constitution

“We the Rich…”

February 6, 2012 By mario piperni

Few would argue the fact that Citizens United has been a major player in the Republican primary…and many if not most would concede that none of it has been healthy for the process. And despite Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion that “…independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption”, E.J. Dionne has a more cynical take on the Citizens United ruling.

We have seen the world created by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and it doesn’t work. Oh, yes, it works nicely for the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, especially if they want to shroud their efforts to influence politics behind shell corporations. It just doesn’t happen to work if you think we are a democracy and not a plutocracy.

Two years ago, Citizens United tore down a century’s worth of law aimed at reducing the amount of corruption in our electoral system. It will go down as one of the most naive decisions ever rendered by the court.

[...]

But ascribing an outrageous decision to naiveté is actually the most sympathetic way of looking at what the court did in Citizens United. A more troubling interpretation is that a conservative majority knew exactly what it was doing: that it set out to remake our political system by fiat in order to strengthen the hand of corporations and the wealthy. Seen this way, Citizens United was an attempt by five justices to push future electoral outcomes in a direction that would entrench their approach to governance.

Of course. Does anyone seriously doubt that the five judges who ruled in favor of removing limits on independent spending for political purposes knew exactly what they were doing and the manner in which their ruling would impact the electoral process?

What is most ironic is that the political party which screams loudest about activist judges is the very party which benefits from the biggest act of judicial activism in the history of the United States.

Follow MarioPiperniDotCom on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
.

Filed Under: constitution Tagged With: citizens united

Conservatives, Wrong Or Right, Are Always Right

October 22, 2010 By mario piperni

Conservatives have perfected the technique of denying blatant stupidity on their part even in the face of irrefutable fact. They simply call a loss a win and repeat it at every opportunity. And it works for them because, for the most part, their minions accept anything they say at face value.

Which takes us to Christine O’Donnell. She got blown out of the water in her first debate with Chris Coons when she clearly displayed a lack of knowledge concerning the First Amendment. If you missed it, see it here. Unwilling to say, “Hey, I made a mistake”, she instead came to her own defense with this lovely bit of spin and chutzpah.

“It’s really funny the way that the media reports things,” O’Donnell told ABC News this morning. “After that debate my team and I we were literally high fiving each other thinking that we had exposed he doesn’t know the First Amendment, and then when we read the reports that said the opposite we were all like ‘what?’”

“[my] line of questioning to Coons was not because [I] didn’t know the First Amendment, but to the make the point the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ does not appear anywhere in the Constitution.”

Yeah, sure Christine. That’s exactly how it happened. It’s the damn media’s fault once again.

For the record, Steve Benen puts even that argument to rest.

Indeed, a variety of constitutional principles we all know and recognize aren’t literally referenced in the text. Americans’ “right to a fair trial” is well understood, but the exact phrase isn’t in the Constitution. “Separation of powers” is a basic principle of the U.S. Constitution, but it isn’t mentioned, either. More to the point, you can look for the phrase “freedom of religion” in the First Amendment, but those three words also don’t appear.

Isn’t knowledge a beautiful thing?

___

To receive new posts directly on your Facebook page, become a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s page. Click on ‘Like’ here
.

Rush Limbaugh as Constitutional Scholar

October 20, 2010 By mario piperni

First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;…”

Christine O’Donnell / Chris Coons debate:

“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” O’Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O’Donnell asked: “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?”

Rush Limbaugh:

“Are you telling me separation of church and state’s in the First Amendment? It’s not. Christine O’Donnell was absolutely correct — the First Amendment says absolutely nothing about the separation of church and state.”

“This is a modern and incorrect description of the prohibition of the establishment of a national religion.”

“And the left has taken this to say that religious people can not be in government. And that you can’t teach something like creation in the schools while you can teach evolution because evolution isn’t religion but creationism is. Intelligent design can’t be taught because that’s a religion, evolution is. Yet both require faith because neither can be proved.”

“Separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, and the fact that people laughed about this is what’s really scary.”

No, what’s really scary is that Limbaugh has 20 million listeners who hang on to his every lie.

___

To receive new posts directly on your Facebook page, become a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s page. Click on ‘Like’ here
.

Filed Under: Conservative Stupidity, constitution Tagged With: church and state, limbaugh, o'donnell, political issues

A Historectomy Disection

May 24, 2010 By Michael Chase

Dr. David Stolinsky, writing for OpinionEditorial, included these nuggets of wisdom in a post bemoaning the removal of our heritage, an act for which he has coined the word historectomy:

“The bad news is that a historectomy is a dangerous operation from which the patient may not recover. The good news is that the procedure can be reversed:

We can teach the actual Constitution, not liberal commentary about it, in high-school civics classes, university political-science classes, and law-school classes.

We can make the “Federalist Papers” and the “Anti-Federalist Papers” required reading in political-science and law-school classes. How many university graduates have even heard of them?

