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| Brief · February 28, 2011 The Foundation"Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness." --James Wilson Opinion in Brief"Attorney General Eric Holder announced that President Obama had concluded that the administration would no longer defend Section 3 of DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act]. ... As he has in so many other areas (EPA, the offshore drilling ban, IMF), Obama has usurped the authority of the other two coequal branches of government to make himself, in effect, not just chief executive but super-legislator and a supreme judicial authority. Holder admitted in his statement that the Justice Department 'has a longstanding practice of defending the constitutionality of duly-enacted statutes if reasonable arguments can be made in their defense,' but not otherwise. But it is preposterous to suggest there are no reasonable arguments to defend the statute when 5,000 years of human history and the express act of Congress fly in the face of that statement. According to professor John Yoo, 'in the few cases that the Supreme Court has heard gay rights cases, it has never adopted (the standard Obama is applying).' In announcing a new standard, Obama claims that the legal landscape has changed in the 15 years since DOMA was passed. You know the drill: Society has 'evolved.' ... [I]t is not Obama's place to make this determination, especially when the people have already done so in such emphatic terms through their duly elected congressmen. ... [W]e have an imperial president who is refusing to enforce a law passed by powerful congressional majorities while persisting in enforcing a law (Obamacare) that two federal courts have already invalidated. The only common denominator is that Obama believes he is the law." --columnist David Limbaugh Culture"One of the most insidious practices of the insidious Obama Justice Department is the sabotaging of litigation -- i.e., DOJ purports to defend some statute or government policy so that it can appear to be moderate, but uses its resulting control over how the case gets litigated to forfeit some of the best legal arguments supporting the statute/policy. This way, DOJ can steer the case toward the radical outcome the Obama base desires rather than the outcome DOJ is ostensibly pursuing. On balance, I far prefer that Obama's Justice Department openly advocates for the outcome desired by Obama's base, as it is finally doing with DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act]. This way, the court can appoint lawyers who will truly defend the statute with the best legal arguments available. ... Regardless of where the DOMA litigation goes from here, what's interesting is the administration's political calculation as the president gears up for the 2012 campaign. Obama has clearly decided that it's more important to be publicly aligned with his base -- which he desperately needs to drum up enthusiasm for his reelection -- than to pursue the more subtle (and effective, albeit unethical) strategy of masquerading as DOMA's defender while actually undermining the statute." --columnist Andrew C. McCarthy Faith & Family"When the family fails, the economy suffers and social pathologies ensue. This invites government intervention, which contracts liberty.... The federal government's programs are no substitute for a mom and a dad in the home. The hard data demonstrates that all children living in intact homes do better in school -- and this costs taxpayers nothing extra. ...What right is more important than the right to life? If we cannot be secure in our persons, will we remain long secure in our property? ... The family that remains together -- and that worships regularly -- can point the path to society's renewal. ... The fiscal costs of social breakdown are massive. Fewer people mean a weaker economy: It has been estimated that since 1970, abortion has cost the nation a minimum of $35 trillion. And government pays hugely for pathologies that derive from broken families and broken lives." --Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council For the Record"During the past week, Barack Obama has found no time to condemn the attacks that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has launched on the Libyan people. But he did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state's public employee unions. ... Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle. ... The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party. ... Now hard economic times have left voters wondering why public employees pay practically zero toward their health insurance and pensions when they have to pay plenty themselves." --columnist Michael Barone Re: The Left"NHJ Journal.com reports that Rep. Michael Capuano, a Massachusetts Democrat, said this [last week] at a Boston 'solidarity' rally: 'I'm proud to be here with people who understand that it's more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.' ... It will not surprise you to learn that Capuano is another 'civility' hypocrite. On Jan. 9, the day after a madman in Tucson, Ariz., got a little bloody, the Globe quoted him: 'What the hell is going on? There's always some degree of tension in politics; everybody knows the last couple of years there's been an intentional increase in the degree of heat in political discourse. ... If nothing else good comes out of this, I'm hoping it causes people to reconsider how they deal with things.' ... Capuano's rhetoric ... was not just violent but authoritarian. He urged government employees to 'get a little bloody' -- to commit violent acts against citizens, as if this were Libya. ... [P]ublic sector 'collective bargaining,' in which public officials 'negotiate' with the unions that helped elect them, is essentially a conspiracy to steal money from taxpayers. Capuano, it seems, would like to escalate that to armed robbery." --columnist James Taranto The Gipper"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us. Business doesn't pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Begin with the food and fiber raised in the farm, to the ore drilled in a mine, to the oil and gas from out of the ground, whatever it may be -- through the processing, through the manufacturing, on out to the retailer's license. If the tax cannot be included in the price of the product, no one along that line can stay in business." --Ronald Reagan
