April 20, 2010
Speaking Of The Constitution…
… I thought I’d share a Wesley Pruden column that came out today, called Won’t Anybody Here Read The Constitution?
The House of Representatives takes up the legislation this week to grant voting rights to the residents of the District of Columbia, and among all the contentious voices there’s none to speak up for the Constitution.
That’s because the contending parties have devised a squalid little game of “you scratch my itch and I’ll scratch where you itch.” But granting the right to congressional representation for the District is a granting authority the Congress does not have, if words have meanings. The Constitution was deliberately written so that the common man could understand it without the mumbo-jumbo that lawyers invented to manipulate the law.
Article 1, Section 2: “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” Congress, this makes plain and clear, is a legislative body made up of representatives of States, not of States and Districts (or townships and precincts). The capitalization of certain words, which seems so quaint to students of our present day, was hardly coincidental.
The 23d Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1961, grants the vote to qualified District residents in presidential elections, but there’s nothing in XXIII about congressional elections. The right to representation in Congress is reserved for “States,” and the District of Columbia is not a “State.” What could be plainer than that?
Now, having posted the above, I will say this: Over the last few years, I have ceased to consider myself a Republican.
Sure, I’ll vote Republican, but only because the GOP offers up a product closer to my personal political beliefs than the Democrats (Durn Tootin’!!!!). On the same token, however, the Republicans have become no better than their opposition where complacency, career-above-country and hell-bent-for-leather spending are concerned.
I simply don’t trust them.
Yes, they’re fighting tooth and nail on our behalf now, but are they doing it for the single-minded Democrat objective of being voted back into power by their skeptical conservative base, or have they truly learned the lesson dished out, with disasterous results, by the 2006 midterm elections?
No, my political beliefs at this point can be narrowed down to a single item, called The U.S. Constitution.
The U.S. wasn’t anywhere near the precipice at which she now leans before our elected representatives on Capital Hill decided to start either ignoring it or “creatively interpreting” it.
Today, under B. Hussein Obama and the far left run Democrat majority in Congress, the Constitution has been tossed onto the dung heap altogether, and as we can see, things are getting worse, prospects, as they (whoever “they” are) say, looking bleaker as the days pass.
There was a reason the Constitution was written just as it was, and it worked while we were following it.
I was chatting with an immigrant acquaintance about that earlier, and as he didn’t understand, I laid it out thus:
We have all seen mom & pop businesses flourish in the hands of their founders, seen them grow large and prosperous, then watched as the children of the founders inherited them.
The children, believing they knew better than Mom and Dad and that their methods of operation were “outdated, meant for a different time”, decided to change the the way they ran the business, and in short order they were out of business.
This is what’s happening here to America today. It would seem that it has become unfashionable to teach the Constitution and any but revisionist history in the school system, for that matter to even impart how the government works, so millions of young people come out of school with the same attitude toward the Constitution they have toward, say, the Treaty of Versailles — “so what? how does that treaty affect me?” — it doesn’t, but the Constitution sure does! Or should, at any rate.
So like the inheritors of the ill fated business, we are tossing out the rules that made the business successful, only in this case, we are rejecting the Constitution, stupid kids that we are, pissing away the greatest inheritance in the history of the planet by adopting a set of rules that have already, in other countries, manifested themselves as a formula for failure..
Dumb!
http://hardastarboard.mu.nu/wp-trackback.php?p=1182
April 21st, 2010 at 1:25 pm
“the Treaty of Versailles — “so what? how does that treaty affect me?” — it doesn’t, but the Constitution sure does! Or should, at any rate.” IMO, the Treaty of Versailles affected us a bit: WWII,
On a cheerier note, Idaho’s Guv has been popular speaking at Tea Parties lately. (He has no humor, however)
for example. As for the US Constitution, Dr. Glenn Beck, PhD. teaches that daily. *sigh* BTW, you should be happy that the MN
5th Congressional District GOP put a ’secession plank’ in this year’s platform..as some wag noted, the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Regiment (read about Gettysburg sometime) must be turning over in their graves. So how come congress hasn’t issued any ‘letters of marque’ lately? huh?
April 21st, 2010 at 5:18 pm
BB –
Let’s see, now…
To say the Treaty of Versailles was responsible for WWII is like saying that putting an adolescent in reform school for burglary is responsible for his becoming a bank robber later, as an adult.