We can insist that schools use history texts that are written from a pro-freedom perspective.”

I just loved his unintentional warning about the mischief that Texas School Boards are inflicting on our nation, but his point is that liberals are distorting history. The U.S. Constitution is not a difficult document to find and read, just follow this link. On this site, one can also find the Declaration of Independence in addition to introductions to the “Founding Fathers”. My personal belief is that the establishment clause, which prohibits the melding of church and state, must be balanced with the prohibition against impediments to the free practice of religion.

My position may be overly nuanced, and I may be tiptoeing through bullshit, extremist positions like those advocated by Dr. Stolinsky represent the greatest immediate threat to liberty our nation has known. This notion of the evangelical right, in particular, that freedom means the right to conform and liberty is an unalienable right of Christians, is terrifying. The reality that those very same people are successfully encoding this bullshit in history and civics texts is nothing less than an academic overflow of the United States. The Constitution was, in fact, written by largely Christian men. This nation is, without substantive argument, a nation of Christians. But it is not a Christian nation.

This Constitution, written by religious Christians does not mention God, Christ, or Saint. Outside of one reference to rights endowed by “the Creator”…nothing else. Thomas Jefferson mentions “The Laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God at the outset of the Declaration of Independence, but never comes close to a religious reference afterwords. Stolinsky’s faith in teaching “The Federalist” (interesting that he argues for the collection’s teaching but does not know the collection’s correct title), is intriguing. “The Federalist” argued passionately for ratification of the Constitution, but largely against the adoption of the Bill Of Rights. His great equalizer would, in fact, rob his conservative movement of no less an item than the 2nd Amendment.

Progressives need to aggressively re-brand freedom and liberty, before the conservatives rewrite Merriam Webster as well…

___

Michael Chase publishes The Rational Middle

Filed Under: constitution, history Tagged With: constitution, history, political issues, politics

RNC Attack Kagan and Defend Defective Constitution

May 12, 2010 By mario piperni

The timeline…

1787 - The U.S. Constitution is written. It represents slaves as “three-fifths” of “Free Persons”. It does not grant slaves nor women the right to vote.

1865 - The 13th Amendment is ratified abolishing slavery.

1920 - The 19th Amendment is ratified giving women the right to vote.

1967 - Thurgood Marshall becomes the first African American nominated to the Supreme Court.

1987 - Thurgood Marshall delivers a speech in which he called the Constitution, as drafted by the Founding Fathers, defective.

I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite “The Constitution,” they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.

For a sense of the evolving nature of the Constitution we need look no further than the first three words of the document’s preamble: ‘We the People.” When the Founding Fathers used this phrase in 1787, they did not have in mind the majority of America’s citizens. “We the People” included, in the words of the Framers, “the whole Number of free Persons.” United States Constitution, Art. 1, 52 (Sept. 17, 1787). On a matter so basic as the right to vote, for example, Negro slaves were excluded, although they were counted for representational purposes at threefifths each. Women did not gain the right to vote for over a hundred and thirty years.

1993 - Elena Kagan, writes a law review article in tribute to Marshall shortly after his death. She quoted parts of Marshall’s 1987 speech, specifically the part in which he calls the Constitution “defective” and that the Constitution showed “a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged.”

2010 (April) – RNC chairman Michael Steele, in response to a question as to why African Americans should vote Republican, said:

“You really don’t have a reason to, to be honest — we haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True.”

“For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

2010 (May) – President Obama nominates Elena Kagan for a seat on the Supreme Court.

2010 (May) – RNC chairman Michael Steele, issues a statement:

“Given Kagan’s opposition to allowing military recruiters access to her law school’s campus, her endorsement of the liberal agenda and her support for statements suggesting that the Constitution ‘as originally drafted and conceived,’ was ‘defective,’ you can expect Senate Republicans to respectfully raise serious and tough questions to ensure the American people can thoroughly and thoughtfully examine Kagan’s qualifications and legal philosophy before she is confirmed to a lifetime appointment.”

2010 (May) – High-ranking Republicans think the RNC’s position is full of shit.

“I would say that the original Constitution was a document that needed amending, and after the Civil War it was amended and removed those offending parts.” -Senator Jeff Sessions

“I don’t like to see anybody downgrade the Constitution, but let’s face it: The Constitutition, to get passed, had to give the three-fifths language to the South, and that’s what Thurgood Marshall was referring to. And I think most people in retrospect say that was a compromise that they had to make in order to have the Constitution, but it wasn’t right. The rest of the Constitution was right.” – Senator Orrin Hatch

Conclusion:

The Constitution as originally written was defective.

Thurgood Marshall was right.

Elena Kagan was right.

Jeff Sessions was right.

Orrin Hatch was right.

The RNC was not.

___
.
To receive new posts directly on your Facebook page, become a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s fan page by clicking on the ‘Thumbs Up – Like” icon here