Give Us Liberty

hen, and even before, he campaigned for the White House, Barack Hussein Obama made it clear that he thought the United States Supreme Court failed in its responsibility to properly adjudicate cases that came before it by basing their decisions on the rule of law and not recognizing the need to entwine elements of social justice into their decisions. In 2001, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama was interviewed on the Odyssey program on Chicago public radio station WBEZ.FM. In that interview, which should have become mandatory listening for every American citizen who was eligible to vote in the United States—even those who chose to ignore the fact that the mulatto who wanted to be monarch was not even a citizen of the United States—Obama did not mince his words. America should have been listening. Obama was a Manchurian Candidate long before he did that interview. A third generation "fellow traveler," he was determined to remake America into something that more closely resembled the former Stalinist Soviet Union than the United States you grew up knowing.

In 2001, the Marxist community organizer turned State politician explained how he would complete his plan to implement the reparative economy that would transform the United States into a Stalinist society. All he needed was the political power to do what needed to be done to achieve that objective. At their own moments in history before Obama we had men like Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao and Castro who believed as Obama believes.

Which, of course, is the opposite thing most politicians seeking national office do. Generally, they hide the sinister Marxist side of their nature until its too late for the voters to stop them. It was almost like Obama, when he did that radio interview with WBEZ-FM, was campaigning for a money backer like George Soros who he would need to win national office. Eventually Soros backed him for both the US Senate and the White House. His current judicial appointments confirm the truth in that notion. Very likely his appearacne on that Chicago talk show, on that day, may have been what initially attracted the interest of the princes of industry and the barons of banking and business at that time. Obama was a person who interested those willing to sacrifice the United States on their quest to create not only a world economy but a world government that would control what will become approximately 185 subservient nation-states governed by the legislative body in the Hague. That government will not be a republic. Nor will it be a parliamentary democracy like England. It will be a fascist-socialist democracy that more closely resembles totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

Obama's interview on WBEZ-FM gives some insight into Obama's Marxist character. When he addressed the 99th Annual Conference of the NAACP in July, 2008 and spoke of his plans to redistribute the wealth of the United States Obama repeated, verbatim, what he said in the 2001 Odyssey interview on WBEZ-FM: "If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order, and as long as I could pay for it, I'd be okay. But," he added, "the Supreme Court never ventured into the issue of redistribution of wealth or the more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted. And, the Warren Court interpreted it the same way that the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the States can't do to you. It says what the federal government can't do to you. But it doesn't say what the federal government or the State government must do on your behalf. And, that hasn't shifted. One of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was [that it] became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of power through which you bring about redistributive change." Obama did not get it in 2001 and he still didn't get it in 2008 or, for that matter, today, in 2010.

The Constitution does not mandate that government do anything for you—except stay out of your way. The 10th Amendment makes it clear that other than the responsibilities specifically assigned to it by the Constitution, the federal government is restricted from assuming for itself any role in the lives of the American people. In other words, the federal government has absolutely no authority to engage in practices designed to create economic parity by taxing the middle class to economically elevate the poor.

That must be why the Warren Court did not attempt to redistribute the wealth of the middle class by applying the tenets of social justice to strip the middle class of their wealth under the guise of elevating the standard of liviing of the poor. Anyone who has studied the economics of the Soviet Union knows that while the middle class was forced down the economic ladder to meet the poor at the bottom of the societal abyss, money did not trickle down to the poor. It found its way into the pockets of the communist elites who lived as prosperous as the capitalists in the West.

What was most frightening about Obama's statements in 2001 and again in 2008, and what has been ignored by the media and the conservative talking heads is Obama's mindset. Obama and all social progressives chose to ignore the fact that the Constitution was established to safeguard the rule of law by outlawing the types of class distinctions found in Europe. Under the US Constitution, all people enjoy the same individual rights and privileges under the law. But neither the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence guarantees its citizens that they will succeed in their endeavors. Nor does it promise that they will be economically equal to all other men. All America promises its citizens is that they will have the opportunity to succeed by the sweat of their brow with whatever means are at their disposal. All the American system guarantees its citizens is the opportunity to be what they can be by the sweat of their brows. In this country, you can be whatever you want to be through your own ingenuity—if you are willing to work hard enough.

