Politicos on Parade
Most politicians -- especially but not only liberals -- pay lip service to the Constitution but tend not to honor it. They have a passion for laws and regulations that dictate, in the name of "good," how people will live their lives, run their businesses, and spend their incomes. They seem not to understand or care that such laws and regulations undermine liberty and thus, to borrow a phrase, the general welfare that flows from liberty.
A "do-nothing" Congress is the best kind of Congress. Would that there were such a thing.
Career politician: a person who has succeeded in fooling just enough of the people almost all of the time.
The Presidency in Perspective
As the presidency has gone from Washington to Clinton, so too has it gone from service to self-gratification, from honor to corruption, from courage to cowardice, and from dignity to disrepute. The fault lies not in the office but in an electorate that has tolerated -- nay, encouraged -- the debasement of Washington's legacy.
The presidency is as dignified or debased as its incumbent.
The impeachment (and removal) of a President is not a constitutional crisis. Rather, it reaffirms the soundness of the Constitution's design for the orderly transfer of executive power. Through impeachment and removal the nation may, without recourse to mayhem or insurrection, be relieved of a President who has dishonored his trust.
Legal proceedings against a President do not disable the presidency, only the ability of the incumbent to serve. Amendment XXV provides for such instances:
Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable [for any reason] to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.
Presidents come and go but the nation survives [maybe] and thrives [sort of].
Social-isms
Where is it written in the Constitution that the federal government is a repository for retirement savings?
A "liberal" of the Twentieth Century persuasion is a person who presumes to tell others how to live their lives. This use of the word "liberal" is a corruption of language fully consistent with the intellectual corruption of American politics.
Would those who decry meritocracy replace it with mediocracy?
The culture of "public service" was born in the New Deal, came to maturity with John F. Kennedy's New Frontier ("ask what you can do for your country"), and continues to thrive, as always, amongst Ivy-leaguers with all the answers, idealistic naifs as yet un-mugged by reality, and lawyers bent on acquiring inside knowledge and cultivating future business.
In Their Own Words...
Newsweek quotes Alan Dershowitz as saying "Yes, I would defend [Hitler]. And I would win." No matter that justice would lose.
The constitutional balance, as seen by Hamilton and Madison in The Federalist Papers:
It will always be far more easy for the State governments to encroach upon the national authorities than for the national government to encroach upon the State authorities. (Hamilton, No. 17)
[T]here is greater probability of encroachments by the members upon the federal head than by the federal head upon the members. (Hamilton, No. 31)
The State governments will have the advantage of the federal government...in respect to...the weight of personal influence which each side will possess...the powers respectively vested in them...[and] the...faculty of resisting and frustrating the measures of each other. (Madison, No. 45)
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. (Madison, No. 45)
[T]he powers proposed to be lodged in the federal government are as little formidable to those reserved to the individual States as they are indispensably necessary to accomplish the purposes of the Union; and that all those alarms which have been sounded of a mediated and consequential annihilation of the State governments must, on the most favorable interpretation, be ascribed to the chimerical fears of the authors of them. (Madison, No. 46)
Thus is paved the road to hell.
"Cato" foresaw in 1787 that: "the great powers of the president...would lead to oppression and ruin"; the national government "would be an asylum of the base, idle, avaricious, and ambitious," a "court [with] language and manners different from [ours]"; and "rulers in all governments will erect an interest separate from the ruled, which will have a tendency to enslave them."
