The Tyranny of the Minority: What Happens When Our System of Checks and Balances is Bypassed

th (15)Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery.- Thomas Jefferson

Politico.com reports that

Buoyed by the success of his nuclear deal with Iran, President Barack Obama is preparing to move aggressively on other long-delayed priorities, including a major climate change summit this winter and his elusive quest to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

The National Security Council’s directorate of strategic planning has been quietly building an agenda of action items for the closing year of Obama’s presidency, in a White House that sees its work as far from complete, administration officials say.

“We have no intention of resting on our laurels,” said one senior administration official. “We have an ambitious foreign policy agenda that we’ll continue to pursue aggressively throughout the remainder of [the] fourth quarter of the administration.”

Part of that agenda includes striking a calmer post-Iran deal relationship with Israel — including a November visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that officials announced on Friday.

Also high on the to-do list: completing a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to which Congress gave “fast-track” approval in June; bolstering counter-terrorism partnerships in Asia and Africa; and putting U.S.-China relations on a firmer footing, a project that will include a state visit to Washington by Chinese President Xi Jingping this month.

As Obama’s presidency draws to a close, he will focus increasingly on the policies his successor will inherit after he’s gone, according to sources familiar with the administration’s thinking.

“The last 16 months actually can be very important not only for this president’s legacy, but for setting up the next president’s administration,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who is close to Obama foreign policy officials. “No matter what people say in campaigns, you’re most likely to see incremental change from administration to administration.”

Even as the Iran deal gets implemented in the months ahead, a potentially thorny process that will occupy significant bandwidth in the White House, Obama will shift his focus to climate.

An international climate summit kicks off at the end of November in Paris, where Obama hopes to find agreement on meaningful new limits on carbon gases. The summit is expected to be one focus of Xi’s visit.

Beneath the heady talk of agenda-setting, however, is the grim reality of a global stage where multiple fires burn despite Washington’s efforts to extinguish them. Obama could spend much of his final year performing triage on issues like the Islamic State, Syria’s civil war and the conflict in Ukraine.

Officials are also braced for possible new crises, including in Afghanistan, as U.S. troops withdraw from a country whose government and security forces remain fragile.

One of Obama’s post-Iran deal projects has already run into trouble as Secretary of State John Kerry has begun new diplomacy to find a political resolution to Syria’s civil war. Russia, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, has recently sent military personnel and equipment to the country—a dramatic escalation that has surprised and angered Obama and Kerry and may derail that project.

“We continue to believe that there needs to be a political solution to the conflict in Syria, and that support for the Assad regime, particularly in a military way, is unhelpful to achieving that goal,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said Friday.

And although the White House been working on a new plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, a key promise from Obama’s 2008 campaign, it has been bedeviled by old obstacles, including political resistance to the transfer of detainees from Cuba onto U.S. soil.

Some Pentagon and intelligence officials remain deeply wary of freeing other detainees cleared for release, and some top officials are skeptical that the camp can be shut down as long as a Republican Congress remains in power.

When our Founding Fathers sat down to provide form and substance to the laws and procedures for governing this new country, which they had fought and won a bloody war over, by pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, they were very aware of the price of tyranny.

They determined that this new nation would be a Constitutional Republic, having had their fill of monarchies.

In order to ensure that no leader of this new nation would go mad with power, and become a tyrannical despot, our Founders set up a System of Checks and Balances, overseen by Three Branches of Government: the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial, with each branch having a distinct and LIMITED  role.

