John Anderson

Deciding to become engaged in civics, some students this past week decided to ask Congressman Bob Etheridge (D-NC) some questions about where he stands on the issues facing our country today.  Congressman Etheridge didn’t respond well, and assaulted the students, gripping one by the wrist, then by the body and the neck.  Luckily, the other student with him had a camera and recorded the event, although Etheridge disrupted the filming by taking some swings at the camera.

The Democratic Party seems to have more of a problem with the assault being caught on tape than with the assault itself.  A national Democratic Party official circulated a memo calling it a “Gotcha Video” encouraging Democrats to respond by attacking the publisher who runs the website on which it first appeared, as well as accusing the cameraman of working for the Republican Party.  Fellow North Carolina Democrat Brad Miller repeated this line, labeling the videotaped question “absolutely a partisan effort”

David Souter, although retired from the U.S. Supreme Court, is still espousing liberal ideas which contradict the Constitution and the intentions of our founding fathers, as he did in the commencement address he recently gave at Harvard.

Souter starts out with a good rendition of how a constitutionally based legal system is supposed to work:

The charges of lawmaking and constitutional novelty seem to be based on an impression of the Constitution, and on a template for deciding constitutional claims, that go together something like this.  A claim is made in court that the government is entitled to exercise a power, or an individual is entitled to claim the benefit of a right, that is set out in the terms of some particular provision of the Constitution.  The claimant quotes the provision and provides evidence of facts that are said to prove the entitlement that is claimed.  Once they have been determined, the facts on their face either do or do not support the claim.  If they do, the court gives judgment for the claimant; if they don’t, judgment goes to the party contesting the claim.  On this view, deciding constitutional cases should be a straightforward exercise of reading fairly and viewing facts objectively.

Souter goes on to explain why he thinks our legal system shouldn’t work this way, but first he gives an example of what he considers a ‘rare’ instance in which the legal system should operate in this fashion:

"If one of today’s 21-year-old college graduates claimed a place on the ballot for one of the United States Senate seats open this year, the claim could be disposed of simply by showing the person’s age, quoting the constitutional provision that a senator must be at least 30 years old, and interpreting that requirement to forbid access to the ballot to someone who could not qualify to serve if elected."

Incidentally, in a recent court case, it was determined that in such an instance voters would not have ‘standing’ (the right to sue) to bring a court case to prevent the 21-year old from becoming a Senator. In Berg v. Obama, which was consistent with prior and contemporary cases, the courts ruled that voters may not initiate a court case against a candidate based on an ineligibility claim, because the harm coming from an ineligible candidate would be “too vague and its effects too attenuated.” It is curious why Souter would choose that particular story as an example of a ‘straightforward exercise,’ when some of the most well known court cases of the past couple years have shown it to be anything but.

Souter goes on to give two examples of why he thinks “the fair reading model has only a tenuous connection to reality” and why he says “constitutional judging is not a mere combination of fair reading and simple facts.”

The first one, the “Pentagon Papers” case, disproves his claim that the Constitution “grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, all together, all at once.” In this case, two newspapers got ahold of classified documents related to the Vietnam War, and the government attempted to block them from publication. In this case, the Supreme Court simply looked to the Constitution, read that “Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” and allowed the newspapers to publish the Pentagon Papers.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court rejected the view of Chief Justice Burger that "the imperative of a free and unfettered press comes into collision with another imperative, the effective functioning of a complex modern government,” as well as the argument of lead government lawyer Dean Griswold that “it is equally obvious that “no law” does not mean “no law,” an argument which Souter praised in his commencement address.

Souter claims that Griswold “won his argument” since some Justices said that “threatened publication of something like the D-Day invasion plans could have been enjoined,” but this determination could easily have been reached by the process Souter rejects, which is to look to the original intentions of the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers executed Benedict Arnold for giving military plans to the British, so they clearly would not have approved of the publication of the D-Day plans, nor intended such to fall under ‘freedom of speech’.

Souter goes on to claim that:

"We want order and security, and we want liberty.  And we want not only liberty but equality as well.  These paired desires of ours can clash, and when they do a court is forced to choose between them, between one constitutional good and another one.  The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice."

Of these, contrary to Souter’s claims, only ‘liberty’ is an actual ‘constitutional good.’ ‘Security and order’ are not, and in fact Benjamin Franklin said “any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

Souter moves on to discuss the famous Brown v Board of Education case in which the Supreme Court reversed prior precedent to mandate racially integrated schools. Although today widely celebrated based on a superficial interpretation of its results; resolving this issue through judicial activism, rather than allowing the constitutional democratic process to take its course has resulted in justification of ‘judicial activism’ to achieve social change in a wide range of other areas.

As Souter admits, “For those whose exclusive norm for constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, Brown must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision.” Like all left-wing proponents of judicial activism, Souter uses long-resolved racial issues to justify the same judicial activism in every other arena.

