Posted on 04/25/2012 4:10:01 AM PDT by IbJensen
DID YOU KNOW SOUTH AFRICA HAS A CONSTITUTION THAT'S FAR SUPERIOR TO OUR OWN? THAT'S WHAT ONE U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE, AS WELL AS SHADOWY ACTIVITIST GROUPS WORKING BEHIND THE SCENES TO EFFECT CHANGE, BELIEVE.
“I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the Constitution of South Africa … a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights …” -Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jan. 30, 2012.
That stunning disavowal—by an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court—of the Constitution she has sworn to uphold, drew widespread and instant condemnation from conservative pundits and legal scholars.
NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox warned that Justice Ginsburg’s statements go to the core of why the coming presidential elections are important, and why they are “about the very survival of our Constitution.” He’s right on the money.
Especially in the mainstream media, Justice Ginsburg’s comments—made during an Egyptian television interview on Jan. 30, 2012—were generally treated in isolation or ignored. For most Americans it was just a sound bite. A fleeting controversy. A mere blip.
Given her animosity toward the Second Amendment, however, Justice Ginsburg’s words must be seen as a special warning of things to come.
Her comments may have seemed off-the-wall, but they reflect an ongoing movement among “progressive” legal activists to render the Constitution as we know it unrecognizable. Perhaps the best definition of this radical movement has been expressed by Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet:
“For 30 years, conservatives have hijacked the Constitution, and we’re taking it back.”
For the Second Amendment, understand that “taking back” the Constitution will certainly mean the end of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms as expressed in the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court decisions.
So the big story—intentionally ignored by the big media—is that Justice Ginsburg’s enthusiastic embrace of the South African Constitution is a long-range political movement to create a “progressive” constitution to ultimately supplant our founding documents.
The movement has a generic name—“democratic constitutionalism.” It came into serious focus with a 2005 American Constitution Society conference at Yale University Law School called “The Constitution in 2020.” That conference was then followed by a book of the same name, and yet another Yale conference in 2009.
Its purpose was described in a May 26, 2009, New York Times Magazine article: “… the organizers set out to gather together a group of scholars to define a progressive constitutional agenda for the coming century. … the democratic constitutionalists see courts and political movements as partners, influencing each other and society as a whole.”
Oh yes, and this will likely come as little surprise to you. This activist partnership to meld leftist political activism and the courts to dump or modify our founding documents in favor of a radical-left constitution is bankrolled by George Soros, the billionaire globalist gun-banner.
Among the initial participants of the 2005 gathering of progressive legal stars were two Soros operatives destined to be key Obama handlers in his presidential campaign, the transition and in the White House: John Podesta and Cass Sunstein. Podesta ran Obama’s transition team. An outsider/insider with unique access to the president, Podesta oversees perhaps the most successful of the organs of the multi-gazillion dollar Soros policy/influence machine—the Center for American Progress. It has been a font of left-wing ideas that the Obama White House has turned into policy.
And that brings us to Sunstein, who, predating Ginsburg’s comments, expressed an even giddier endorsement, calling the South African Constitution “the most admirable constitution in the history of the world.”
Sunstein, who was tagged as an “informal” Obama campaign advisor, is the White House regulation czar, director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—a powerful position in which he serves as a gatekeeper for all new federal regulatory changes. Sunstein, on leave as a Harvard law professor, is an incredibly prolific “progressive” far-left legal scholar espousing a host of ideas any reasonable person would just call “weird.”
He would ban all hunting. Sunstein has proposed giving animals—yes, cows, dogs, rats—standing to sue in court. He would afford them a quasi-constitutional personhood.
And he has proposed a kind of rationing of the Internet. He has demanded that websites be forced to include opposing views, because of “the growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what it is that they see.”
He fears that Americans are too stupid to create the kind of “diversity” provided by the former gatekeepers of network TV. To Sunstein, individual citizens are incapable of being on their own in a sea of digital information. He fears that, “In the extreme case, people will be fully able to design their own communications universe. They will find it easy to exclude, in advance, topics and points of view that they wish to avoid.”
Sunstein is calling for government censorship to create diversity of thought. Imagine this man writing a new First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; and it could happen.
Does the term oxymoron come to mind? But then, everything in the world these people inhabit is Alice-in-Wonderland—down the rabbit hole. Progressive operators like Sunstein, even with his seemingly wacky views, must never be underestimated.
Although there is no secret about the existence of the “Constitution in 2020” movement (anybody can find it on the Internet), the radicals who would deface the current Constitution plan to do so by stealth. Stealth will be in the details written way below the surface or created by alternative means such as administrative law or international treaties and agreements. The real threat will come “under the radar,” as President Barack Obama is wont to say.
A lead-off speaker during the follow-up 2009 Soros-funded “Constitution in 2020” conference reconvened at Yale University Law School, professor Aziz Huq of the University of Chicago Law School laid out the need for a deep political masquerade to accomplish real change.
“We’ll start with the problem of candor,” Huq said. “No constitutional movement ever got very far by admitting that it sought innovation in the founding document. Or by admitting that it was enabled by the particular social/historical or doctrinal circumstances of the change that it urged.
