The Old Girl's Club

By Alan Caruba

I would be more depressed regarding the nomination of Elena Kagan to be a Supreme Court Justice were it not for George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Myers. That caused such a firestorm of rebuke that she withdrew herself from consideration. The same should be done for the ideologue that Obama has nominated, but it won’t.

Kagan, like Obama, salivates over having the power to change the history of the nation, tilting it toward the same failed socialism that collapsed the former Soviet Union, has been abandoned by the People’s Republic of China, and has brought a number of European nations to the doorstep of bankruptcy and default. No matter what form or modification of socialism has been tried, it has failed.

Watching the dumpy Ms. Kagan lie through her teeth saying her personal politics won’t influence her decisions is nauseating. Her rise through the ranks of academia and public service has all been due to how she politically positioned herself through life to get to this point.

It is a confluence of events and personalities such as history always throws up—-usually at the worst possible time.

America was blessed by some of the finest minds of their time when the Founders gathered in Philadelphia to write a Constitution. We were blessed by men of determination and vision like Lincoln and Reagan as just the right time in our history. In between those times, the tendency was to fall back into bad habits of thinking and doing things.

Kagan has a rather pedantic resume. There are surely a hundred or a thousand more attorneys who have demonstrated their knowledge and mastery of the law in a fashion superior to her. She has never been a judge. She has no substantial trial experience though, as Soliciter General, she has argued before the Supreme Court.

Little wonder, the former lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago thinks she should be on the Supreme Court. They share a similar lack of real achievement in life by comparison with those who have built or managed companies, fought in wars, or excelled in the sciences or arts.

What they do share is an extreme, progressive outlook, filled with a hatred for guns, corporations, Wall Street, a bizarre desire to let homosexuals marry, and an admiration for all things that are not American. She will join Justice Sonia Sotomayor, another Obama choice, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a Clinton choice, as the Supreme Court begins to looks increasingly like an old girl’s club.

Americans know they have literally trapped themselves into this situation and, until control of the Congress can pass from the Democrats to the Republicans, they are helpless to influence or to stop these egregious “changes” in our nation’s affairs.

Short of some damaging revelation, the Senate will confirm Ms. Kagan and she will serve on the Supreme Court for decades. Contrary to popular myth, the Court has made some horrendously bad decisions in the past. One would hope that the Senate Republicans would mount a filibuster to save the nation from this, but that too is not likely to happen.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Case Against Elena Kagan: Obama the Destroyer

Btter than I could ever do it, Jeffrey T. Kuhner, writing in The Washington Times, makes a powerful case against the nomination and possible approval of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.

I urge you to read his article at:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/14/obama-the-destroyer/

Assaults on the Second Amendment

By Alan Caruba

While Americans are still wary of making big purchases such as a new home, they are investing heavily in guns and ammunition. The sales are off the charts and this may have something to do with why the Founding Fathers, after protecting free speech, free press, and the right to peacefully assemble to protest, made the right to keep and bear guns the Second Amendment.

Right after 9/11 Americans similarly went out and bought guns and ammunition. When Americans get scared, they get guns. The first months of the Obama administration have given many cause for concern that this president harbors totalitarian dreams.

New Jersey is well known for electing some of the lamest politicians at all levels from federal to state. Following a quick switch by the Democrat Party when Sen. Robert Torricelli, seeking reelection, was forced off the ballot in 2002 due to some embarrassing ethical revelations, former Senator Frank Lautenberg was put on the ticket and, of course, won. He is 85 years old, making him one of the oldest members in a Congress famous for turning a blind eye to incipient senility.

I provide this thumbnail history because Sen. Lautenberg has introduced S.1317, a bill that would give the Attorney General the discretion to block gun sales to people on terror watch lists. These lists, since 9/11, have ballooned, often including people with no connection to terror. The names of people on the watch list are secret and, in effect, this would invest the Attorney General with extraordinary power to limit gun sales.