Dr. Michael Uhlmann has written an excellent review of the lack of a constitutional basis for Brown v Board of Education, and how it was used as a jumping off point for the Supreme Court to bypass the Constitution and democratic process in many other areas. Some summary excerpts are presented below, though reading the entire article is encouraged for those interested in gaining a full understanding of the topic:

"If Brown's impact on the race question is difficult to measure, its broader influence on constitutional jurisprudence can hardly be overestimated. Proper exposition of the topic would require a treatise (of which more than a few have already been written), but it suffices to say that Brown radically altered our understanding of what it means to have a written Constitution and what the Court's interpretative role should be. On the first question, Brown advanced the notion that constitutional text and tradition may be disregarded if they stand in the way of achieving social justice. On the second question, Brown paved the way for increasingly bold assertions of judicial supremacy, which are by now so routine (and so routinely acceded to) that only close students of the subject realize how radically contemporary practice departs from the pre-Brown understanding of the judicial function.

The justices knew that overturning school segregation would require them to take liberties with the Constitution. Such reservations as they may have had on that point, however, were soon overwhelmed by their desire to do good. That perhaps explains why Warren's opinion in Brown is thin and unpersuasive in its specifically legal justification. Rather than address head-on what they understood to be serious constitutional obstacles, the justices resolved instead to ignore or work around them. The want of a coherent legal rationale disposed them, in turn, to write what was in effect a plea to the conscience of the nation. From the perspective of 1954, the important point is that most of the justices did not see themselves as precipitating agents of radical constitutional change across a broad front. Least of all did they realize that they were setting forces in motion that would in time establish judicial supremacy."

"The phrase 'living Constitution' had not yet been embraced, but its premises, surely, were hatched in Brown. Thereafter, by gradual degrees, it became the rubric by which original meaning and settled precedent were set aside in the interest of achieving justice. Once the idea of a living Constitution took root, there was very little to stop the judiciary from becoming what one senior federal judge later called a "floating constitutional convention."

Little of this, as I say, appears to have been present in the minds of the justices in 1954. Indeed, we know enough about what induced individual justices to act to say that, had they foreseen where Brown would lead, a majority may never have come together. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of Brown, the Court willy-nilly convinced itself that if constitutional precedent and tradition could be ignored or rewritten for the sake of achieving racial justice, the same formula could be applied to any number of other pressing social problems. In the two decades following Brown, the Court fashioned, without benefit of formal amendment, a substantially new constitutional order. In ways that would have been thought shocking (even to many Brown justices) only a few years before, the Court wrote a new national code of criminal procedure; contrived a theory of representation wholly at odds with that of the original Constitution; conjured a right to privacy out of thin air and used it, inter alia, to eviscerate every abortion law in the nation; substantially altered both the speech and religion clauses of the 1st Amendment; and in general second-guessed on novel and dubious constitutional grounds a large body of state law and custom. If there is a subject on which the Court now feels ill-disposed to opine, or about which it is reluctant to lay down detailed constitutional mandates, it is hard to think of what it might be."

The facial effect of Brown v Board of Education would have been brought about by the Constitutional democratic process within a decade. The secondary results of Brown v Board of Education have been catastrophic; giving the Supreme Court a green light to impose their values on the rest of the nation without regard to what the Constitution says and how it was meant to be read by its authors. As we can see with Souter’s commencement address, the usage of the Supreme Court to dictate social policy and values is defended by referring to Brown v Board of Education, and then proceeding to use the emotional hyperbole which surrounds racial issues to justify Supreme Court dictation in every other area.

After all, they say, why shouldn’t our court systems be used to push more ‘progressive’ views on subjects such as abortion, ‘gay marriage’, and punishment for criminals? After all, the Supreme Court did that in Brown v Board of Education.

If the Constitution is subject to being purposefully twisted by members of the Supreme Court to impose their personal philosophies on the rest of society, we might as well not have a Constitution-in fact, we would be better off resolving everything by pure democracy. David Souter’s world where “no law” does not mean “no law,” and judges impose their philosophy on the rest of the nation based on fictional ‘constitutional goods’ such as ‘security and order’ leads us down the road to tyranny and needs to be recognized as such. Contrary to what Souter says, a return to “fair reading” is exactly what this country needs.

KrisAnne Hall, an assistant Florida state attorney, was fired Monday by her supervisor, Skip Jarvis, who is the State Attorney for the Third Judicial Circuit of Florida, which is the local prosecutor’s office.  Jarvis gave his reason for firing Hall as "She was speaking at some political events, some things were anti-state and anti-government."  Or, as KrisAnne Hall put it, "I was told I could speak about the Constitution openly or keep my job."