“Yet to be a credible movement for constitutional change—a credible social movement—that movement has to deny, in a sense, its ultimate goal.” (Emphasis added.)
And the deniable goal clearly is to supplant our rights, memorialized for Americans with our unique position as the freest people in the world, with a bizarre set of government-granted privileges masked as “rights”—a kind of leftist cultural affirmative action creating unprecedented social division: a constitutional caste system between the American people. It will be a reflection of President Obama’s now ubiquitous cultural war.
To use the progressive definition of the Constitution as a “living organism,” understand that these people see themselves in the same light as genetic engineers who are altering the DNA of our freedom into something entirely unrecognizable—something most Americans today would consider malignant.
If you were to suspect this is a key part of President Obama’s agenda for “fundamentally changing America,” you would likely be right. In fact, their “change” is a growth antithetical to the individual liberty protected and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution as we know it.
In the lexicon of the “progressive” movement to rewrite America’s founding document on a global model, the guarantees of what the founders recognized as pre-existing God-given rights—among them, free speech, freedom to assemble, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the right against self-incrimination, the right to be protected against undue search and seizure—all of those most basic protections are considered “negative rights.”
These people are not talking about replacing the U.S. Constitution with the South African Constitution out of hand. What they seek is to include key viral elements of that document, in a bit-by-bit infection that will ultimately transform the whole nature of our country.
So what is it that these people find so attractive in the South African Constitution? In a phrase, the answer is something they call “positive” rights.
Perhaps the most direct explanation of what they are going for was penned on the “Constitution in 2020” blog by Emily Zackin, now an assistant professor at Hunter College:
“These rights (sometimes called positive rights) obligate government to intervene in social and economic life, promoting equality rather than simply procedural fairness.”
So, fairness—the very basis of real blind justice in America—is to be replaced with social/cultural favoritism decided by a cadre of law school radicals.
Dr. Zackin—who won top honors from Princeton for her Ph.D. dissertation, “Positive Constitutional Rights in the United States,” cited as an example: “… the South African Constitution includes the right to medical care. The text of the U.S. Constitution contains no such explicit guarantees, and the Supreme Court has consistently declined to interpret the Constitution to include them.” She further defined the notion of “positive rights” as “welfarist policies.”
These “positive rights,” like the “right to health care” and the “right to housing,” are the key elements that make the South African constitution so attractive to welfare statists who would control every element of American life. These “positive rights” dump fairness in favor of drastically skewing the playing field to the advantage of select groups of citizens.
With this stealthy Soros-backed effort, the new, radical Constitution that would emerge in the future will likely include as “positive rights” many government-granted privileges and collective rewards centered around endless memes of “justice”—“social justice,” or “economic justice,” or “green justice.” The list could be endless.
One thing is certain—there will be “freedom from gun violence” added to the list of “positive rights.” With that, the Second Amendment will be headed to the dumpster of history.
In a spot-on Canada Free Press analysis of the effect of “positive rights” versus “negative rights,” Daniel Greenfield characterized the combined “positive rights” pressed by the so-called progressive establishment as “the right to be taken care of in every way possible.” These “rights”—touted as the be all, end all in the South African constitution—“serve to eliminate most of what Americans have traditionally considered freedom. … Positive rights offer a privilege that is overseen by the government … universal benefits at the cost of individual liberties.”
Yet privileges—unlike rights—can be withheld at the whim of those who hold the power of government.
As for the 61,000-word South African Constitution, perhaps the best view of what U.S. proponents are really striving for was spelled out in a 2003 law review article by Mark S. Kende, now head of the Constitutional Law Center at Drake University Law School. The title of the article is unambiguous: “Why the South African Constitution is better than the United States’. ”
Giving meaning to Sunstein’s delirious “most admirable constitution in the history of the world” tag, Kende says the description fits because, “It contains a lengthy list of socio-economic rights, which the drafters hoped would protect and assist those … who are poor and vulnerable.”
“Conversely,” he says, “the United States Supreme Court has been unwilling to find socio-economic rights in the United States Constitution.”
Among those “positive rights” he lauds, “Everyone has a right to have access to adequate housing,” and “the right to have access to health care services … sufficient food … appropriate social assistance.”
“Moreover, courts must consider international law in rendering decisions, and may also consider foreign law.”
What is so bizarre about this article—and what is so strange about all of the radical proponents of the document—is that none of these “positive rights” are even marginally attainable by the tens of millions of South Africans who live in indescribable poverty and suffer from a homicide rate nearly seven times higher than ours in the U.S.
So what good is it?
Kende puts it this way: “Placing socio-economic rights in a constitution does not mean that every individual is entitled to assistance on demand. … The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights.”
Further, he writes that under a “limitations clause” on the “socio-economic rights,” “The court’s overall responsibility is to determine whether the infringement on the right is proportional to the resulting societal benefit.”
So in reality, these so-called “positive” rights are not rights at all. They are privileges doled out under a deeply corrupt system of state rationing.
With perhaps as many as 7 million South African citizens dying of HIV and AIDS, the constitution’s guarantee of the right to “have access to health care services” was pointless under the regime of President Thabo Mbeki, a virus denier who kept Western life-saving medicine at bay while his people died.
