americanideal.org Blog

It’s a shame it took a blogger (God bless him or her) to dig up a seven-year old interview of Obama that the LEM (Liberal Establishment Media; there is nothing mainstream about them) didn’t know existed.  It’s a shame, also, that the questions Obama answered in that interview have NEVER BEEN ASKED OF HIM BY THE MEDIA, ANY OF THE DEBATE MODERATORS, NOR EVEN THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN. 

The questions are central to the role of government in the United States of America and to the function of the Presidency.  With all the promises both candidates have made, with all the things that Obama says he will do (most of which are unrealistic and outside the realm of the presidency), nobody has ever challenged him with the simple question, “Is that the role of the President as defined in the Constitution?”

The US Constitution is the job description for the President, yet there has been no, and I mean no, discussion of the Constitution by either campaign.  Whoever wins this thing will swear an oath, in fact, to “defend and protect the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Isn’t it only fitting that the candidates be required to know and understand the Constitution as a pre-requisite to being elected, so that they know what it is that they will be swearing to defend and protect?

Barack Obama apparently thinks the Constitution is inadequate. Here is what he said on a Chicago Public Radio station in 2001:

OBAMA: 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 now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.
But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as 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 in the same way that generally 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 I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.
MODERATOR: Let’s talk with Karen. Good morning, Karen, you’re on Chicago Public Radio.
KAREN: Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren court wasn’t terribly radical with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place – the court – or would it be legislation at this point?
OBAMA: Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.
You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.
The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts. 

To Obama, the Courts could come up with a way to justify positve rights (”what the federal or state government must do on your behalf”), but he doesn’t think they will.  So it has to be done at the grass-roots level of community organizing. Hello ACORN!

Obama believes that the government must provide “redistributive” justice. If it can’t be forced through the courts, it should be enacted through legislation.  This is a fundamentally radical view of human rights and of the American experiment in ordered liberty.  It is at odds with the vision of America’s founders and even with a great many Americans to this day.  Obama’s view would be consistent with the notion of a “right” to health care, which he advocated in the last debate; a “right” to housing; a “right” to education, etc.  This view of rights not only guarantees that a person cannot be obstructed in trying to obtain those goods, but also that the government must actively provide them to every citizen.

The President’s most fundamental duty is to uphold and defend the US Constitution.  Will the citizens of the United States elect a man to the presidency who does not believe in the very document he will swear to uphold?