Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, and can’t be removed from office short of impeachment. Throughout the history of the country, only one justice has ever been impeached (Chief Justice Samuel Chase for, among other things, his disgusting behavior during the sedition trial of pamphleteer James T. Callender) but he was ultimately acquitted by a majority vote of the Senate.
The idea behind the lifetime appointments, and the difficulty in removing them, is to insulate them from the whims of public opinion and the sway of partisan politics. But is it really working? Is it time to limit the term of justices on the Supreme Court?
Mark Levin, a long-time critic of the federal judiciary, thinks so:
Obviously this debate is happening in the wake of the Obamacare ruling, with conservatives not especially thrilled about Chief Justice John Roberts’ ruling that the individual mandate is legal, but revelations about Roberts’ having apparently switched his vote after writing most of what would ultimately become a dissenting opinion holding that the entire law should have been struck down makes the debate pertinent.
Does anyone really think the Supreme Court isn’t partisan? Or, at least, ideological? Right nowthe status quo has the fate of some of the most important policies in the nation being decided based on which presidents made which judicial appointments in years previous.
I’m not sure that term limits are the answer, but I find it hard to defend the court’s status quo too.
Civil disobedience is the act of breaking the law and defying the authorities to do anything about it. So is tyranny. The difference between the two lies in which side of the power equation the breaker is on. When the law is broken, two things happen. Either the law is upheld or the authorities back away from a confrontation and find some way to save face.
The ObamaCare process involved breaking a long list of rules and laws and then defying the ragged remnants of the system to do anything about it. At every turn the United States was unable to stop a rogue chief executive and his ruling party from trampling the law. When the case finally reached the Supreme Court, the leading judicial body in the land sidestepped a confrontation by redefining what the action was, rather than rule on the law. It was a classic case of the authorities saving face.
Civil disobedience balances moral absolutes against legal principles. The Supreme Court exists to serve as the final bastion of the law against runaway moral absolutes. But, just as in its showdown with FDR, the Court blinked, and our court, unlike that court, didn't even at least put up a good fight for the law before backing down. Obama didn't even have to threaten to pack the court with justices. All he had to do was make it clear that he wasn't going to follow the law, which forced the law to save face by following him instead.
The American chief executive has a great deal of power and a chief executive who dons imperial robes is a danger with few precedents. There have been conflicts between the branches, but even FDR made a pretense of bowing to some outside authority. Obama never has, with the exception of the King of Saudi Arabia.
If he were to be impeached tomorrow, as some urge, he simply wouldn't leave. I don't know what he will do if he loses the election, simply because I don't think he knows what he will do-- I don't think the prospect of losing has seriously entered his mind. If he loses it will be a pitched battle between Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama on one shoulder telling him to stay and Joe Biden and whatever unfortunate soul is Chief-of-Staff at that point acting as the voices of reason telling him that it's over.
Even absolute monarchs make concessions to something outside themselves, to religion or tradition, but Obama never has. History, religion and tradition are nothing but lines that he drops into speeches in praise of himself. The American flag and the Constitution are trophies that he uses as backdrops, the same way that he uses Greek columns-- these aren't things that mean anything to him. They're decorations for the sets playing the eternal movie of him.
Obama is not a politician. Politicians learn to compromise. They learn that they can't always get their way. Obama has never learned that lesson. He always gets his way. Or he did until 2010. No one has ever told him "No" and made it stick. There is no weight of life experience that tells him what to do when this happens.
Unlike many of his predecessors, Obama was never in the military. Unlike all of them, he never held anything resembling a real job that required him to do anything but show up and make speeches. Children are natural tyrants. Take a child throwing a tantrum off the playground, give him every privilege in life, leave out any real challenges, keep telling him that he's special for 50 years and he will be an actual tyrant.
No one ever thought that a man with the emotional maturity of a child, with no life experience and no principles, would occupy the White House, surrounded by sycophants and worshiped by a press that acts as an extension of the White House Press Office. It took an extensive breakdown among multiple institutions and the national culture for that to happen, and the inability to assert the rule of law is a further symptom of that breakdown.
No one is fooled, unless to some degree they want to be fooled. To believe a lie, you have to want to believe it, and that means that at some level, you know that it is a lie.