Jarvis said the specific activity of Hall which he found offensive was her "discussing a desire for less government and smaller budgets."  Although Jarvis claimed that “she can say and do what she wants, but not while under my flag," Hall had never claimed to be speaking or acting in an official position, and did so entirely on her own time and using her own resources and funds.  Jarvis responded to this with the claim that "in these small towns everybody knows who my people are."

So, apparently, if living in a small town and working for the government, you are not permitted to say anything - even while acting as a private citizen - that disagrees with the political views of your supervisor, or you can be fired.  What makes this even more disturbing is that the supervisor in this case is the chief prosecutor for the area.

As usual, this only applies to people from the right end of the political spectrum.  Isabel Garcia is the Pima County Legal Defender, meaning she is head of the county’s public defender office.  She co-chairs an organization called the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, whose logo is a map showing the state which employs her annexed by a foreign government.  Recently, Garcia appeared on CNN to denounce the Governor of her state and the passage of Arizona’s 1070 law which assists in protecting the state against illegal immigration, which she called "illegal" and "unconstitutional."  Garcia finished up her interview with the proclamation "the resistance begins."  In the past, Garcia has participated in the beating and decapitation of an effigy of an Arizona Sheriff, Joe Arpaio.

Obviously there is something wrong when one attorney in the state public justice system is allowed to promote the annexation by a foreign country of the state which employs her, but another is fired for promoting the Constitution on which our country is founded.

For reference, here is the speech by KrisAnne Hall which got her fired.

Unlike most liberal commentators, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof decided to actually travel to Africa, tour the countryside , and talk to locals to examine the root causes of the continent’s troubles.  Kristof’s travels took him to Zimbabwe earlier, and now bring him to Mont-Belo in the Congo Republic.  What he discovered was this:

There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:

It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

One youth he encountered, Jovali Obamza, will soon no longer be able to attend school because his family is three months behind in tuition payments.  Although education is officially free in the Congo Republic, every school charges a small tuition of around $2.50 per month or so.  Kristof describes his encounter with the youth’s parents:

We asked to see Jovali’s parents. The dad, Georges Obamza, who weaves straw stools that he sells for $1 each, is unmistakably very poor. He said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go.

The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can’t afford the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for each of their three school-age kids.

“It’s hard to get the money to send the kids to school,” Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed.

But Mr. Obamza and his wife, Valerie, do have cellphones and say they spend a combined $10 a month on call time.

In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. By his calculation, that adds up to about $12 a month — almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.

I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.

This family is more the rule than the exception.  Mr. Obamza is actually one of the best in the village in regard to moderating the amount of money spent on alcohol and cigarettes:

Other villagers said that Mr. Obamza drinks less than the average man in the village (women drink far less). Many other men drink every evening, they said, and also spend money on cigarettes.

“If possible, I drink every day,” Fulbert Mfouna, a 43-year-old whose children have also had to drop out or repeat grades for lack of school fees, said forthrightly. His eldest son, Jude, is still in first grade after repeating for five years because of nonpayment of fees. Meanwhile, Mr. Mfouna acknowledged spending $2 a day on alcohol and cigarettes.

This pattern of behavior is common across the third word.  A study by economists at MIT discovered:

the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.

This belies the claim that ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ are to blame for the troubles in Africa and the rest of the third world.  Ethiopia, which was never colonized, shares the same troubles as the rest of Africa.  Hong Kong, Singapore and Ireland, which were British colonies well into the 20th century, are among some of the most prosperous societies on the planet.

The fact is that attitudes and behavior, which are generally derived from the culture one grows up in, are the determinative factor in success.  One can even see this in certain segments of the population living in America.  Many communities at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, especially the urban poor, mirror Africa and the rest of the third world: large amounts of money are spent on alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes, while other needs are ignored.  The only thing granting them a better lifestyle than Mr. Obamza’s family in the Congo Republic is that America is a wealthy country and able to pay out large sums of welfare.

The U.S government has to practically babysit the welfare recipients in this country to ensure that they actually spend their money on food and rent; not drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.  The government created an entire rental assistance program bureaucracy called ‘Section 8’ which issues ‘rental vouchers,’ because they can’t trust welfare recipients to actually spend the money on rent instead of drugs.  Furthermore, the government (usually local housing authorities) has to inspect the rental properties periodically, because apparently the recipients can’t be trusted to find housing which is up to standard.  The government has to issue ‘food stamps’ instead of cash to ensure that poor Americans actually spend their money on food instead of drugs, although in many cases the recipients sell some or all of their ‘food stamps’ for half price on the black market in order to get cash to pay for drugs.  The most tedious program of all, WIC (‘Women, Infants, and Children’) actually spells out a grocery shopping list line by line for the recipients.  A certain amount of milk, a certain amount of fresh fruit, etc, each appear on a line of the voucher, along with an expiration date to ensure they actually use buy groceries on a regular basis.

