The American Thinker on Roe and the Constitution

I think I can pretty much let this stand without commentary. Wouldn't hurt ya none to go read the whole thing, though:

From a constitutional perspective, moral arguments are irrelevant. Properly understood, the abortion question is a matter of federalism. Our Constitution lays out a governmental framework that is really quite simple. The powers of the national government are enumerated in Article 1, Sec. 8. The Tenth Amendment then tells us that any power not enumerated as a federal power (or prohibited by the Bill of Rights) is reserved for the states. This includes a wide range of state regulatory powers (known as "police powers") which include authority over many moral and social issues. For example, the Constitution does not mention prostitution; therefore, it is a question for the states to decide according to their own local morals. The state of Nevada has chosen to legalize prostitution; forty-nine other states have chosen to outlaw it.

The same logic should be applicable to abortion -- and it was, prior to Roe. By 1973, four states had legalized abortion, and forty-six others had restricted it. But the Supreme Court decided that it was going to ram abortion down the nation's throat, whether it had constitutional justification to do so or not. The end result was a train wreck of an opinion. Conservatives who oppose Roe ought not speak about it in hushed moral tones, but rather with derisive hoots, jeers, and catcalls. The decision is intellectually fraudulent, and anyone who takes it seriously reveals his own intellectual insolvency.

[snip]

Roe is so bad it makes other controversial decisions -- like Plessy v. Ferguson or Dred Scott -- look like models of Solomonic wisdom by comparison. In those cases, the Court was clearly biased, but it at least made an attempt to pay lip service to the Constitution.

What Roe revealed about our modern political elites is this: they simply do not give a damn what the Constitution does or does not say, and they know they can get away with ignoring it. The specious type of "reasoning" in Roe ultimately leads to Nancy Pelosi snarling incredulously, "Are you serious? Are you serious?" when asked by a reporter how the Constitution justifies ObamaCare; it leads to Justice Kennedy citing
the European Court of Human Rights when declaring that the Constitution guarantees the right to anal sex; and it leads to Justice Breyer quoting the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe.

When our courts fail to heed the actual text of the Constitution they are supposedly applying and replace it with inane drivel about "the Ephesian, Soranos" and with foreign law, one is forced to conclude that we no longer live in a constitutional republic, but in a dictatorship of the judiciary -- where reading the "supreme Law of the Land" on the floor of the House is a controversial event.

James Madison must be rolling in his grave.

Well, actually, come to think of it, there's one thing I feel compelled to add, for the sake of those who sneer at those who take the Tenth Amendment seriously, or those who think the General Welfare clause authorizes the federal government to do 'most anything: at least take a gander at an opposing view, okay? Before you comment on this post? It might save you from looking a complete fool.

"Wingnuts" and "Zanies" and Proof Positive of Darn Near Total Ignorance

You know, I can handle the local lib blog crowing over Randy Brogdon's loss to Mary Fallin. They crow because they see it as a defeat of "Tea Party" ideas, including what they call "tentherism."

I think they've totally misread the results. I never expected Mr. Brogdon to win, but that's because I have known very well who Mary Fallin was for several years, and Randy Brogdon only appeared on my radar screen within the last eighteen months. Considering the amount of time I spend reading and listening to things political, I really don't think it's too much of a stretch to conclude that Mr. Brogdon was at too much of a disadvantage in terms of name recognition to stand a chance.

Also, I've heard all the Republican candidates' ads--over and over and over again. They all ran on Tea Party ideas, every single mother's son and father's daughter of 'em. Kind of hard to determine that mainstream Republican voters don't like Tea Party ideas in a situation like that, I would think.

But you know, there is something about their crowing that bugs me. Bugs me every single time they bring it up. It's their persistent characterization of Mr. Brogdon's ideas on the Tenth amendment as those of a--conflating their terms slightly here--"zany wingnut."

It just astounds me that anyone could be so fantastically ignorant. Mr. Brogdon's ideas on the subject are perfectly in line with those of the Founding Fathers, as anyone can see by reading The Federalist Papers. They are perfectly in line with those of Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans that ruled American politics for a very substantial part of the nineteenth century. They were, in fact, very common currency right up until the New Deal. Those same bloggers once linked to a piece that complained of how the High Court consistently ruled--at least at first--against Roosevelt on specifically "tenther" grounds--that is, they inadvertently admitted that those ideas were widely-enough held prior to the Roosevelt administration to secure the appointment of several Supreme Court justices who shared them.

They missed that, of course. They miss everything that might shatter the wonderful little spun-glass world in which they live.

Look, here's Jefferson on the Tenth Amendment:

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that "all powers not delegated to the U.S. by the Constitution, not prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people". To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.