Moreover, Sen. Lautenberg says he has been frustrated by the FBI’s refusal to disclose to investigators details and specific cases of gun purchases beyond aggregate, general data. Apparently it is not enough that one has to secure a state permit to purchase any weapon these days. In New Jersey, I was fingerprinted in order to do this. Just how much information on gun owners does the Senator need?

Sen. Lautenberg, like his liberal colleagues in Congress and in offices throughout the land, blame guns, not the criminals who use them, for crime. In states that permit the carrying of concealed weapons, the crime rate has fallen. A citizen’s ability to shoot back has a sobering effect on criminals.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is leading the fight against S. 1317 and you should support this effort. History is replete with evidence that wherever gun ownership is banned, totalitarian governments are free to slaughter their own citizens.

There is, however, some good news on the horizon. The Second Amendment Foundation reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will hear the case of McDonald v. City of Chicago to decide whether the right to keep and bear arms secured by the Second Amendment protects Americans from over-reaching state and local governments.

At issue is a 27-year-old Chicago law banning handguns, requiring the annual taxation of firearms, and generally interfering with the right of law-abiding citizens to keep guns at home for self-defense. In a landmark case last year, District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court struck down a law that rendered the District a virtual gun-free zone. Since it is administered by the federal government, the Chicago case will apply nationwide to states and local governments.

A lot is riding on the Chicago case, but in the meantime, Congress must be constantly monitored for its continuing effort to limit the Second Amendment.

Time to Demand Obama's Resignation

By Alan Caruba

“In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by law provide for the case of removal…” (Article Two, U.S. Constitution)

Since the President takes an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, a President who acts contrary to the Constitution or is found guilty of breaking the law should be subject to removal.

Constitutionally, removal can be secured by “impeachment for, conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Here’s a question I would pose to you. If the Supreme Court can act within days to approve the sale of Chrysler to Fiat, why can it not act to hear cases filed months ago regarding whether President Obama is a “natural born” citizen of the United States? Why have some lower courts refused to hear such cases citing that the parties bringing them, citizens under the rule of the Constitution, have no “standing” to do so?

The Supreme Court is famous for trying to dodge such cases. The likelihood of impeachment is zero because Democrats control Congress and only one President ever resigned from office and that was Richard M. Nixon. It took an excruciatingly long time to reach that point as anyone who lived through the Watergate scandal will tell you. The nation was shocked to learn that a President engaged in a criminal enterprise while in office.

The question of preserving and protecting the Constitution would be hard to prove except in hindsight, but by then it would be too late for the nation, ruined by excessive, unjustified taxation and borrowing that threatens the collapse of the economy.

I would argue that a President who appoints over twenty “czars” to supersede the powers of the secretaries of various federal departments; people who are apparently exempt from Congressional approval or oversight, and people who apparently do not feel the need to hold press conferences to explain what they are doing, is distinctly unconstitutional.

It will be argued that there have been various such “czars” in the past, mostly particularly “drug czars” whose purpose was to oversee and coordinate efforts to address the nation’s problems with illegal drugs, but the imposition of people to virtually replace members of the President’s cabinet is unprecedented. Cabinet officers must receive the approval of Congress, but these “czars” have not.

Even the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has been reduced to a mere figurehead as various personal envoys of the President have been authorized to act for him regarding sensitive diplomatic affairs, answerable presumably only to him.

What we have is a President who is running the government through an invisible network of people who are not answerable to the citizens of the nation, yet granted powers to determine the extent of the rights of those citizens including how much compensation they may receive.

This is a President who has said during a C-Span interview that the government is out of money, but who is pressing forward for legislation to impose trillions in taxes on all energy use, who advocates the borrowing of tens of billions by the nation for a proposed healthcare “reform”, and who has already signed a so-called stimulus bill of nearly 9,000 items representing $700 billion that he deemed “imperfect.”

The economy does not need a stimulus. It needs the government to get out of the way of the free market system to correct itself and for the nation’s famed entrepreneurial spirit to initiate new businesses and new jobs. We do not “rescue” people who took on too much debt.

