Reflections From a Murky Pond

It looks rather more likely than not that Arizona will geld Obama or, at least emasculate his ability to harm Arizona through his barely quasi-legal Executive Orders or directive from his DoJ. Last week on March 10, 2015 Arizona’s House of Representatives voted in favor of House Bill 2368 (HB 2368), which bans the use of AZ personnel or monies to enforce, administer, or cooperate with any of them.

So, politically speaking in Arizona, it looks probable that Obama’s testicles will be tied off, wither and rot, and fall off.

Obama supporters and Statists, have quickly put up the spurious and ignorant argument that HB 2368 violates the US Constitution’s, Article VI, Clause 2 (the “Supremacy Clause”):

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

But even a passing knowledge of SCOTUS jurisprudence and Constitutional Law shows that Arizona’s HB 2368 in no way violates the Supremacy Clause because, supremacy or not, the SCOTUS via the “Anti-Commandeering Doctrine” set forth in their 1842 Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 1981 Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclamation Assn., Inc., 1992 New York v. United States, and 1997 Printz v. United States decisions has unequivocally stated that the federal government cannot legally commandeer legislative processes of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program by demanding that those States’ governments to undertake targeted, affirmative, coercive duties.

Oh please pay special attention to Prigg v. Pennsylvania, as it stated that the federal government could not force states to implement or carry out the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.

In other, simpler words, the Federal government cannot legally compel any of the States to spend their resources in the furtherance of any federal mandate, regulation, or even law. The Supremacy Clause ensures that the States can’t contravene federal edicts but the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine requires that the federal government enforce those edicts with federal resources instead of compelling the States to use theirs to do so.

Hence, in point of legal fact, Arizona didn’t need to limit HB 2368 to merely those edicts spawned within the Executive. The bill would be equally valid on resting upon proven, sound legal grounds if it had include legitimate federal laws enacted by Congress as well.

Now it just remains to be seen how many other states shall go reaching for their gelding knives or similar tools…

Tags: America | Arizona | Constitutional Law | Executive Orders | Federalism | Gelding | Government | HB 2368 | Law | Neutering | Obama | Politics | Statism | Statists | Subsidiarity | The Constitution | Tyranny | US Supreme Court

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2015 at 11:41 am and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Obama, the boy who would be king, has always had a problem with authority that doesn’t stem from himself, his handlers and overseers, or his direct underlings in the Executive.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when he’s dealing with the several States and the governments demanding that he, to at least some extent, abide by the 10th Amendment.

Louisiana’s Governor, Bobby Jindal ran into this attitude recently.

“When we met with him as governors, I asked him, why don’t you give the states more influence on accrediting higher education, to bring more competition in the marketplace?” Jindal said.

“Here’s the insulting thing: In a room full of Democratic and Republican governors, basically, in so many words he said, ‘We can’t trust states. We can’t trust governors to protect their own people.'”

Of course, to be fair, this goes a bit beyond and outside of Obama’s authoritarian streak. It’s also a cultural disconnect. The question of giving the states more influence on accrediting higher education smacks of States’ Rights; Obama is – by his choice – a Black; and Blacks have been inculcated to believe that States’ Rights is just a code phrase for racism.

Really! Expecting Obama to behave differently or better would be culturally insensitive and would be ignoring the weight of over 150 years of Blacks being taught to be against the several states having any level of authority or autonomy. 😉

Tags: America | Blacks | Federalism | Jindal | Obama | Politics | States Rights | Subsidiarity | Tyranny

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2014 at 11:43 am and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Starting in 2008 and increasingly over the intervening five years we Americans have repeatedly heard how the Republican Party was dying and how the GOP was doomed. Given their showing in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections and also their inability to retake control of the Senate in the 2010 elections from our domestic enemies, this opinion is easy to arrive at and very seductive to the Left.

This, however, is a false assumption. It’s mere hopeful wishing on the part of the Liberals and Progressives and a tool being used by the Establishment GOP to try to maintain control of a party who has left them in favor of returning to America’s roots and core values. It has little or no basis in fact.

To start with, the GOP took control of the House of Representatives and has held that control to this date, with little thought that this will change in the 2014 elections. More important and telling is the Republican Party has been emphatically shown to the the States’ party of choice.