In an effort to keep this simple (in deference to any Modern American Liberals, who may be reading), here is a description of their powers:

The Legislative Branch is given the powers to make the laws. It has the following checks over the Executive Branch:

  • May override presidential vetoes with a two-thirds vote
  • Has the power over the purse strings to actually fund any executive actions
  • May remove the president through impeachment
  • Senate approves treaties
  • Senate approves presidential appointments

The Legislative Branch has the following checks over the Judicial Branch:

  • Creates lower courts

The Executive Branch is given the power to carry out the laws. It has the following checks over the Legislative Branch:

  • Veto power
  • Ability to call special sessions of Congress
  • Can recommend legislation
  • Can appeal to the people concerning legislation and more

The Executive Branch has the following checks over the Judicial Branch:

  • President appoints Supreme Court and other federal judges

The Judicial Branch is given the power to interpret the laws. It has the following checks over the Executive Branch:

  • Judges, once appointed for life, are free from controls from the executive branch
  • Courts can judge executive actions to be unconstitutional through the power of judicial review

 The Judicial Branch has the following checks over the Legislative Branch:

  • Courts can judge legislative acts to be unconstitutional.

The situation, which we as a nation, find ourselves in today, is one which our Founding Fathers sought valiantly to avoid.

We are suffering under an Imperious Presidency.

One in which the President of the United States does not care about the “Will of the People”, but, rather, is intent on implementing and enforcing his own Far Left Policial Ideology, resulting in a “Tyranny of the Minority”.

For example, the “victory” of The Iran Deal, which the Liberal website, i.com, was lauding in the article posted earlier in this blog, is one which, according to a poll from Pew Research, is supported by only 215 of Americans.

That’s a victory?

Climate Change is the Fool’s Gold of the “Politically Hip”. It is the biggest Con Job since P.T. Barham hung up a sign to fool the rubes, which read

This way to the Egress.

The Syria/ISIS/Middle East Situation is an erupting volcano of Radical Islam, which endangers the whole civilized world. And, make no mistake, boys and girls, it is Obama’s responsibility.

However, the situation which our nation finds itself in, could have been avoided…if there had been EFFECTIVE POLITICAL OPPOSTION to the plans and Machiavellian Machinations of Barack Hussein Obama.

Like the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, who accompanied Dorothy down that fabled Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City of Oz, if the Congressional Republican Elite, led by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, had only had heart, brains, and courage, they could have used our System of Checks and Balances to thwart, or, at least, to slow down, all of Obama’s Plans, which have succeeded in, literally, “radically changing” the Shining City Upon a Hill, into something almost unrecognizable.

It would have helped if they had found some spines, too.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

“So This is How Liberty Dies…With Thunderous Applause”…and a SCOTUS Ruling

wpid-fb_img_1435357963373.jpgWell, it happened. The overwhelming majority of American voters have been spat squarely in the face by five representatives of the Judicial Branch of our government, who decided, instead, that they wanted to be the Legislative Branch, and add a new “right” to our Constitution.

In other words, our votes in State Referendums, in which the overwhelming majority of states, voted against “gay marriage”, did not mean squat to the five self-righteous Liberals on the Supreme Court.

The following excerpts, from the dissenting Supreme Coast Justices, are courtesy of nationaljournal.com

Chief Justice John Roberts:

Roberts’s argument centered around the need to preserve states’ rights over what he viewed as following the turn of public opinion. In ruling in favor of gay marriage, he said, “Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law.”

Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas joined him in his dissent.

While Roberts said he did not “begrudge” any of the celebrations that would follow the Court ruling, he had serious concerns that the Court had extended its role from constitutional enforcer to activist.

Roberts: “Understand well what this dissent is about: It is not about whether, in my judgment, the institution of marriage should be changed to include same-sex couples.”

Judge Antonin Scalia:

According to Scalia, the five justices in the majority are using the 14th Amendment in a way that was never intended by its writers. “When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every State limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so,” he wrote.

“They [the majority] have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a ‘fundamental right’ overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since.”

Scalia called out the majority for acting like activists, not judges. (He was similarly critical in Thursday’s ruling on health care.) “States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ ‘reasoned judgment,'” he wrote.

Scalia’s scorn went beyond picking apart the majority’s legal judgement. He also made fun of their language.

The majority began its opinion with the line: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”

Scalia wrote that if he ever were to join an opinion that began with that sentence he “would hide my head in a bag,” saying such language was more like the “mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie” than, say, legendary Chief Justice John Marshall.