The social progressives, on the other hand, believe that equality is based not on the civil rights that makes the poorest man equal in the eyes of the law with the richest man but, rather, that it's based on economic equality—with all men possessing the same wealth regardless of the sweat equity investment in their labor.

Everyone, in their view, has an inherent right to be economically equal to his neighbor. Those who cannot achieve the same degree of prosperity as their neighbor are nonetheless entitled to economic parity with that neighbor. In the view of the social progressives (i.e., true communists), the State not only has the right, but an obligation, to take the excess money that is being hoarded (i.e., saved) by the middle class (which the social progressives feel possess more than they need to pay for their day-to-day sustenance), and redistribute that "excess" to those who choose not to work, or do not to manage the fruits of their labor well enough to provide for their families. The real tragedy of socialism or fascism is that the utopian promise of equality is a sham. In our modern free enterprise system, there are several economic classes of people: [a] the super rich who sit of the economic pinnacle of the world (which the media pretends does not exist), [b] the ultra rich (which appear in the Forbes and Fortune lists of whom they label as the world's richest families), [c] the common rich (where real taxation begins), [d] the management middle class, [e] the blue collar middle class, [f] the working class, [g] the low income working class, [h] the poor, [i] the impoverished and the homeless, and finally, [j] the carrions of society who believe the "system" owes them a living. The system, created by the social progressives in 1965 shackled the welfare class to the government's feeding trough in order to place them in perpetual bondage to the Democratic Party, creating an indentured class that existed until the GOP forced Bill Clinton to end generational welfare in 1995 and provide those who had never worked with a helping hand to provide them with the skills they needed to find work.

It is the social progressives like Obama and his ilk that now control the Executive and Legislative branches who are determined to rob the sweat equity from the brows of those who toil to provide for their families and give it to those who feel they are owed a living. When Obama campaigned on a platform of "change," that change was a socialist redistribution of wealth. "Social justice," he told the NAACP, "is not enough. It matters little if you have the right to sit at the lunch counter if you can't afford lunch." It has not occurred to the social progressives that if you need money, you get a job and earn that money. That entry level job may not pay as much as the job someone else has had for the last ten yars, but all of us started work at the bottom where the pay sucks—even those whose daddy owned the company.

This exercise in Economics 101 was designed to explain to you what Obama is up to appointing social progressives as high court nominees. He needs to complete the judicial coup d' etat started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 by completely politicizing the federal court system. When the unconstitutional New Deal laws (which, like today, no one read before signing them into law), began to find their way into the federal courts and were overturned one after another, Roosevelt decided to force the "rule of law" judges to retire and replace them with social progressives who agreed with his precepts of social justice. In 1935, after witnessing over half of the New Deal laws get overturned by the US Supreme Court, Roosevelt demanded that the New Deal Congress neact legislation that would force all federal judges to retire at age 70. Unlike today's 111th Congress headed by Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] and Sen. Harry Reid [D-NV] who would have had the motion on the floor for a vote before Obama hung up the phone in the Oval Office, the New Dealers understood what FDR was up to and refused. Having a Supreme Court that took its marching orders from the White House would erase the separation between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government and give FDR the power of a dictator.

Roosevelt, lying to the House and Senate leadership, declared that the high court was hopelessly backlogged with cases that needed to be adjudicated, had his Brain Trust write the legislation that would add six more Justices to the high court, taking the Supreme Court from 9 to 15 jurists. In the end, Roosevelt's own party defeated his attempt to stack the high court. But FDR's near success scared the Hughes Court, which not only was not backlogged, but had no pending cases before it. Worried that FDR's next attempt to force them to retire would succeed, the high court re-addressed several of their recent decisions and decided that maybe the laws were not quite as unconstitutional as they appeared to be on first blush. The court struck the most offesnive passages and let the laws stand, preserving much of the New Deal they had previously found to be unconstitutional.

