing the House in November? Say, to give just one possible example, for deliberately not enforcing and, indeed, undermining U.S. immigration law?
Will Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in Pelosi-fashion, start yanking troublesome radical Democrats off House committees?
Will a conservative Robert Mueller-like “wise man” head a $40 million, 22 month-long special counsel investigation of the Biden-family influence-selling syndicate—arrayed with a “dream-team,” “all-star,” and “hunter-killer” right-wing lawyers to ferret out “Big Guy” and “Mr. Ten Percent” quid pro quo profiteering?
Would a Republican-led House set up a special committee to investigate the racketeering and “conspiracies” across state lines that led to a near “coup” and “insurrection” marked by “the riots of 2020?” Would such watchdogs offer up criminal referrals for all those responsible for attacking a federal courthouse and torching a police precinct or for setting an historic church afire? Or causing $2 billion of damage, over 30 deaths, and 1,500 law enforcement officer injuries—while carving out illegal no-go zones in major downtowns?
Given the need for “accountability,” the “threats to democracy,” and a need for “transparency,” would another congressional committee investigate the Afghanistan fiasco of summer 2021? Will it learn who was lying about the disaster—Joe Biden or the Joint Chiefs—and how and why such a travesty occurred?
Would a rebooted January 6 committee reconvene under new auspices—with Democratic members limited to those selected by a new Speaker McCarthy—to revisit the lethal shooting of Ashli Babbitt, to review thousands of hours of released surveillance video, to subpoena all email communications between the previous congressional leadership and the Capitol police, to demand the lists of all the FBI informants in the crowd, and to interrogate the sadistic jailers and overzealous prosecutors who have created America’s first class of political prisoners subjected to punishment without trial? Such a multifaceted legal inquiry would eat up most of Biden’s final two years in office. As accomplished leakers, Republicans then would also supply “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” special news alerts on cable TV, the fuel of supposedly “imminent” and “impending” indictments, based on special counsel leaks to conservative media.
Following the Democratic cue, should the Republican-majority Senate consider ending the “disruptive” and “anti-democratic” filibuster? Should there be a national voting law rammed through the Congress, overriding state protocols, and demanding that all national election balloting must require a photo ID?
Will Speaker McCarthy, Pelosi-style, in furor at more of Joe Biden’s chronic lies, tear up the president’s State of the Union address on national television?
A Permanently Politicized Bureaucracy?
Will the new Washington apparat likewise adhere to the Democratic Party’s new precedents?
Perhaps a newly appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs can reassure a Republican majority that its primary mission is not battle readiness—and certainly not climate change or “white rage”— but rather ferreting out service personnel with known ties to radical groups like BLM or Antifa or other “subversive” and “racist” organizations?
Will a conservative Lois Lerner emerge from the IRS shadows to start slow-walking nonprofit-status applications from left-wing organizations on the eve of a presidential election?
Will the FBI become a Republican retrieval service to hunt down and keep inert embarrassing lost laptops, diaries, and hard drives of absent-minded conservative grandees?
In the middle of a campaign, will the CIA Director believe it is his duty to inform the senior Republican leaders in the Senate that he has good “information” that leftists are intriguing with foreign governments to warp the election?
The Lettered Classes
And what of our corporate and professional classes?
Should conservative zillionaires pool their resources and, Zuckerberg-style, select key precincts in the next general election, hire armies of activists, and then absorb and supersede the work of state or county registrars? Only that way, could they ensure the “right” people vote and their “correct” ballots were accurately counted?
Should conservatives start rounding up “professionals,” “scientists,” and “scholars” to express their superior morality and erudition in pursuit of political agendas?
Certainly, a recent trend has been a spate of letters of “conscience” and “statements of concern” signed by revolving-door government, academic, and corporate grandees who pose as disinterested experts to mold public opinion.
When we read such letters of principle—characterized by shared and collective outrage by assorted professionals, replete with letters and/or titles after their name—beware!
Do we remember the recent “stellar” cast of Nobel-Prize winning and near-Nobel laureates who admonished us that Biden’s massive deficit spending programs would never lead to inflation?
In circular fashion, Biden solicited and then cited this “blue-chip” group of experts led by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz warned the hoi polloi not to worry about printing trillions of dollars at the very moment pent-up demand from the COVID lockdowns was surging, when for millions the government kept issuing checks that made staying home more lucrative than working, when interest rates were at near zero, and when the national debt was cresting at $30 trillion.
The distinguished economists promised us that if we just followed the Biden lead, then inflation would actually decrease. Or as they put it, “Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressure.” [emphasis added].