Obama was elected because we, Democrats and quite a few Republicans, wanted to be saved from ourselves. We wanted to be saved from our policies, our debates and our guilt. In a time of crisis, we weren't looking for a reliable experienced professional to do the job; if we had been, McCain, for all his flaws, would have won by a landslide. We were looking for someone who would lie to us and make us feel better.
The man we picked had no experience and no skills beyond his surface charm. He was irresponsible, and that was why the country chose him. His irresponsibility made our irresponsibility look good. Even his racist associations were a plus, they made voters feel better about their own prejudices. Every wrong, ugly, stupid and irresponsible thing that he did only made him more appealing to the people who voted for him.
Every now and then people like to get drunk. When things are a complete mess, that's when the temptation to open the bottle and pour it down the hatch comes. Things were a complete mess in 2008, and the country got stinking drunk. It decided to be completely irresponsible and, feeling sorry for itself, it elected someone who wouldn't have been qualified for any position in his own Cabinet.
Since then, the country has sobered up. It thinks that Obama is doing a bad job, but it doesn't know how to tell him that he was only a one-night stand. He seems like such a nice guy, and it would hurt his feelings to tell him why he was really elected. It wasn't because anyone, besides zombie liberals, thought that he knew what he was doing. It was because he seemed like a cheerful bright spot in a dour time and everyone felt sorry about slavery and segregation.
The problem is that Obama won't leave. 2010 was a sharp hint. Any halfway-competent politician would have caught it and changed direction. But Obama refuses to understand hints. He refuses to understand the unspoken message because that gives him power. The power of the rude is in their rudeness. The rudeness is a challenge to anyone with manners to match him equally or shut up and take it. Some Republicans, like Joe Wilson, have matched him rudeness for rudeness; many more, like Justice Roberts, have chosen to take it instead.
A Head of State who refuses to follow the law is engaging in rudeness squared, but Obama is doing what the left has always done. The left rejected manners and mores; it trashed the culture, threw out its morals, defied the law with acts of civil disobedience and, once in office refused to accept any limitations on its power. And most of the time it won. It stared down the society, the police and the politicians, defied their rules and took their rulemaking powers for its own.
The power of the left lies in challenging the lies that society tells itself and creating the illusion of credibility and sincerity through that challenge. It succeeds when its enemies lack faith in their own ideas, their own policies and their own values. The more abrasively it challenges norms, the more it refuses to follow any rules but its own, the more credibility it gains as a liberation movement.
Obama is the apotheosis of the left's project, a brat nurtured on self-esteem, weaned on white guilt, educated to play with words and rewarded for staged confrontations with equally staged surrenders. All these qualities have shaped him into the entitled monster that he is, squatting in the Oval Office and grinning from the covers of a hundred magazines, determined to always win the only way he knows how, by ignoring the rules of the game.
If you have ever encountered someone genuinely worthless yet successful, it was almost certainly a man or woman who refused to take "No" for an answer. That can be a useful quality in some fields, but it's also a perfect way for people with no useful skills to get what they want out of life. These are the people who don't get fired or denied promotions because it would cause too many problems, who get discounts they aren't entitled to, because they keep demanding them, who use determination and confrontation as substitutes for knowledge, ability and competence-- who become a success story purely based on their enormous sense of entitlement and complete lack of shame.
Today such a man occupies the highest office in the land and rules accordingly. What the left once practiced as civil disobedience has become tyranny. Under Obama, the country is turning lawless because its chief executive is lawless. But Obama's rise to power is a symptom of deep-rooted problems in the country. They cannot be fixed just by voting him out of office, because there are other Obamas out there.
Obama's rise to power is a mirror of the national problems that got him there. All the things wrong with him are reflected, to some extent, in the men and women who voted for him. It could not be otherwise. His lawlessness is a symptom of an existing lawlessness. His contempt for values and morals, for tradition and history, for the nation itself, is a symptom of the contempt that the left has fed over the years until it has become a poison in the national bloodstream.
To truly defeat Obama, we have to be able to defeat those negative traits as well. To understand what gave someone like him power over so many people. It is not enough to just remove him from office, because, unless we understand the corruption that made his rise possible, he, or someone like him, will rise again.
John Adams predicted in a letter to his wife Abigail that Americans would celebrate their Independence Day on July 2. Off by two days — not too bad for government work.
On July 2, 1776, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, signed only by Charles Thompson (the secretary of Congress) and John Hancock (the presiding officer). Two days later Congress approved the revised version and ordered it to be printed and distributed to the states and military officers. The other signatures would have to wait.