Granted, Germany received little in the way of sympathy from her former victims (those victimized by having to fight a defensive war they hadn’t sought), given the casualty count and volume of property damage incurred.
Sure they got a raw deal (at Versailles) from their perspective, but like the old saying goes, “Mess around with the bandwagon, expect to get hit with the horn”.
Besides, they held the durn thing in France, and when you surround yourself with the French(spit!), you have to anticipate the worst.
Then again, call it advance payback for WWII and, for that matter, the lie (courtesy of the BND, Germany’s National Intelligence Service, under the auspices of their politicians) that caused the EU, the UN and Bubba Clinton to commit what one might well consider war crimes in the Balkans at the close of the 20th Century.
But…but while it might be argued that the Treaty of Versailles was responsible for plunging Germany into the depression that led to the rise of Hitler and all that followed, when German derrier was licked by the French (spit!) and later kicked by us, that war was over and many decades passed before our portside contingents in both the media and the government began ignoring the Constitution.
Sounds to me like they’re smoking some pretty potent flora in the Land of A Whole Passel o’ Lakes. They’d never be seccessful.
Butch Otter is also an NRA member, bless him. As Jack Higgins likes to say, “Patriotism never goes out of fashion”.
An addendum to that would have been, “…except in the Pelosi/Reid Congress and the Obama White House, where treason is la règle générale. {A little French (spit!) there, heh heh}…
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:26 am
Yep, NRA is an Idaho birthright. Big outfit they: some members
..and sadly
resign and others are forced out …as regards the Versaille Treaty, though,
it has been argued that the input of the Fwench (spit!) added enough humiliation to enable facist propoganda..I guess you could blame the german population, the Nazi Party, the depression, the Treaty, the Brownshirts, Alsace, the redone map of Europe (pick one or all). In the event, it became apparent early on in WWII that
‘unconditional surrender’ and ’start over from scratch’ might be a better endgame. (’cept ol Winston was always trying to cut deals,
empire and all that, you know) BTW, what’s your opinion on the Treaty of Augsburg as a cause of the Cologne War?
Butch Otter came down with a bug and had to be hospitalized. I suspect the TeaPartiers are carriers, ya know?
April 22nd, 2010 at 12:37 pm
BB –
The idea of Michael Moore belonging to the NRA is enough to encourage the most aggressive bout of regurgitation known to man.
Idaho’s got to have a lot of NRA members in the state — somebody’s gotta protect them award winnin’ spuds!
There never would have been a Cologne War if a German hadn’t gone shopping for a wife on skid row and ended up marrying French (spit!).
April 22nd, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Our guv helped create the habit of Idahoans always wearing a cowboy hat:
“In 1992, Otter was pulled over on Interstate 84 near Meridian, Idaho for suspicion of driving under the influence. He claimed the arresting officer observed him swerving as he was reaching for his cowboy hat, which had been blown off by the wind in his open car. A jury convicted Otter in 1993. He was sentenced to 72 hours of community service and 16 hours at an alcohol treatment program.”
..still got a few cowboy hats in my closet…along with some cowboy boots. Geez, they hurt your feet. That’s why John Wayne had that
interesting sideways shuffle.
April 22nd, 2010 at 9:11 pm
BB –
I’ve had some western boots before and kinda’ wondered about that myself. I guess they were originally designed to go through the stirrups on yore hoss, where any good cowpoke is supposed to spend all his time (according to Louis L’Amour, a real cowpoke never works out o’ the saddle, though I wonder how they can do that when he’s mendin’ fences, ‘ceptin’ when he’s at the chuck wagon or bellyin’ up t’the bar at the saloon, or rolled up in his blankets).
I did a Wikipedia look-up on him and saw the bit about the Grey Wolf kerfuffle:
On January 11, 2007, Otter announced his support for a “gray wolf kill,” in which all but 100 of Idaho’s recently-recovered population would be eradicated, pending the forthcoming U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removal of the wolves’ federal protections under the Endangered Species Act. This position drew criticism from Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals who called for a boycott of potatoes from Idaho.
I don’t suppose Priscilla Feral’s “call for a boycott of potatoes from Idaho” went very far. I have observed that environmentalists, animal rights activists and their ilk are generally profoundly self important, and I envision some bespectacled, tweedy Friends of the Library lady standing by herself over a lone spud and declaring, “I am boycotting this potato!”