As inflation nears or exceeds eight percent per annum, will they write an apology or instead issue yet another letter assuring us that inflation is easing?
Do we remember the 50 “former intelligence officials” letter writers rounded up by former National Intelligence and CIA Directors James Clapper and John Brennan? (The latter two previously had confessed to lying under oath to Congress.) Yet just two weeks before the 2020 election, these revered “professionals” assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not just fake but likely Russian disinformation.
Or as the shameful 50 put it in their sorta, kinda conspiratorial style, “. . . our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” The guidance of Brennan and Clapper alone—apart from the clear evidence that the laptop was Hunter’s—should have made all Americans “deeply suspicious” that the Biden campaign “played a significant role in this case.”
Do we remember “the over 1,000 health professionals” who in 2020 signed a letter of conscience, assuring us that:
. . . we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.
So, in “follow the science fashion” we were told not just that some violations of strict masking, quarantines, and lockdowns were more equal than others, but that flagrantly ignoring health mandates entirely was, in Orwellian fashion, actually good for the health of the exempt.
Do we remember the 27 Lancet “scientists” who signed the now infamous letter reassuring us the Wuhan lab played no role in the origins in COVID? Do we also recall that all but one of these progressive humanitarians failed to disclose that they themselves had connections with Wuhan?
Leftist professionals in politics, government, and private enterprise debased themselves for short-term political gain, or in furor at their bogeyman Trump, or in anger at the unwashed. They have now set precedents, which if embraced by conservatives and applied to the Left, would be called unethical at best and fascistic at worst.
In the end, all the warped grandees accomplished was to further discredit the entire notion that those with high salaries, prestigious degrees, impressive titles, and insidious influence are somehow less likely to lie, connive, cheat, and conspire than those whom they libel and attack.
By Victor Davis Hanson
The uncivil strategy for offensive Leftism
The Left foreshadowed their ongoing street theatre of harassing leadership and throwing up phoney charges at the opening of the Kavanaugh hearings. Audience members jumped up shouting and wailing in a calculated and prolonged demonstration, made to appear like random testaments, to insert themselves into, and destroy the hearing process – egged on by phoney procedural delay attempts from their Leftist Senators.
It was all planned, and it raised a big middle finger to the American people who tuned in to learn something about their government.
The Left cannot permit reason to control. Under reason, they lose. But the rule of law is no match for the rule of the mob. Civility can’t compete with barbarity. Consent means nothing in the face of force.
The Left moved the bar to shouting, property destruction, procedural disruption, and all things uncivil. Without civility, what remains to check human impulses? How long until they start shooting?
That’s how previous Leftist movements all ended up. The fascists, communists, and socialists always end up imposing violent repression because citizens don’t usually voluntarily give up their freedom. Freedom gets taken surreptitiously. It’s stolen quietly, a bit at a time.
Like now. Our Supreme Court nomination process has been taken from the people and put under the force of Leftist dominion. Our Republican leadership seems oblivious to the theft.
Antifa, BLM, the Indivisibles, the Resist movement, the DSA, all the Soros-funded groups, etc., want their violent escalations to end up in revolution. No way are they moderating themselves.
The best response is no response
The best response to Leftist violence is to starve it of attention. Theater only works with an audience present. Don’t attend, only publish the conflicts on social media alongside critical analysis. Don’t give the barbarians meme space. Leave the angry Left alone to demonstrate and yell at itself.
What possible reason exists to confront it in the streets anyway? Few arguments, however reasonably delivered, could be sufficiently compelling to change a zealots mind during a mob event. Confrontation sustains the mob, and that’s exactly what the mob is there to generate.
Philosophical arguments aren’t settled in the streets. They require cool heads to even be heard.
The Left knows this. That’s why they keep their people in a constant state of agitation. Don’t help them.
Stand Strong in the HOUSE
Sixteen days into the government shutdown, we know; [Read more…]
hyperbolic times
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
Polite debate is no longer the accepted norm in our society. The liberal left is not tolerating divergent opinions, they want them eliminated. Outrageous labels, personal threats, and even violence have escalated during what used to be polite discourse and disagreements of opinion. [Read more…]
it ain’t over till it’s over
If we’re not going to stand by our leaders when they speak the plain truth, if we’re going to censor ourselves when the plain truth is on the table for all to see, then the professionally sensitive have won. With all that came out about Obama last week, with hindsight in that very same week proving Coffman 100% right on his Obama assessment, giving any credence to Coffman’s critics seems extremely unwise. The left continue to issue their self-incriminating reactions, and rather than capitalize on those revelations for all the really negative things they indicate about the left, Republicans want to talk about undercutting the conservative message, and undercutting conservative’s ability to get a message out! [Read more…]
left is going it alone
Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin
The New Authoritarianism
A firm hand for a “nation of dodos”
6 January 2012
“I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer,” said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn’t legally in recess. The chief executive’s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn’t the first example of the president’s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that “where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.” On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that’s just what he’s been doing—and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This “go it alone” philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.