Many actually viewed the Declaration of Independence as a yawner — a rehashing of arguments already made against the British government. John Adams would later describe the Declaration as "dress and ornament rather than Body, Soul, or Substance." The exception was the last paragraph that said the united colonies "are and of Right ought to be Free and Independent states" and were "Absolved of all Allegiance to the British Crown."
For Adams, it was the momentum towards achieving American independence initiated on July 2 that future generations would consider worth celebrating, not the approval of this document on July 4.
Bee's Note:
During the past 4 years and under this present White House administration, and with the aid of Congress and the latest Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, Americans look back at the first signing of the Declaration of Independence and slowly see, with deepest sadness, that unless we WAKE UP and VOTE this November to turn out the "Red Coats" - all of them - this could be the last year we celebrate "INDEPENDENCE DAY" as we've known it since 1776.
Jack Lew, Chief of Flack for the Obama Administration was on Fox News Sunday this AM. He’s a smooth talker, all right, but what he had to say had as much familiarity with the truth as Michael Jordan had with being chosen last for a pick up basketball game.
“One thing that’s great about our system, is that we the Supreme Court rules, we have a final answer.”
Really, Mr. Lew? Because the final answer from the Supreme Court was that Obamacare is a tax. Why do you keep denying this if the Supreme Court affirmed it in their “final answer”?
“We sent Congress plans, which if they were enacted, would have create a million new jobs: policemen, firemen, teachers…”
Noble professions, to be sure, but all on the government payroll. All of them funded by the private sector and all of them contributing to public sector unions, which contribute heavily (Read: almost exclusively) to Democrats. Since the federal government and many of the states , cities and counties are broke, the money to pay these employees and their benefits would have to be borrowed, and add to the National debt, or printed by the government, which leads to inflation. This president’s plan, his “focus” if you will, is to spend more money from Washingtonto stimulate the economy and end the recession.
But, that’s exactly what he’s been promising and doing for the last almost four years. How would the next four years of doing the exact same thing be any different? Other than to perhaps, take America’s credit rating down another notch?
“…the American people want the divisive debate on Healthcare to stop.”
Stop??? It never even got good started before Congress by the barest of majorities and not in any way a bi-partisan bill, passed a 2000+ page bill that most of them had never read and the people they supposedly represent didn’t have the time to read, or reflect on or give any feedback to their elected representatives.
A majority of the American public, when asked, say they not only don’t like Obamacare, but want to see it repealed. Of course, you would prefer that the matter be settled, Mr. Lew. Obamacare and the economy, the crowning jewel of his first (and hopefully only) term and his primary responsibility after securing the national defense, are both colossal failures. (I was going to say national “borders”, but we all know what a miserable job he’s done at that, too!)
Jack Lew, like the Moooove-on people, wants us to “move on” from a discussion of Obamacare to its implementation. He even used those exact words: move on. That way, the Bamboozler-in-Chief could natter on about his “vision” for what he wants America to look like. And his “vision” is very flowery and full of high sounding words. Just words, as someone might say.
He wants to run on his “vision” because he cannot run on his record. His primary achievement has been to push a phony “healthcare” reform down the throats of the American people instead of addressing any of the problems with the cost of healthcare. Like tort reform, for example. Tort reform is opposed by the Democrat Party, which is a subsidiary of the Trial Lawyers Association, which doesn’t want tort reform. (See: How John Edwards became a millionaire.)
During the interview, Jack Lew spoke of how much President Obama had lowered people’s taxes. Lowering your income will certainly do that to you!
If you listen to the whole interview, you can here him lie about how Obama wants to “reach across the aisle” to work with Republicans (like he did when he rejected all their input and amendments to Obamacare) and the lie ( around 13:21)that “Fast and Furious” started in the Bush administration, when in fact the Bush program Wide Receiver had been shut down for two years before Obama, Holder and Co. ever started Fast and Furious.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I catch someone in an obvious lie, I have a hard time believing anything that person says.