As the battle over the size of the Supreme Court raged between Roosevelt and the Democratic leadership, Burton K. Wheeler [D-MT], also a social progressive, learned that the only reason some of the aging justices refused to retire was their pay would be cut in half. Wheeler introduced a bill in the Senate that allowed federal judges to retire with pensions equal to their wages. Two Associate Justices, Willis VanDevanter and George Sutherland retired almost immediately. Between Aug. 12, 1937 and Jan. 15, 1938, FDR put three New Dealers on the high court to protect his socialist agenda. First was Sen. Hugo Black, the bulldog in the Senate who pushed most of Roosevelt's unconstitutional laws through that body and got them enacted. Second was Solicitor General Stanley Reed who defended the unconstitutional laws before the Hughes Court, insisting that the "national emergency" Roosevelt faced made the laws imperative. And finally, on Jan. 15, 1938, FDR placed the architect of the New Deal on the high court when he appointed the nation's first communist to the high court—Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter was also one of the founding members of the American Civil Liberties Union. None of the New Deal justices ever recused themselves from litigation concerning the legality of the laws they helped enact. They were specifically placed on the high court to make sure the New Deal remained intact. They succeeded. All of the New Deal laws still on the book are just as unconstitutional today as they were when they were enacted. Political cronyism kept those laws on the books. (The second communist placed on the high court was Abe Fortas. When his communist ties were discovered, Lyndon Johnson, who appointed him, removed him by "promoting him" to an Executive Branch job that would end when his term in office expired.)

Obama, a student of Franklin D. Roosevelt's tactics, knows that to protect his unconstitutional laws he needs social progressive judges on the bench who will do what the Hughes Court of 1935. Obama needs to protect not only his national healthcare system but the death board that was buried in HR 1—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Death Board, officially known as the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Research, was put into place to save both Social Security and Medicare, and curb the costs of the new healthcare system when its implemented. Appointing Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens guarantees his seat on the court remains a social progressive vote. . Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a social progressive who admitted her willingness to temper her decisions with empathy, replaced 69-year old Justice David Souter who, although extremely liberal, did not qualify as a true social progressive ideolog although he was liberal enough for the pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, pro-gay crowd.

Obama, like FDR in 1937-38, will put three justices on the high court before his first term is over, replacing three of the four hard left liberals with social progressive justices of his own choosing. Again, at first blush, exchanging one liberal with another liberal looks likes a no-fault swap since John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter were the four leftwing votes on the court. Exchanging Sonia Sotomayor for Souter and Elena Kagan for Stevens are viewed by everyone as even swaps. They aren't. While it's not like Obama was trying to replace conservatives like Chief Justice John Roberts or Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas or even moderate Sam Alito with hard core leftists who would completely undermine the philosophical slant of the high court for years to come.

But compared to Sotomayor and Kagan, David Souter and John Paul Stevens don't appear quite as liberal as they did a minute ago. I haven't seen anything in the records of the high court's pre-Obama liberals that suggest any of them believed the court had the legal authority to arbitrarily redistribute the wealth of America's middle class by seizing the wealth of the nation's middle class and giving a portion of it to the poor simply because the middle class was better off financially than the poor. At least, that's the political rhetoric. The reality is, the social progressives are really redistributing the wealth of the middle class to themselves, with the poor getting a handout at the feast-laden table of the elites who actually keep most of what they take from the middle class, forcing the middle down the ladder of affluence to meet the poor at the bottom of the ladder where prosperity does not exist for anyone except the politicians.

An Obama court (if he can't convince Breyer to step down), will pit three hard leftists: Sotomayor, Kagan and very likely 9th US Circuit Appeals Court Judge Sidney Thomas against three conservatives: Roberts, Scalia and Thomas. The media will likely rebrand Breyer as a moderate, grouping him with Alito and Anthony Kennedy, and calling the high court "evenly divided." In reality, those examining the decisions coming from the Roberts Court will find increasingly that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee—who was greatly influenced by Sandra Day O'Connor, another Reagan appointee—will be equally influenced by Kagan who served as Dean of Harvard's School of Law, leading to more 5-4 decisions favoring social justice over the rule of law, unlike the current court when the 5 to 4 split is fairly well balanced, with the pendulum swinging in either direction.

Kennedy, like Kagan, was not a judge prior to his appointment to the high court. Kennedy was a Professor of Constitutional Law at McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific (and currently teaches legal seminars during McGeorge's European summer sessions in Salzburg, Austria.) Kennedy will likely view Kagan as a preeminent peer. Kagan attended Oxford, Princeton and Harvard Law School and became a Law Professor at each. She then became Dean of the Law Collge at Harvard before going to Washington. Expect Kagan to pull Kennedy farther to the left. Breyer, who will remain as liberal as ever, will provide the fourth or fifth vote in the 5-to-4 decisions against the rule of law.