The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.
Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.
The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.
The tension between self-government and “good” government has existed since the origins of modern liberalism. Thinkers such as Herbert Croly and Randolph Bourne staked a claim to a priestly wisdom far greater than that possessed by the ordinary mortal. As Croly explained, “any increase in centralized power and responsibility . . . is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition” and the fact that “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”
During the first two years of the Obama administration, the progressives persuaded themselves that favorable demographics and the consequences of the George W. Bush years would assure the consent of the electorate. They drew parallels with how growing urbanization and Herbert Hoover’s legacy worked for FDR in the 1930s. But FDR enhanced his majority in his first midterm election in 1934; the current progressive agenda, by contrast, was roundly thrashed in 2010. Obama may compare himself to Roosevelt and even to Lincoln, but the electorate does not appear to share this assessment.
After the 2010 thrashing, progressives seemed uninterested in moderating their agenda. Left-wing standard bearers Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Robert Borosage of the Institute for Policy Studies went so far as to argue that Obama should bypass Congress whenever necessary and govern using his executive authority over the government’s regulatory agencies. This autocratic agenda of enhanced executive authority has strong support with people close to White House, such as John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, a left-liberal think tank. “The U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy,” Podesta has written. “These authorities can be used to ensure positive progress on many of the key issues facing the country.”
Podesta has proposed what amounts to a national, more ideological variant of what in Obama’s home state is known as “The Chicago Way.” Under that system, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune explains, “citizens, even Republicans, are expected to take what big government gives them. If the political boss suggests that you purchase some expensive wrought-iron fence to decorate your corporate headquarters, and the guy selling insurance to the wrought-iron boys is the boss’ little brother, you write the check.” But the American clerisy isn’t merely a bunch of corrupt politicians and bureaucratic lifers, and the United States isn’t one-party Chicago. The clerisy are more like an ideological vanguard, one based largely in academe and the media as well as part of the high-tech community.
Their authoritarian progressivism—at odds with the democratic, pluralistic traditions within liberalism—tends to evoke science, however contested, to justify its authority. The progressives themselves are, in Daniel Bell’s telling phrase, “the priests of the machine.” Their views are fairly uniform and can be seen in “progressive legal theory,” which displaces the seeming plain meaning of the Constitution with constructions derived from the perceived needs of a changing political environment. Belief in affirmative action, environmental justice, health-care reform, and redistribution from the middle class to the poor all find foundation there. More important still is a radical environmental agenda fervently committed to the idea that climate change has a human origin—a kind of secular notion of original sin. But these ideas are not widely shared by most people. The clerisy may see in Obama “reason incarnate,” as George Packer of The New Yorker put it, but the majority of the population remains more concerned about long-term unemployment and a struggling economy than about rising sea levels or the need to maintain racial quotas.
Despite the president’s clear political weaknesses—his job-approval ratings remain below 50 percent—he retains a reasonable shot at reelection. In the coming months, he will likely avoid pushing too hard on such things as overregulating business, particularly on the environmental front, which would undermine the nascent recovery and stir too much opposition from corporate donors. American voters may also be less than enthusiastic about the Republican alternatives topping the ticket. And one should never underestimate the power of even a less-than-popular president. Obama can count on a strong chorus of support from the media and many of the top high-tech firms, which have enjoyed lavish subsidies and government loans for “green” projects.
If Obama does win, 2013 could possibly bring something approaching a constitutional crisis. With the House and perhaps the Senate in Republican hands, Obama’s clerisy may be tempted to use the full range of executive power. The logic for running the country from the executive has been laid out already. Republican control of just the House, argues Chicago congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., has made America ungovernable. Obama, he said during the fight over the debt limit, needed to bypass the Constitution because, as in 1861, the South (in this case, the Southern Republicans) was “in a state of rebellion” against lawful authority. Beverley Perdue, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, concurred: she wanted to have elections suspended for a stretch. (Perdue’s office later insisted this was a joke, but most jokes aren’t told deadpan or punctuated with “I really hope someone can agree with me on that.” Also: Nobody laughed.)