In order to repeal Obamacare, we need a Republican majority in the Senate. The Senate currently has 53 Democrats, and 47 Republicans. Republicans must hold all of their Senate seats, PLUS pick up four more. According to Real Clear Politics, there are currently eight toss up seats for U.S. Senate. Two of those are currently held by Republicans. Below are the eight toss up Senate seats with links to contribute, volunteer, and to each candidate’s Twitter accounts. Please consider contributing so that we can retake the Senate and Repeal Obamacare. If Mitt Romney wins the presidency, he Cannot repeal Obamacare without a Republican controlled Senate. It is Imperative that we gain at Least four U.S. Senate seats.
You can also contribute to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The NRSC is "the only political committee solely dedicated to electing Republicans to the U.S. Senate." To contribute, visit www.nrsc.org.
I have listed the Senate races by order of polling data. The races that are the tightest are at the top. (RCP = Real Clear Politics) See toss up polls at Real Clear Politics Senate Toss Up Races.
CLOSEST RACES
Florida US Senate Election 2012 – Must Win Incumbent: Bill Nelson – Democrat Challenger: Connie Mack IV, U.S. Representative – Republican
RCP Average 5/17 – 6/25 — Nelson: 45.3, Mack: 39.3. Nelson +6.0RCP Florida Polls
Missouri US Senate Election 2012 – Must Win Incumbent: Claire McCaskill – Democrat The GOP primary will take place on August 7th. There are three Republicans vying to challenge McCaskill. Running are former state treasurer and state senator, Sarah Steelman, U.S. Representative Todd Akin, and businessman John Brunner. According to the latest polls, Steelman has the biggest lead over McCaskill. It would probably be best to go with the strongest challenger to McCaskill.
John Brunner – Republican Donate: http://johnbrunner.com/donate/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/brunnerformo — Wisconsin US Senate Election 2012 – Must Win Democratic candidate: Tammy Baldwin Republican candidate: Tommy Thompson – former governor, and former Secretary of Health and Human Services.
As readers of this site are aware, thanks especially to Jack Cashill's recent posts, I've been researching and writing a book on Barack Obama's mentor, . That book, titled The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor, just came off the press this week, with an official release date of July 17. I knew that the book would be very relevant, and we've been preparing for media reaction. In the book, I list at length the stunning commonalities in Davis's thinking and communist propaganda work and President Obama's thinking and work. That said, I didn't imagine how relevant it would be in light of the Supreme Court's decision on ObamaCare. Let me explain.
Frank Marshall Davis, who lived from 1905 to 1987, mentored Barack Obama in Hawaii in the 1970s. Davis was a devoted communist -- pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin, and pro-Mao. His Communist Party number was 47544. Davis did terrible, blatant propaganda work for the international communist movement. In The Communist, I publish rare declassified FBI and Soviet archival documents on Davis and his work. I also present columns written by Davis for Communist Party newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s. (Click here for video.)
Among those columns, Frank Marshall Davis wrote a piece on July 21, 1955 calling for taxpayer funding of universal health care. That column was published in the Honolulu Record, which was the Communist Party publication for Hawaii. As Davis put it, he wanted to "see my tax dollars go to insure health care for everybody."
I first read that column over a year ago. Given Davis's linking of "tax" dollars to universal health care, and Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court doing the same in their historic decision, that column suddenly has new meaning (and irony) for me.
In fact, Davis's belief in government-controlled health care went even farther. Prior to his work writing communist propaganda for the Honolulu Record, Frank Marshall Davis had been a columnist and founding editor-in-chief for the Chicago Star (1946-48). The Star was the Communist Party publication for Chicago -- known among locals as the "Red Star." There, Davis's fellow columnists included Senator Claude "Red" Pepper of Florida, who championed a 1947 bill to socialize medicine in the United States. That bill, which failed, was written by Pepper's chief of staff, Charles Kramer.
Who was Charles Kramer? Kramer was born Charles Krivitsky. He had been a self-proclaimed "progressive" who previously worked for FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Administration. In fact, we now know that Kramer was working for the KGB. He was an official Soviet agent, with the KGB codename "Mole." He was so bad, so suspicious, that J. Edgar Hoover himself personally wrote a letter directly to President Truman warning about Kramer.
Such were the kind of characters that Obama's mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, worked with to advance a government takeover of health care in the 1940s. They called themselves "progressives," but in truth, they were hardcore communists trying to advance Marxism, with a government takeover of health care as a crucial step.
And yet, there's more to the story.
Another irony of Frank Marshall Davis, in light of Obama's and the court's actions on health care, was his bold willingness to declare certain policies "constitutional" even when they clearly were not. Davis was never shy about that. In a June 1949 column, to cite just one example, he stated unequivocally, "That, it seems to me, is unconstitutional."