• 30 states now have Republican governors vs. 20 with Democrat governors
• 25 states now have GOP control of both the Executive and Legislature vs. 14 where DEMs control both the Executive and Legislature

Does sound or look like the GOP is moribund or does, especially when combined with the GOP’s lasting control of the House, show that the majority of Americans choose and vote Republican?

It’s a simple case of the wisdom of subsidiarity. The closer the position is to the People the more often the People chose Republicans because the closer the position is to the People the less they favor the goals and agenda of the Democrats and the less the election is skewed by the bias and prejudices of the minority voters.

This is why the Democrats and their operatives focus so heavily upon federal control of- and influence over any and matters, most of which are meant to left to the several States. They know that they’ve built their whole platform on catering the needs and desires of those minority of staunchly Liberal states to the exclusion of needs and desires of the majority of Americans. It’s also why those blue states will remain blue. The Democrats’ policies are tailored to them and do a decent job of fulfilling their wishes.

No, the Republican Party isn’t dying. It’s growing from the ground up stronger than before because it’s the States’ party.

Tags: 10th Amendment | 2008 Elections | 2010 Elections | 2012 Elections | America | Democrats | Federalism | GOP | Liberals | Politics | Progressives | Republicans | Subsidiarity

This entry was posted on Friday, August 30th, 2013 at 9:57 am and is filed under 2008 Election, 2010 Election, 2012 Election, 2014 Election, Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Of late, much as been made in the Blogosphere by Liberals and Progressives – and the more mainstream professional Democrats – about Thomas E. Mann’s and Norman J. Ornstein’s recent assault upon the GOP.

The Leftists living within America’s borders love it since it stays staunchly within their narrative experience, and reinforces their ideological beliefs.

Mostly, the focus had been upon one paragraph in their lengthy Op-ed of April 27, 2012:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

While Mann and Ornstein meant this as approbation, there’s truth in it and it is something that the burgeoning Conservative arm of the GOP should be heartily proud of.

Yes! The current Republican Party, largely through the efforts of TEA Party and those the elected into office, is insurgent outlier in American politics. They are no longer willing to maintain the destructive farce that is, and has been for generations, the status quo of American politics. They don’t just want change, they want and demand a course correction – because that’s what we, the People told them to want.

Tags: America | Conservatives | Corruption | Economics | Insurrection | Liberals | Norman Ornstein | Politics | Progressives | Republican Party | Republicans | Revolution | Revolutionaries | Statism | Subsidiarity | Tea Parties | Thomas Mann

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

It’s pretty obvious to even the willfully blind that America is in dire straits. It’s quite apparent to Americans that this is largely because over the decades and generations since WW2 we’ve allowed ourselves to tolerate more and more Statism and centralization of power in the country.

What is far, far, far from obvious, even to those who’ve studied politics, history, and social engineering is what can be done about this incremental slide into a federal despotism. This is made much worse by the fact that there’s much argument over how far down the entropic curve we have already slid.

How it happened and how it continues to happen isn’t difficult to explain though. It just takes looking around and also looking back.

One Day It Is Over His Head

What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap, after 1945, between the government and the people. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense or the military, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with various leaders, their trust in them, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that few Americans could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

Read the paragraphs above and think about them carefully. They aptly describe exactly what has been happening, and continues to happen, in America since the end of WW2. They are also the barely altered and paraphrased words of Milton Mayer in his book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45.

For some time the disparate but equally horrid visions of Orwell and Huxley have been battling for America’s future and, all the while, Americans have not noticed it anymore than the Germans noticed their government drawing further and further away from them and thereby allowing the rise of Hitler and the National Socialists.

No matter which Dystopian future wins out, however, our children and our children’s children will be slaves to the state. Fundamentally, from the American perspective, it doesn’t matter if its a cruel, classical tyranny or the benevolent despotism of the Nanny State.

The only way to prevent one or the other of these dark futures from happening is to embrace subsidiarity and bring the government back to the people, starting with reining in the federal government and stripping it of many of the powers it has quietly usurped. Yet, at this point, that course of action would carry a great weight of acute pain and misery – most likely more than most would tolerate, even for the sake of their progeny.

~*~

The Universe spirals downward to dissolution while the Reaper sits by, drinking tea sweetened with dead stars.

Tags: America | Freedom | Germany | History | Milton Mayer | Nanny State | Politics | Subsidiarity | Tyranny

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2012 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.