The Left’s growing support for a soft authoritarianism is reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both right and left looked favorably at either Stalin’s Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialist rivals. Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently praised Chinese-style authoritarianism for advancing the green agenda. The “reasonably enlightened group” running China, he asserted, was superior to our messy democracy in such things as subsidizing green industry. Steven Rattner, the investment banker and former Obama car czar, dismisses the problems posed by China’s economic and environmental foibles and declares himself “staunchly optimistic” about the future of that country’s Communist Party dictatorship. And it’s not just the gentry liberals identifying China as their model: labor leader Andy Stern, formerly the president of the Service Employees International Union and a close ally of the White House, celebrates Chinese authoritarianism and says that our capitalistic pluralism is headed for “the trash heap of history.” The Chinese, Stern argues, get things done.
A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced. In the post-election environment, the president, using agencies like the EPA, could successfully strangle whole industries—notably the burgeoning oil and natural gas sector—and drag whole regions into recession. The newly announced EPA rules on extremely small levels of mercury and other toxins, for example, will sharply raise electricity rates in much of the country, particularly in the industrial heartland; greenhouse-gas policy, including, perhaps, an administratively imposed “cap and trade,” would greatly impact entrepreneurs and new investors forced to purchase credits from existing polluters. On a host of social issues, the new progressive regime could employ the Justice Department to impose national rulings well out of sync with local sentiments. Expansions of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion rights could become mandated from Washington even in areas, such as the South, where such views are anathema.
This future can already been seen in fiscally challenged California. The state should be leading a recovery, not lagging behind the rest of the country. But in a place where Obama-style progressives rule without effective opposition, the clerisy has already enacted a score of regulatory mandates that are chasing businesses, particularly in manufacturing, out of the state. It has also passed land-use policies designed to enforce density, in effect eliminating the dream of single-family homes for all but the very rich in much of the state.
A nightmare scenario would be a constitutional crisis pitting a relentless executive power against a disgruntled, alienated opposition lacking strong, intelligent leadership. Over time, the new authoritarians would elicit even more opposition from the “dodos” who make up the majority of Americans residing in the great landmass outside the coastal strips and Chicago. The legacy of the Obama years—once so breathlessly associated with hope and reconciliation—may instead be growing pessimism and polarization.
Fred Siegel, a contributing editor of City Journal, is scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Joel Kotkin is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University.
History repeats
Hitler told the Reichstag
“The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures…The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such a law is in itself a limited one.”
He also promised an end to unemployment and pledged to promote peace with France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. But in order to do all this, Hitler said, he first needed the Enabling Act.
Enabling Act, Article 1
In addition to the procedure prescribed by the constitution, laws of the Reich may also be enacted by the government of the Reich.
Enabling Act, Article 2
Laws enacted by the government of the Reich may deviate from the constitution as long as they do not affect the institutions of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat. The rights of the President remain undisturbed.
Barak Obama, State of the Union, 1-24-2012
Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything -– even routine business –- passed through the Senate. (Applause.) Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. (Applause.) For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a simple rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days. (Applause.)
The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it’s inefficient, outdated and remote. (Applause.) That’s why I’ve asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy, so that our government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people. (Applause.)
the agenda
“Why bother with an environmental impact assessment if the decision was always going to be made for political reasons?” WSJ, 1/19/2012, pg. A14.
Excellent question, and it points squarely to the agenda motivating Elbert County greens in pushing through impossibly complex local oil and gas zoning. This zoning putsch masquerades under saving property values, sparing the environment, and smart growth, but those are just platitudes for the rubes.
This zoning would create a matrix of imponderable and unchallengeable laws administered by a czar, who would conduct numerous public planning circuses for green activists to attend and applaud, for the sole purpose of displaying oil and gas development blasphemers for the greens to ridicule.
The political decision has already been made by these people. Please, save us all a lot of time and money. We’re not stupid. We don’t need your sacrificial rituals to the green gods. Just ban it for the taboo that you’ve already decided it is.
And I want to see the Community and Development Services director wear a witch doctor’s headdress at future BOCC meetings, you know, something befitting a smartly dressed shaman.
Operational Conflicts Waiver
Proposed Elbert County Oil & Gas Regulations and Permitting Process
Part II, Section 26.2 Review Procedures
I. OPERATIONAL CONFLICTS WAIVER
A waiver to these Regulations shall be granted if or when the application of the requirements of these Regulations actually conflict in operation with the rules of the Oil and Gas Conservation Act or implementing regulations.