And here he is on the General Welfare clause (since leftists always run immediately to the General Welfare clause when you bring up the Tenth Amendment):

...our tenet ever was, and, indeed, it is almost the only landmark which now divides the federalists from the republicans, that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated; and that, as it was never meant they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money. I think the passage and rejection of this bill a fortunate incident. Every State will certainly concede the power; and this will be a national confirmation of the grounds of appeal to them, and will settle forever the meaning of this phrase, which, by a mere grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a claim of universal power. For in the phrase, “to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide for the general welfare,” it is a mere question of syntax, whether the two last infinitives are governed by the first or are distinct and co-ordinate powers; a question unequivocally decided by the exact definition of powers immediately following.

Not an iota of difference exists between Jefferson's views and Mr. Brogdon's views. Mr. Brogdon's views aren't those of a zany wingnut; FDR's were. But since, to rather an awful lot of American liberals, history only starts with the New Deal, the local lib-bloggers most likely don't know that. They most likely don't know that they've inadvertently characterized Jefferson's, and many other prominent Americans', views of the Constitution, as those of zany wingnuts. They most likely don't know that they've branded themselves, for anyone who's done the reading to see, as grossly ignorant.

And frankly, it bugs me to see the grossly ignorant act as though they were intellectually superior to the likes of Randy Brogdon.

We're Missing the Basic Ingredient

Thomas Sowell recently wrote, emphasis mine:

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.

"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive. In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.

I must note in passing that I take mild issue with Dr. Sowell's rather loose use of the term "democracy"--the United States is not, at least on paper, a democracy, democracy was virtually an epithet to the Founding Fathers, a system they more or less equated with mob rule--but his fundamental point is absolutely critical: our system of government, to function as intended, relies implicitly on a reasonably informed and thinking citizenry. As I have done before, I point to The Federalist Papers as something of an "exhibit A". This book was written by James Madison, aka "the father of the Constitution," Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, to explain--to sell, in a way--the proposed constitution to the citizens of the state of New York, whose support would be critical in the battle for ratification. It is a document critical to understanding how our government is supposed to work. It was first published, essay by essay, in the newspapers, for the general public. I noted, when I first started reading it, that the authors did such things as make casual reference to the Peloponnesian War and the history of democracy in Athens in making their arguments.

These days? I like to think that I am reasonably intelligent, and I was, on paper at least, an excellent student in our government schools. I am prepared to swear that we never, ever broached the subject of The Federalist Papers when I was in school, and as far as knowing anything about the Peloponnesian War or democracy in Athens, you might as well have been dreaming. Nor were my parents, or even my grandparents, familiar with these documents. I asked. They never heard of them. Neither have the vast majority of people I have asked.

Now, I am prepared to concede that more people are taking an interest in our Constitution now than I have ever seen, and I couldn't help but note, when I got the link from Amazon, that it seems that The Federalist Papers is available in more editions than I have ever seen, so, yes, the situation is improving, but will it improve fast enough?

And then there's economics. I do not, friends, pretend to be an economist. But I do know the difference between a profit and a profit margin, and I do have a grasp of just what a tariff is, and what income taxes are, and what the Fair Tax is, and what a value-added tax is, and the overall effects of each on an economy. This information is not arcane, and it is not hard to find. Any idiot can have this knowledge for the "cost" of checking a few books out of the library and reading them.

My question to you is this: what percentage of the American voting public, do you think, could even begin to discuss those issues reasonably intelligently? I think if you are not unjustifiably optimistic, you will have to say that it is very small--almost vanishingly small. For decades now, the American population at large has simply not concerned itself with the nuts and bolts of government and economics. We do not have an informed citizenry. It will take years, if not decades, to build one. Yes, we appear to have possibly turned a corner, in that more people are becoming aware of the need to do something about this, but it will take time to shift the direction of so massive an object as the American electorate. I am not at all sure that we will be able to change course in time to avoid hitting the iceberg, so to speak, because when it comes right down to it, too many people, if they read at all, prefer to read romance novels, Hollywood gossip, lightweight science fiction and fantasy, and graphic novels rather than anything dealing substantively with issues and ideas. They prefer to escape the issues rather than equip themselves to deal with them.

And then, they will have the audacity to complain about the results they get.

But, of Course, We Know Better Than the Father of Our Country Did, Don't We?

Here's what he had to say, emphasis mine:

Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.—The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same Religion, Manners, Habits, and Political Principles.

[snip]

Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion, and Morality are indispensable supports.—In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens.—The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.—A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity.—Let it simply be asked where is security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.—Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure.—reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.—
’Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.—The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of Free Government.—Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?—

But what the heck did he know? Didn't he understand that "diversity is our strength?" Didn't he understand that you can have a nation of good people and good citizens, that you can have political liberty and freedom, without a widespread belief in God?