The lack of value on education and oversize expenditures on wasteful products such as drugs and entertainment in lieu of necessities seems to be part of an overall cultural lack of thinking and planning ahead.  The same MIT study which discovered much of the world’s poor spending multiple times the amount of money on alcohol, cigarettes, and festivals as they spend on education also discovered that they neglected to save their money, even when they were able to and it would greatly help them out in the near future, concluding that “they could easily save more without getting less nutrition, by spending less on alcohol, tobacco, festivals, and food items such as sugar, spice, and tea.”  Take this example on fertilizer use in Kenya for example:

According to surveys conducted over several years, just 40.3 percent of farmers had ever used fertilizer, and just 25 percent used fertilizer in any given year. Conservative estimates suggest that the average return to using fertilizer exceed 100 percent, and the median return is above 75 percent. Duflo, Kremer, and Robinson conducted field trials of fertilizer on the farms of actual randomly selected farmers, which were meant to teach the farmers how to use fertilizer and the rewards of doing so. They found that the farmers who participated in the study are 10 percent more likely on average to use fertilizer in the very next season after the study, but only 10 percent more likely – and the effects fade after the first season.

When farmers were asked why they did not use fertilizer, most farmers replied that they

did not have enough money. However, fertilizer can be purchased (and used) in small

quantities, so this is another investment opportunity which seems easily accessible to farmers with even a small level of saving. This suggests that the issue, once again, is that farmers find it difficult to put away even small sums of money. The program in Kenya offered to sell farmers a voucher right after the harvest, which is when farmers have money in hand, which would entitle them to buy fertilizer later.

This program had a large effect: 39 percent of the farmers offered the voucher bought

the fertilizer, and the effects are as large as a 50 percent subsidy on the cost of fertilizer. The voucher seemed to work as a commitment device to encourage saving. But what remains puzzling is that the farmers could have bought the fertilizer in advance on their own. Indeed, a huge majority of the farmers who bought the vouchers for future delivery of fertilizer requested immediate delivery, and then stored the fertilizer for later use. Moreover almost all of them used the fertilizer they bought. They apparently had no self-control problems in keeping the fertilizer, even though they could easily exchange the fertilizer for something more immediately consumable. Indeed, even if there were some transaction costs in selling, they would have to be very large indeed, given that these are people appear to be are willing to give up a 100 percent return in a three to five months in order to consume now.

Unfortunately for America, the traditional Western notions of saving and working hard are becoming less common.  Part of this is the takeover of our education system and domination of the media by the far Left, and part of it is the importation of people with third world cultural values, who, contrary to liberal claims, are not adopting American values for the most part.

The Arizona immigration law is already bearing fruit.  Three illegal aliens who criminally trespassed in Senator John McCain’s office were arrested for the offense, and as per the new Arizona law, their citizenship was examined and found to be wanting.

Lizbeth Mateo, a Mexican who illegally lives in Arizona; Mohammad Abdollahi, an Iranian who illegally lives in Ann Arbor, MI; and Yahaira Carrillo, a Mexican who illegally lives in Kansas City encamped in Senator John McCain’s office to protest his decision this year not to support a full illegal alien amnesty or another law called the ‘Dream Act’ which would grant an amnesty to illegal aliens completing college in the US.

McCain was targeted because he has been a proponent of amnesties for illegal aliens in the past, but suddenly changed his position this year when he was faced with a challenge in the Republican primary from J.D. Hayworth, who has been a staunch advocate of border security.  "McCain was supportive of the Dream Act in the past” Abdollahi said, “we saw him as a champion in some ways, and we hope that comes back."   He may be in luck: Hayworth’s proponents have been arguing that the old amnesty-supporting McCain will return if he wins the primary election.

With a gaggle of their supporters outside egging them on, the five protesters entered John McCain’s office to stage a ‘sit-in’.  After closing time, akin to the illegal aliens who overstay their visa, the protesters refused to leave.  At this point, since they were on the property illegally and refused to leave, they were arrested for criminal trespass.  As required by Arizona’s new 1070 law, they were required to prove they are in the country illegally because they had been arrested.

Unlike claims of liberal commentators, they could not be asked for proof of legal residency until after they had been arrested for another offense, in this case criminal trespass.  Since they admitted to violating the law and living in the country illegally, they will be turned over to federal immigration authorities for processing, and if the law is followed they will be sent back to their home countries.

Tania Unzueta, a Mexican who illegally lives in Chicago, initially acted as the spokeswoman for the group before deciding that discretion was the better part of valor and fleeing to avoid arrest and deportation.

Raúl Alcaraz, a Mexican who legally resides in Tucson, AZ, joined in the trespass action as a show of solidarity with the illegal aliens.  Unfortunately, he does not appear to intend to continue the show of solidarity with them by deporting himself to his home country.