1. All applications where a waiver due to operational conflicts is requested shall be processed as a Major Oil & Gas Facility and heard in a noticed public hearing by the Board of County Commissioners. The Applicant shall have the burden of pleading and proving an actual, material, irreconcilable operational conflict between the requirements of this section and those of the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission in the context of a specific application.
Translation: You have to prove an operational conflict exists between interpretations of the county and interpretations of the state regulations.
2. For purposes of this Section, an operational conflict exists where an actual application of a County condition of approval or regulation is contrary to State statutory or regulatory requirements and where such conflict would materially impede or destroy the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission’s goals of fostering the responsible, balanced development, production, and utilization of the oil and gas resources in the State of Colorado in a manner consistent with protection of public health, safety, and welfare, and protection of the environment and wildlife resources.
Translation: The county determines the standard by which it will accept a conclusion of an operational conflict.
3. County requirements in areas regulated by the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission that fall within County land use powers necessary to protect the public’s health, safety, and welfare pursuant to the application presented, and which do not impose unreasonable burdens on the Applicant, or materially impede the State’s goals, shall be presumed not to present an operational conflict.
Translation: The county will interpret when an operation conflict exists and whether the conflict presents an unreasonable burden to the applicant.
4. If the Board of County Commissioners determines that compliance with the requirements of these Regulations results in an operational conflict with State statutes or regulations, a waiver to this section shall be granted, in whole or in part, but only to the extent necessary to remedy the operational conflict. The Board of County Commissioners may mitigate any impacts by conditioning the approval of a waiver as necessary to protect the public health, safety, and welfare. Any such condition shall be such that the condition itself does not conflict with the requirements of the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.
Translation: The county says whether a waiver that they might offer will satisfy the conflicting state requirement.
5. If the Applicant, or any person entitled to receive notice of the original application for the Oil & Gas. Facility, wishes to seek judicial review of a final Board of County Commissioner’s decision on the operational conflict waiver request, appeal to the district court shall be pursuant to C.R.C.P. Rule 106(a)4.
Translation: If you don’t like it, sue us.
The American Community Survey
U.S. Supreme Court
ICC v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447 (1897)
Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson
No. 883
Argued April 16, 1894
Decided May 26, 1894
154 U.S. 447
“Power given to Congress to regulate interstate commerce does not carry with it authority to destroy or impair those fundamental guarantees of personal rights that are recognized by the Constitution as inhering in the freedom of the citizen.”
“The inquiry whether a witness before the Commission is bound to answer a particular question propounded to him, or to produce books, papers, etc., in his possession and called for by that body, is one that cannot he committed to a subordinate administrative or executive tribunal for final determination. Such a body could not, under our system of government and consistently with due process of law, be invested with authority to compel obedience to its orders by a judgment of fine or imprisonment.”
“Neither branch of the legislative department, still less any merely administrative body, established by Congress, possesses or can be invested with a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen. Kilbourn v. Thompson,
Page 154 U. S. 479
103 U. S. 168, 103 U. S. 190. We said in Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 116 U. S. 630 — and it cannot be too often repeated — that the principles that embody the essence of constitutional liberty and security forbid all invasions on the part of the government and its employees of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of his life. As said by MR. JUSTICE FIELD in In re Pacific Railway Commission, 32 F. 241, 250, “of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value.”
Now, see:
The American Community Survey
~
planned chaos
Democrats Use Fiscal Crisis As Weapon To Bash GOP
Investors Business Daily Posted 12/27/2011 07:09 PM ET
Debt: Wasn’t it just last summer Republicans and Democrats nearly came to blows over raising the debt ceiling? Well, guess what — President Obama is back, asking for another $1.2 trillion. Are we being gamed here? [Read more…]
enforcing propaganda
Andrew Breitbart: Courts an Instrument of Leftist Thuggery
by Audrey Hudson
03/24/2011
Politicians and their supporters use interesting tactics to intimidate and silence their critics, from rumor-mongering to editorial cartoons, even dueling pistols.
But the target of a high-profile lawsuit who is also a relentless investigator of the Obama administration says the judicial system is being used to retaliate against him.
“The President of the United States has an unprecedented and uncanny desire to silence those who report the truth about him,” says media mogul Andrew Breitbart. [Read more…]
stimulus jobs
Collected from: http://denver.craigslist.org/npo/2230001566.html
I wonder how many financial intermediaries there are between the U.S. Treasury and these community organizers — probably not more than a couple.
Reason beats the rabble
Union Members Gang up on a Tea Partier
~and remember to always ~
Look for the Union Label
First the union movement chased American manufacturing over to China, and then it made our government so expensive that China owns it too!