THE LAST FOURTH?
"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves." —Winston Churchill
Happy Fourth of July! Today we celebrate the founding of America’s freedom by commemorating the greatest act of political genius in human history – the writing of The Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson. An excellent way of doing so would be for your family and loved ones to gather together and read it aloud, savoring every extraordinary word.
Savor the words well, for it is quite possible that this may be our last happy Fourth, due to the greatest act of political cowardice in recent American history – Judas John Roberts’ ruling on Zerocare.
Glenn Beck’s t-shirt is selling well today:
It is bitter consolation that Roberts has ruined himself. As CBS News is reporting, he switched his vote, obviously due to bullying from Zero. This is prompting legal scholars such as constitutional law professor John Eastman to call for Roberts to resign from the Court.
Paul Ryan (R-WI) observed that, "The chief justice had to contort reason and logic to come up with this ruling." It is personally horrifying for me to see a number of conservative commentators doing the same – contort reason and logic – to defend the ruling. It’s also painful, as one of them is a dear friend.
People can honestly disagree. For those TTPers on Roberts’ side, here’s why I think the reasoning behind defending Roberts is as catastrophic as the decision itself. If you remain unconvinced, well and good. We’ll just agree to disagree. On the Forum, the reasoning is this:
"I’m confident John Roberts did the right thing. Not legally — he had to torture the law to make it go where he wanted to take it — but politically. He understands that the only way to get rid of Obamacare is to get rid of Obama in November. His decision makes that outcome more likely… He is playing chess while the rest of us are playing checkers."
My response: We do not pay Supreme Court Justices to be Grand Masters of Political Chess. We pay them to prevent violations of our founding legal document, the Constitution. Roberts made a political ruling that violated the clear meaning of the Constitution and did so knowingly. That alone make his ruling immoral and impeachable.
Yet Roberts defenders think that his making a political ruling instead of a legal, constitutional one is something to celebrate and praise him for it:
"Roberts took the key weapon of the Left — judicial activism — and turned it on them. They are hoist by their own petard! … For those of you lamenting the precedent this sets, the precedent was set decades ago, and has been followed routinely by liberal judges since before the Warren Court. Roberts is a conservative who will fight ugly and fight dirty to win. I don’t like his methods either. But I prefer them to playing nice and losing to the Obamunists who always play dirty."
My response: If this view holds, we can toss conservatism in the ash can along with the Constitution. Liberals need to distort the Constitution – which is what "judicial activism" is – because the Constitution won’t give them the all-powerful state they want. Conservatives need no such distortion – because we already have the Constitution itself.
Our goal is a government that obeys the Constitution and restricts itself to its Enumerated Powers. The left’s goal is a government free to ignore the Constitution.
The last thing on earth we need is judicial activism to distort the Constitution. All we need is judicial constitutionalism, not anti-constitutionalist "activism."
The moment we begin to advocate interpreting the Constitution any way we want as liberals do, the Constitution ceases to have any meaning and thus ceases to exist. It’s deuces wild. Until, at least, a Constitutionalist political movement comes to replace a meaningless Conservative one that has abandoned its basic principles.
Further, Roberts’ supposedly-praiseworthy "judicial activism" is anti-conservative in the extreme. As the Wall Street Journal notes, it gives the federalies A Vast New Taxing Power. He’s not a genius, a chess master, nor the Daniel Webster of our times. He’s nothing more than "a politician."
Worse, "Roberts has hollowed out dual federal-state sovereignty and eviscerated the very limit on the Commerce Clause that he posits elsewhere in his opinion and that has some conservatives singing his praises. From now on, Congress can simply regulate interstate commerce by imposing ‘taxes’ whenever someone does or does not do something contrary to its desires."
Skye on the Forum explains that Roberts has so increased the power to tax that the Enumerated Powers no longer have any substantive meaning:
"Call any penalty about anything a tax, and the power is good to go, with no requirement for an enumerated power authorization. No, it is even worse; call any penalty a penalty and have it collected by the IRS and it is henceforth transubstantiated by the miracle of the Roberts decision into a ‘Constitutionally authorized tax.’
"Roberts has given Congress a General Police Power that it has never had and was never supposed to have. A tax credit for buying a Government Motors electric car is not legally equivalent to charging you an extra tax for not doing so – at least that wasn’t the case a week ago.
"I think that Roberts has created something even worse than the Dred Scott decision. If it is not soon reversed, I fear that it will lead to blood in the streets. One of the most important purposes of the US Constitution with its Enumerated Powers and 10th Amendment was to take a vast array of General Police Powers off of Congress’ political table. Everything is now up for grabs at the central government level, and the lobbying for the loot has started."
To look at the purely political aspect. How in the world does the Roberts ruling upholding Zerocare make defeating Zero in November "more likely"?
Suppose Roberts was courageous and not a coward, ruling constitutionally not politically, and sided with his four colleagues who voted to overturn Zerocare in entire. Would we be bemoaning it? Would Roberts’ current defenders be wailing that Zero’s chances of reelection were now much higher? Of course not, we’d all be high-fiveing each other. We’d be ecstatic, more filled with energy and enthusiasm to win on November 6 than ever. Now all we’ve got is anger.
Will that be enough? Let’s hope so, for we don’t have much else. And we won’t even have that if we don’t direct our anger at Roberts as well as Zero for becoming an arch-anticonstitutionalist.
We have the weakest candidate of the lot to argue for legislative repeal of Zerocare, saddled as he is with Romneycare and as of yet unable to coherently attack the Roberts ruling. His campaign, which was firing on all cylinders and striking with devastating counterpunches before, is suddenly adrift. Not good.
We are up against an opponent with an ends-justify-whatever-means morality; who will lie, cheat, and steal as much as it takes; who has the complete total protection of the media to whom reporting truth and facts means nothing; and is the single most powerful individual on the planet.
Against this, we have anger. Then again, it was anger that enabled a bunch of rube colonials to defeat King George and the most powerful nation on the planet at the time. If ever there was a time to fight against the Edicts of the King, that time is now. If ever there was a time to prove we are worthy of being Americans, that time is now.
If ever there were a Fourth of July to commit ourselves to our inalienable rights to our lives, our liberty, and the pursuit of our happiness, to commit ourselves to the re-establishing of a government that exists to protect those rights instead of existing for its own power, that Fourth of July is now.
For not only is the time to do so now, we still have the time. Not much – 18 weeks from yesterday (7/03). That’s time enough for a desperate all-out dash to save our country.
We are past the time when we can win easily, past the time when victory will be sure and not too costly. We have come to Churchill’s moment when we have to fight with the odds against us and only a precarious chance of survival. But we have not yet come to fighting with no hope of victory.
That moment comes on November 7 should Zero win. Then we will have choice but to fight and disobey, to tell the IRS to shove its taxes up its nose, to rebel and risk perishing rather than be slaves in Zero’s Fascist America.
In that America, there will never again be another Fourth of July as a genuine celebration of freedom. So enjoy this day. Enjoy it to the hilt. Read the Declaration. Then starting tomorrow, work for Zero’s defeat as if your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness depended on it, because they do.
We must all work our hearts and brains out to ensure that never again will we think that any Fourth of July will be America’s last.