Elsewhere, the majority wrote “The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.”

Scalia scoffed at this assertion, saying that even “the nearest hippie” would know that marriage hinders the freedom of intimacy. Here are his words:

Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.

Judge Clarence Thomas:

In his own separate dissent, which Scalia also joined, Justice Clarence Thomas pilloried the majority opinion as “at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our nation were built.”

Kennedy and the Court’s liberal wing are invoking a definition of “liberty” that the Constitution’s framers “would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect.”

“Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in our Declaration of Independence—that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government,” Thomas said. “This distortion of our Constitution not only ignores the text, it inverts the relationship between the individual and the state in our Republic. I cannot agree with it.”

Judge Samuel Alito:

In his dissent, Alito argues that gay marriage is not protected in the Constitution under the Due Process Clause because “liberty” only applies to those principles that are rooted in U.S. tradition. His argument is that the concept of gay marriage is new and therefore not included.

“For today’s majority, it does not matter that the right to same-sex marriage lacks deep roots or even that it is contrary to long-established tradition. The Justices in the majority claim the authority to confer constitutional protection upon that right simply because they believe that it is fundamental,” Alito writes.

Alito also reaffirms his position that there is no way to confirm what the outcome of gay marriage may be on the institution of traditional marriage and therefore the Court is and should not be in a position to take on the topic.

Philosophers, and historians—can predict with any certainty what the long-term ramifications of widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage will be. And judges are certainly not equipped to make such an assessment,” Alito wrote.

Alito’s belief is also that traditional marriage has existed between a man and woman for one key reason: children. His argument is:

For millennia, marriage was inextricably linked to the one thing that only an opposite-sex couple can do: procreate. Adherents to different schools of philosophy use different terms to explain why society should formalize marriage and attach special benefits and obligations to persons who marry. Their basic argument is that States formalize and promote marriage, unlike other fulfilling human relationships, in order to encourage potentially procreative conduct to take place within a lasting unit that has long been thought to provide the best atmosphere for raising children.

Now that the majority has ruled in favor of gay marriage, Alito offers a stark warning about future conflict between religious liberty and progressive ideas.

“By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas. Recalling the harsh treatment of gays and lesbians in the past, some may think that turnabout is fair play. But if that sentiment prevails, the Nation will experience bitter and lasting wounds,” he writes.

If you try to talk to a Liberal about this New Fascism, they will deny that there is any Fascism going on at all. In fact, they will tell you that this is “the will of the people” and they will site Democratically-stacked push polls in order to back their opinion up.

When you ask Liberals if , for example, “homosexual marriage” is the “will of the people”, why did voters in the overwhelming majority of states, including California, vote against it? And, if there is “no Fascism”, what do you call the fact that 2% of the population is having activist judges overturn the actual will of the people in order to get their way, in their attempt to redefine a word that has meant the same thing since time immemorial?

In response, you will usually see their eyes glaze over, like a deer in the headlights, or experience a dramatic pause in posting, if you are on the Internet.

Liberals can not legitimately defend the suppression of the First Amendment Rights of Christian Americans.

Fascism, in any form, remains indefensible, even, when a spineless Supreme Court narrowly sides in favor of popular culture and against God’s Law.

Have you ever heard the story of the frog in the pot of water?

You put a frog in the pot of tap water. You place that pot of tap water on the stove. You slowly increase the heat on that burner in increments, allowing the frog to get adjusted to the rising heat, so that he is content with staying in the pot of water, until he boils.

That is what has happened to America. Gradually, like the frog in the pot of water, we’ve allowed things that we intrinsically know are wrong, to become a part of our popular culture and everyday lives, burning away what were the Traditional American Values, upon which this country was founded, and upon which we were raised.

And now, the country which we have known and loved, all of our lives, is sitting here boiling in a facist stew of our own making.

God, be merciful.

Until He Comes,

KJ