He has approved “bailouts” to private companies that should have been allowed to seek bankruptcy protection and he has demanded that the former head of General Motors be fired by its board of directors. He has launched an attack on the Constitutional sanctity of contracts, abrogating the rights of lenders. Banks which received TARP funds are desperate to return such funding to the U.S. Treasury rather than give up control over their affairs.

We have all watched the President in action since January 20, 2009 and what we have seen and heard has been constant criticism of America that has been an affront to our great history and our defense of human rights. He has done this in one foreign nation after another.

A speech in Cairo to the worldwide Muslim community President Obama distorted the facts of American history and conflated the deliberate murder of six million European Jews in the last century with the suffering inflicted on so-called Palestinians by their fellow Arabs; the result of repeated wars on Israel. No such comparison can be made and is by definition obscene.

Within months, “tea parties”, citizen protests, occurred from coast to coast and others are being planned for July Fourth. Not since the advent of the Civil War under threat of secession has a President faced such widespread opposition after taking office.

In State after State, resolutions are being passed in opposition to his proposed legislation and policies. An organization of “Oath-Keepers”, members of the U.S. military, the reserves, the National Guard, peace officers, and veterans, has emerged to say they will not blindly “follow orders” issued by this President that are contrary to the oath to uphold the Constitution they have taken.

This is a President whose Department of Homeland Security has defined as “extremist” anyone who criticizes or disagrees with his policies.

Americans who are fearful of the havoc President Barack Obama has let loose on this nation need to flood Congress with the demand that he be removed from office for his failure to protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution. Indeed, to conclusively prove he was constitutionally qualified to run for the presidency.

The White House has to hear from Americans calling on the President to resign.

He and the Democrat-controlled Congress are proposing onerous taxation and reckless borrowing that will destroy the nation’s economy.

Americans cannot afford to let this President hold power until the next election in 2012. They cannot hope that the midterm elections in 2010 will be sufficient to protect them against the damage he will do to them, to their children, and to their grandchildren before they are held.

We cannot even be sure that as the result of the White House takeover of the Census and its close association with ACORN that those elections will not be rigged.

President Barack Hussein Obama must go!

The Supreme Court Affirms the Second Amendment

By Alan Caruba

Eighty million Americans breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court struck down the Washington, D.C. ban on gun ownership. Had the Court not supported the Second Amendment that asserts the right of Americans to own guns, the next step would have been efforts to take their guns away and to insure that no one could purchase one for self-defense.

Americans would have gone from being citizens to subjects.

Over the span of thirty years since the ban had been imposed Washington, D.C. had become the murder capital of the nation and, if this lesson has been lost on Americans, then it is surely time to restate it. Where citizens are permitted to own guns and, in those States where they are permitted to carry concealed weapons, the crime rates and, in particular, murder rates fall dramatically.

Some might argue that this is also a racial issue because so much of the violence in our cities is black-on-black with murder cited as a major cause of death among young, black Americans. However, a statement by Project 21, a black activist leadership network has hailed the decision.

“This is a great day for law-abiding citizens of the nation’s capital who have been unjustly been denied their full right to protect themselves and families for over 30 years,” said Project 21’s Deneen Borelli. “Perhaps the government should find a better way to keep illegal guns away from criminals and not law-abiding citizens.”

This Supreme Court decision confirms once again the intention of the Founding Fathers and the intent of the Second Amendment to ensure that Americans have a right to bear arms, i.e., to own guns and to use them for self-defense and as a defense against a government that might turn against its own citizens for the purpose of enslaving them.

The Second Amendment protects not just citizens, but the Constitution because it ensures that it will not be destroyed for those in power who might want to impose a totalitarian regime.

Every day in America, gun owners protect their lives and others against criminals, often by doing nothing more than a show of arms. Where guns are forbidden, the innocent becomes nothing more than victims of criminals and the crazed.

An armed America is a safer America.