I mean, you really gotta wonder about that guy.

Some Bon Mots from Dennis Prager

Mr. Prager has several interesting things to say in this column:

...the God-based morality of the Declaration of Independence and all the Founders.

Yes, all the Founders. Even the so-called deists, while not theologically Christian, were ethical monotheists, i.e., strong affirmers of ethics rooted in the will of the Creator. As Steven Waldman, no conservative, writes in "Founding Faith," a book that has been praised by Left and Right, "Each felt religion was extremely important, at a minimum to encourage moral behavior and make the land safe for republican
government."

[snip]

Leftism functions as a secular religion, and its adherents understand that the major obstacle to the dominance of Leftist policies and values is traditional religion, specifically Christianity. With the demise of Christianity in Western Europe, Leftist ideas and values came to dominate that continent. America, the most religious industrialized democracy, remains the great exception.

[snip]

Leftism opposes America's three great values -- what I call the American Trinity...-- "E Pluribus Unum," "Liberty" and "In God We Trust." The Left uses diversity and multiculturalism to undermine E Pluribus Unum ("From Many, One"). It substitutes equality (of result) for liberty, and the powerful state for the powerful free individual. And it seeks, perhaps above all, to replace "In God We Trust" with a secular society and secular values.

[snip]

The Left tells us that non-Christians are offended by the government celebrating Good Friday. As a Jew, permit me to say that any non-Christian offended by Good Friday or Christmas gives new meaning to the word "narcissist." To seek to erase the name Good Friday is an exercise in self-centeredness and ingratitude that is jaw-dropping. We non-Christian Americans live in the freest society in human history; it was produced by people nearly every one of who celebrated Good Friday, and we have the gall to want to rename it?

[snip]

Most Americans will characterize the Davenport attempt to rename Good Friday "Spring Holiday" as Political Correctness. That it is. But the term itself is Politically Correct. Like everything PC, the term itself hides its true meaning, which is Leftism. Political Correctness is invariably produced by the Left. The term, therefore, should not be PC; it should be OTL, "Offends the Left."

One of the most galling things about the way the Left deals with Christianity is its habit of saying the most moronically uninformed and ignorant things about it. Leftists get their ideas about Christianity from a mutually-reinforcing group of Christianity's critics and the Westboro Baptist Church, and hardly ever bother to actually read the Bible or anything decent defending Christianity. More often than not, they sound embarrassingly ignorant on the subject and aren't even aware of it. Then they have the unmitigated gall to act as though a country whose founding laws and documents are thoroughly rooted in Biblical ideas and whose founders explicitly said that they were counting on the religious character of the people--that being overwhelmingly Christianity at the time--has somehow moved beyond the faith that shepherded it into being.

Peggy Noonan's Diagnosis and the Big American Idea

She saith, emphasis mine and in bold where present:

While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.

It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don't see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren't they worried about the impact of what they're doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they've never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don't have the habit of worry. They talk about their "concerns"—they're big on that word. But they're not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa's lap.

They don't feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—"strongest nation in the world," "indispensable nation," "unipolar power," "highest standard of living"—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.

A few thoughts, just as they occur to me:

"Mindless?" I am pretty close to agreeing. Too many people--I will admit to this being true of both sides of the political aisle, though I think it is worst on the Far Left side--no longer think. They do not evaluate the facts of the current situation in light of man's nature and the historical record. Instead, they rearrange and regurgitate sound bites, trying to define the terms of the debate so as to make themselves look better. Whether they are right or wrong matters less to them than whether they can lob a zinger at you.

Yes, I definitely am aware that this thing we call America is fragile in some ways. It is very fragile indeed. Sometimes, I wonder if people really understand what America, the real America is, or was, and what it is now turning into.

I'm not unaware of the realities of cultural and racial backgrounds when it comes to nationhood. Indeed, when it talks about "the nations," the Bible isn't really talking about the modern political state at all. It's talking about what the missionaries call "people groups" today. A nation is bound together by language, by shared experiences and cultural values, by shared history and ritual--but in America's case, at least, that is not all, or was not all, it is bound together by. America, more than any other nation in the history of the world, is, or was, bound together by an idea: the idea, drawn from Biblical thinking, distilled over six hundred years or so of Scots/Anglo/American political thinking and experience, that men are created equal by and before an almighty God, that they have intrinsic rights granted by that God which cannot be legitimately denied by any institution of man, since they were not granted by and do not proceed from any institution of man. I am always somewhat pained to have to point out to modern audiences that I am not at all making this up. Our history is shot through with it. You can start with Lex, Rex and follow the trail all the way up to our Declaration of Independence, which states the idea in terms as flat and stark as those I have just used, even though penned by the most deistic of our Founding Fathers. If there is a genuinely American Idea, this is it. It is an idea big enough to allow people from widely disparate backgrounds and with terrifically different cultures to come together as a nation. No doubt having a common language, having the same heroes, telling the same stories, etc., is important, but for America, the American Idea is the most important element in national unity.