Liberty"Contrast the framers' vision of a republic with that of a democracy. Webster defines a democracy as 'government by the people; especially: rule of the majority.' In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. As in a monarchy, the law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws do not represent reason. They represent force. The restraint is upon the individual instead of government. Unlike that envisioned under a republican form of government, rights are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government. To highlight the offensiveness to liberty that democracy and majority rule is, just ask yourself how many decisions in your life would you like to be made democratically. How about what car you drive, where you live, whom you marry, whether you have turkey or ham for Thanksgiving dinner? If those decisions were made through a democratic process, the average person would see it as tyranny and not personal liberty. Is it no less tyranny for the democratic process to determine whether you purchase health insurance or set aside money for retirement? Both for ourselves and our fellow man around the globe, we should be advocating liberty, not the democracy that we've become -- where a roguish Congress can do anything simply by mustering a majority vote." --economist Walter E. Williams Government"A recent New York Times story summarizes how various government agencies have come up with formulas for determining how much we are worth. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Times notes, has set the value of a human life at $9.1 million.... The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) arrived at its own figure for the value of an American life. The FDA, writes the Times, 'declared that life was worth $7.9 million last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in proposing warning labels on cigarette packages featuring images of cancer victims.' The Transportation Department ... put our worth at $6 million 'to justify recent decisions to impose regulations that the Bush administration had rejected as too expensive, like requiring stronger roofs on cars,' according to the Times. ... [G]iven the Obama administration's likely pursuit of health care rationing ... it is easy to forecast where this could lead should human life be regarded as having only that value placed upon it by government, or an agent of the state. ... If government gets to determine our worth, it could lead to government determining when in its judgment we are worthless. It could lead to government deciding that when we are costing the state more than we are paying in taxes, we might be seen as a bottle, package or can, whose 'sell by' date has expired. And that would mean the government could regard us as disposable and allow -- or force us -- to 'expire.'" --columnist Cal Thomas Reader Comments"Collectivist Tyranny was an excellent essay. As a mastered degree public school teacher, retired, I want the Dept. of Education dismantled and the power returned to the states and localities and their hired professional staff to determine what is best for their children. The students belong to the parents, not the NEA or the Dept. of Ed. Let the localities do what is best, and let the parents hold the professionals they hire to teach and even raise their children be accountable to the parents and citizens of those localities. Imposing rules and social engineering from the top (either by the government or the teachers' unions) just 'ain't' it!" --Vanessa "Too many parasites living off the labors of the industrious -- agreed. Throw the billionaire parasites out! And based on the comments of that Indiana prosecutor Cox, it's not so far-fetched to conjure up memories of Kent State. Watch out for 'thugs' (to use Cox's word against him) in high places. Cox got caught making his 'deadly force' comment, where other hardliners keep it behind closed doors. And where Woody Guthrie's 'This Machine Kills Fascists' guitar message was metaphorical, this guy's bloodlust seems real." --Steve Editor's Reply: By "billionaire parasites," you must be referencing Union executives and the Democrat politicians they keep in office.... "The best road to tax reform? Hold national elections on April 15, same as tax day. (Others thought of this before me, I just echo them.) Then we will see real reform. Better still, eliminate withholding, and require folks to write a check to Uncle Sam on election day. We'd have a flat tax and small government in a year." --Tim
The Last Word"There are many lessons to be learned from the demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin. First and foremost, workers in the public sector should never have been allowed to unionize. Once that happened, it was inevitable that civil servants would wind up being better-paid and better-pensioned than the folks in the private sector. That's because they got to wind up negotiating with politicians who had nothing to lose by giving in to union demands. ... There was a time when unions fought the good fight, but that was a very long time ago. Listening to the union members in Madison raving about the glorious accomplishments of unions is a lot like listening to Arabs boasting about all of their great contributions to mankind, and being reminded that they took place several centuries ago." --columnist Burt Prelutsky Opinion
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