Well, let's bring this, too, up to date.
Thanks to the current actions of the Supreme Court, which declared Obama's health care bid "constitutional," Frank Marshall Davis is no doubt smiling from his grave. Alas, the old Communist Party crony's pupil, Barack Obama, has at long last fulfilled the dreams of Frank Marshall Davis: government-controlled "universal health care," sanctified by the Supreme Court as "constitutional," and declared a "tax."
It's eerie, chilling, but true. In his wildest dreams, Justice John Roberts couldn't imagine that he has fulfilled the ambitions not only of Barack Obama, but of Frank Marshall Davis and Communist Party USA.
How's that for hope and change? Amazing, truly amazing.
Let me expand that title: "Justice Roberts Calls President Obama an Incompetent Idiot and the American people stupid for electing him."
One thing we can take away from this week's Supreme Court ruling [PDF] on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the insult Justice Roberts threw at President Obama and American voters when he wrote, “... it is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
Translation:You idiots voted for a socialist/communist President, now live with the consequences.
In my 2008 article President Barack H. Obama will make me Rich, I wrote that I was going to vote for Obama precisely because he's a socialist and, as all socialists ultimately end up doing, he will ruin our country economically which will double the price of gold and make me rich.
Socialists are basically idiots and so I was sure he would enact policies that would drive deficits into the stratosphere and make gold, one thing the government cannot print more of, more expensive.
Now some people may think it very crass of me to have voted for Obama just so I can make money while the rest of the country suffers. Not so. There were two reasons I voted for Obama and will vote for him again:
Yes, yes - I will make a ton of money because an incompetent idiot is running our country.
Too many Americans do not know that Socialism is a failed system. Obama will teach them this important lesson.
We need to give Americans a good taste of what it's like to live in the UK or Europe where individualism and entrepreneurship are stifled.
The Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a press release on June 29 announcing that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former Chief of Staff, has announced an Office of New Americans Advisory Committee that includes the Executive-Director of CAIR-Chicago, Ahmed Rehab.The committee’s goal is to “generate recommendations, develop strategies, and present an overall vision to promote the City’s economic vitality and ensure global competiveness, by becoming the most immigrant friendly city in the world.”The Office consists of 50 advisors, divided into four subgroups. Rehab belongs to the subgroup, “Civic engagement, Diversity welcomed and celebrated.”In 2007, the federal government labeled CAIR an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history. The Holy Land Foundation was shut down and five of its officials were convicted for covertly funding Hamas. In 2009, a federal judge upheld CAIR’s designation, ruling that “ample evidence”tied the organization to Hamas. Evidence introduced during the trial showed that CAIR was birthed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s American branch. The Brotherhood listed as one of its “working organizations” in a 1994 document.CAIR is especially influential politically in the state of Illinois. On August 30, 2011, Governor Pat Quinn released the make-up of his new Muslim American Advisory Council. Rehab was one of those chosen, as was Safaa Zarzour, the secretary-general of the Islamic Society of North American, another designated “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Holy Land trial. Internal Muslim Brotherhood documents identify ISNA as one of its fronts. Zarzour also is on the board of CAIR-Chicago.After RadicalIslam.org’s National Security Analyst Ryan Mauro wrote about Quinn’s new council in FrontPage Magazine, CAIR-Chicago and Rehab attacked him as a “third-rate propagandist,” (and twice managed to misspell his name as “Ray!”) It also called FrontPage Magazine an “echo chamber for bitter, old, extremist conservatives who hate anything that does not look or think like they do.”Click here to read the rest of my RadicalIslam.org story.
Bee's note: President Obama also has a representative of CAIR as one of his "religious" advisers" ... Wonder if Rahm Emanuel was behind the White House appointment of CAIR's rep to the president?! Isn't it amazing that this administration's highest offices all have Islamic representatives tied to the Muslim Brotherhood as appointees and therefore, access to national security information ... and we wonder why there are so many "leaks" pouring out of the White House. How many Americans ever thought that when Obama was talking about "change", he wasn't referring to nickels and dimes, but adding groups that should be deported out of this country for having ties to terrorists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Obama's administration wants to make "nice" with the Egyptian MB leaders - however, looks like they have been working along side the Brotherhood these past 4 years.