Big ideas can unify people. I have seen this over and over again. But when I say, "big," I am talking about "big," not what some idiot politician thinks of as "big," but really, genuinely and truly big. When a politician talks about big ideas, he may be thinking of universally guaranteed health care, or a particular scheme of taxation. That is not really big. Nations do not coalesce around tax ideas or health care plans. Those are not national raisons d'etre. But the idea that you--yes, you--stand in the same status before God as any wealthy man, any ruler of nations, that has ever lived? That you have the same intrinsic rights, by the nature of your being, as any other man, that those rights cannot be taken away, not legitimately, by anyone? That all men bear the imago Dei, the image of God, and can all relate to one another on that basis?

Those are big ideas. Those can provide a basis for national unity amongst people from diverse backgrounds. But we are losing those big ideas. They are not taught in our government schools. Fewer and fewer people teach them at home. Publicly mentioning them will only get you ridiculed. And as these ideas fade into the background, as fewer and fewer people appreciate them for what they are and what they do, the nation--our nation, the American nation, a nation unique in the world's history--splinters. As a nation, we no longer have a vision of man that allows us to resist the pressures of disparate backgrounds.

Yes, America is strong--strong as long as it holds firmly to the idea that undergirds it. But when that idea is abandoned, when it is no longer taught, no longer understood by the mass of people born in this country, it will be very fragile indeed.

As to the rest of Ms. Noonan's remarks, I have to agree: much of what is going on now reflects a very shallow view of history. These people seem not to have realized that there has never, not once in human history, been a nation so strong, so stable, so utterly invincible as not to be capable of self-immolation and self-destruction. They don't seem to realize that they have the power to destroy the country, or that the practices they are now advocating have greatly damaged other countries, if not destroyed them outright. They are guilty of hubris of a very high order, and they worry me.

Absolutely Superb

The article from which this quote comes is absolutely superb. I could have profitably quoted much, much more from it. If I could write like this, I would own myself a writer. Emphasis is mine:

Since God no longer exists in government, and his history there is no longer taught, is it any wonder that millions upon millions of Americans believe, in utter opposition to the founding philosophy, that our rights come from the government? Where else would they come from? And should it be any surprise if those same Americans desire that the government give them other things as well? After all, if our rights are not by the grace of God but by the grace of government, then whoever controls the government has the ultimate authority over man. Government by definition can do no wrong. This is precisely the kind of thinking our Founders literally warred against. It is also precisely why Americans of all faiths should be proud to own America’s Christian Heritage, and why without it, America is lost.

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.” - Thomas Jefferson,
“Deist”

“Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian Nation…” - Barack Obama, “Christian”

Hat Tip to the inimitable Kat.

And just as an afterthought, it occurs to me that people who enjoy that article might also enjoy Benson Bobrick's Wide as the Waters.

James White Saith...

The only weapon that can win the war against a constantly advancing and militaristic Islam is the Holy Spirit of God applying the gospel of Christ to the hearts of Muslims and bringing them into a true and full relationship with God through Jesus. A dying secularist West may have all every kind of technology at its disposal, but it lacks the heart to survive. Secularism breeds a culture of death, and it sucks the spirit and life out of mankind, reducing him to a mere animal, robbing him of purpose and life. It cannot survive against an advancing, militant Islam.

And, in my opinion, he is absolutely right--as is not at all unusual.

Look, I am not at all against the United States fighting to defend itself. As a matter of fact, I prefer that we do. But it seems to me that if we have had one big flaw in our "plan," it is this insane idea that we can somehow successfully export and institute American-style representative government without successfully transmitting (to use a weak word) the worldview which produced it. The Founding Fathers repeatedly affirmed that the model of government which they had designed assumed a more-or-less Christian population. They explicitly said that it would not work without one.

So it seems to me that the idea of going into a Muslim country and procuring for it, at a great cost of blood and treasure, a more-or-less American-style representative government, is ultimately doomed to frustration unless we were to successfully evangelize the country. And here we are destroying, at government expense, privately supplied Bibles in the local languages, all to avoid offending the sensibilities of the religion that is producing our enemies in the first place.

I am so sorry. The track record is clear: Islam and totalitarianism go together like peanut butter and jelly. In the long run, resisting Islamofascism means dealing with Islam itself--and that means evangelization. Shooting ourselves in the foot ain't gonna help.