Currently, Ginsburg, a close personal friend of Scalia, votes left on societal issues, but generally votes with Scalia on States rights issues. With 9th Circuit Judge Sidney Thomas expected to replace Ginsburg (or Stevens if the conservatives decide to filibuster Kagan) we will find a federalist high court of the type this nation has not seen since the days of Federalist President John Adam when the Federalist Supreme Court suppressed the 1st Amendment and seized the assets of any American who criticized the President under the Aliens and Sedition Act of 1798. Those found guilty of violating the law were sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000. Since most people did not have $1,000, their assets were seized to satisfy the federal lien. It was the Aliens and Sedition Act of 1798 and the prosecution and imprisonment of ten Americans that led to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves in which the States told the federal government that, as an agent of the States, the States reserved the right to nullify any law enacted by the central government with which they disagreed.

What does the media know about Elena Kagan? About her politics? Not much. They knows she's a lesbian. But, when it comes to liberals, sexual orientation is a subject not discussed. With conservatives, its fair game. In a May 14th article in the Washington Post online, Post writer Karen Tumulty raised and answered the question in the headline of the article by asking if Kagan's sexual orientation is any of our business. She concluded that, today, it's hypocrisy to make an issue of the subject—unless, of course, the question is raised about a conservative or any member of any conservative's family. Washington Post writer Michael Gerson admitted that while we know that Kagan clerked for Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and she wrote a liberal column in the Daily Princetonian, we don't know much about her personal convictions or political views on subjects concerning constitutional law because they literally don't exist. Kagan appears to have emerged from the shadows as an expert in the field of law without leaving any distinctive legal footprints to tell us where she's been or where she likely to go if confirmed to the high court. That makes her scary. In fact, it even has some liberals skiddish as well since even though she's a social progressive, her footprints are so faint some of them are not quite sure how she will rule on issues most important to the socialists who currently control the flow of legislation in both Houses of Congress.

The Obama people are sure of only one thing—Kagan is a fellow traveler who has privately assured Obama that she will listen to the cases before her with "empathy," and temper the rule of law with social justice. She, like Associate Justice Sotomayor, who also had no judicial experience before being appointed to the US District Court, will not hesitate to ignore the Constitutional rule of law in favor of the Marxist tenets of social justice. Kagan and Sotomayor have one in common. Both embrace "identity politics."

Kagan's judicial resume is as nonexistent as is her personal resume. Kagan spent most of her career flying under the radar screen. She was so lackluster as a person that she was completely ignored by the media and the conspiracy theorists alike. She posed for her high school yearbook photo in a judge's robe, holding a gavel and cited a quotation from socialist Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter which was printed under the photo. She smoked cigarettes as a teenager and smoked cigars with Bill Clinton as she fought "Big Tobacco" for the Clinton Administration. Kagan loves the opera, and she enjoys a cigar while she plays poker.

As Dean of Harvard's School of Law, Kagan once held a dinner to honor Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Yet, as Dean of Law, Kagan also fought to keep the US military from recruiting on Harvard's campus. It was a battle she ultimately lost. When Gov. Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in Nov., 1980, Kagan was so depressed she drowned her sorrows in vodka and tonic. Kagan had been working to elect Congresswoman Liz Holtzman to the US Senate in 1980. Holtzman, who is now running (in 2010) for the job of Attorney General of New York, lost as well. Kagan bemoaned her loss to "...an ultraconservative machine politician—Al D'Amato." D'Amato, as it turned out, was anything but a ultraconservative. But, when you're as far left as Kagan, a center-left Republican would appear ultraconservative.

Kagan admits that where she grew up "...on Manhattan's upper west side, nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans." She described the Manhattan of her childhood as a place where those who won political office were "real" Democrats, not "closet Republicans," but "...men and women committed to liberal principles and motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government."

While the paper trail left by Kagan goes from thin to transparent, Kagan's mindset pretty much dovetails with Obama's with one key difference. There is nothing in her past that suggests she's a racist.