Quote:
Originally Posted by scottw
"As I say, just another day in the life of the republic: a corrupt bureaucracy dispensing federal gravy to favored clients; a pseudo-legislature passing bills unread by the people’s representatives and uncomprehended by the men who claim to have written them; and a co-regency of jurists torturing an 18th-century document in order to justify what other countries are at least honest enough to recognize as an unprecedented novelty. Whether or not, per Scalia, we should “condemn” the United States Constitution, it might be time to put the poor wee thing out of its misery."
National Review Online | Print |
It is becoming a common observation and refrain that the Constitution is all but dead as a viable blueprint of governance--it is no longer even living and breathing. For our politically stupefied populace who still have some vague notion that the Constitution is "the law of the land," it is paraded as the legal basis for federal legislation and judicial decisions which are connected to it by subterfuge and which are actually in opposition to and destructive of it. Take the latest SCOTUS decision striking down DOMA. In the above article, Steyn points out Kennedy's moral or personal or intellectual reasoning (as well as thoroughly revealing its idiocy), but he doesn't mention the Justice's faulty and inconsistent constitutional reasoning. Kennedy, somehow, invokes the constitutional notion of equal protection. Sure, if a state makes gay marriage legal, thereby defining marriage to include that status, it deserves equal protection and due process. But what, in the Constitution, gives the Federal Gvt. the power to distribute benefits to people who get married that it does not to people who don't? What is the equal protection and due process available to single people to either get Federal benefits that married people get, or protects them from having their income redistributed to the married? And where is this vaunted equal protection when it comes to the progressive income tax? Why must some pay at higher rates than others rather than at the same rate? And where is this equal protection when the Fed decides winners and losers? When it subsidizes one and not another? When it artificially protects farm income (actually making it more feasible to promote big agra and more difficult to maintain small farms) but not mom and pop stores? When it bails out big business (which it more easily can regulate and from whom it can garner larger chunks of easier collectible revenue as well as large campaign contributions) but not the little guy, or other big businesses that fail as well? And on, and on, and on.
Justice Kennedy's opinion is, as Steyn says "just another day in the life of the republic . . ." It is rule by personal whim and opinion. The Constitution has nothing to do with it other than as a twisted cover for decisions and legislation. And the Snowden incident, and the immigration fiasco, etc., are all part of this bureaucratic system rather than constitutional governance.
It is amazing how the redefined "We the People" demand (or are convinced to demand) guarantees on every product we buy, or health care we get, and insist that government enforces those guarantees . . . but we have lost the guarantees against government overreaching power . . . and we seem to think and trust that such power is, and always will be, to our benefit. It is, historically, this growth of government size and power that has led to the tyrannies from which the Constitution protected us. It was the guarantee which we, for convenience, have decided to forego. The progressive administrative State has been growing, now at a faster rate, and is coming to a fruition that even its founders did not envision . . . but which our founding fathers did . . . we are becoming ripe for the domination of central power . . . call it dictatorship (benevolent or not), oligarchy, monarchy, socialism, or whatever name you wish. We are at that state and about ready to be plucked.