How would this cadre of activists and professors alter the U.S. Constitution to take on elements of the South African model? Obviously not by any means provided in Article V of the Constitution, which the Founders intentionally made extraordinarily difficult to accomplish.
So what are they proposing? By what means do they alter the foundation of the nation? By what means do positive rights creep into constitutional law?
Those questions were actually at the very core of the second Yale conference. Among the back-door approaches discussed:
• Enacting “landmark” laws that are too big, too complicated and bring dramatic fundamental change. These laws take on the force of the Constitution.
• Enacting international treaties that have the force of law. As one speaker put it, “Once you have an Article II [ratified by the U.S. Senate] treaty in place, it can undo state law that’s contrary, and undo federal law that’s contrary.”
• Creating administrative law that the speaker claimed would be beyond the normal scope of judicial review.
Attendees also discussed a grassroots political effort to force the U.S. Senate to get rid of the filibuster with its 60-vote requirement to close down debate, making all sorts of simple majority legislative mischief possible.
What the Soros gang proposes is a melding of their notion to replace the Constitution with administrative orders, landmark laws, treaties and the like with raw propaganda and a long-term, grassroots activist agenda. Mobilizing for change on the streets, if you will.
Yale law professor Jack Balkin, among the leaders of the “Constitution in 2020” movement, says under “democratic constitutionalism” grassroots politics is the key: “The basic way that the Constitution changes over time is that people persuade each other that the way they thought about the Constitution and what it means isn’t the right way of thinking about it. … That’s why you just can’t focus on elections, judicial appointments … constitutional culture. That’s why you have to focus on the people’s arguments about norms.”
Keep in mind that “norms”—international norms—are at the heart of the gun-ban movement worldwide. It is a well-recognized “norm” that the United Nations pointedly refuses to recognize armed self-defense as a human right.
It is certain that for many in the “democratic constitutionalism” movement, the kind of draconian laws that have left South African citizens at the mercy of brutal, murderous criminal violence would represent America’s constitutional norm in the future, if they get their way.
Of course, future Supreme Court appointments will be determined by who wins the presidential election this fall. Four more years of Barack Obama would undoubtedly mean one or more new justices in the mold of Justice Ginsburg who would push to shift our freedoms further from what our Founding Fathers intended—yet more “change” that our Right to Keep and Bear Arms might not be able to survive.
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This mess that constitutes a significant bloc in the SCOTUS is so far over the top that it's time to rethink recalling members who apparently hate the U. S. Consitution by impeachment. These are not American citizens that decent Americans want sitting on a bench in the highest court of the land to decide the future of the nation.
These are traitors to their oaths to uphold the Constitution and to use the document as it was intended. It is the best Constituion in the world and those four robed clansmen that will sit on the bench for life, knows it! Their oath has apparently been to satan and the the equally evil United Nations. Americans must get them and the United Nations out of the United States or our free future will be in serious peril and Washington will become very much like Madrid in 1936, excepting our commissars have been hatched here instead of Moscow.
obama doesn't. If he thought it would be overturned, why is he secretely and behind the scenes transferring money from medicare to the IRS to enforce it? Why did the IRS order so many shotguns?
Sorry, but you are a slave still...
Please enlighten us.
Or far as that goes, if the cops made a color copy of it and put it in front of everyone they interrogated, informed the suspect that they had to look at it until they confessed, they would get confessions in record time. I would confess to things you did.
I guess my South African friends didn’t realize how much better South Africa was, when they moved to Texas and got their US citizenship! They thought they were just moving to escape all the crime, violence and corruption. snort>///S
These evil characters that the current occupant of the White Hut has surrounded himself with proves beyond the shadow of doubt that he is not merely unfit. Obama is inherently evil beyond a decent man’s capacity to measure evil.
Those who form his inner circle are as devoid of decent humanity as is a wild boar hog.
He demonstrates his evil by reaching down into the sewers to select beings for key positions that existed and for those that did not exist until he was crowned. These evil ones he appoints have neither character, or a modicum of goodness in their being.
We, my fellow Americans, are being ruled and ruined by members of the netherworld. They are no better than ghouls, zombies or manufactured monsters.
Another full year of us will be about the same as lobotomizing America and turning this once great nation into something much worse than a banana republic without the bananas: a cemetery!
These frightening, bottom feeders hate and despise everything that is innocent and good. They wallow in depravity and encourage its growth. Anything that pleases satan is advanced by these evil anti-American monsters.
How is it that we came to this?
It is my opinion, that although sub-creatures such as these existed in our past, the accelleration began about 1912 and the first president to call upon these forces of darkness was noneother than Woodrow Wilson.
The only way to combat this evil that has descended upon America is to pray to God and St. Michael the Archangel to cast into hell all the evil spirits who prowl about the earth seeking the ruination of souls!
The constitution guards our country from the sinful nature of man. The left can’t stand or even understand that concept.
They’re “good people”, and anyone whom they support are also “good people” who would never abuse their power and always do what is good for everyone, even if it seems to be oppressive in the short term.
I think the best summation of “rights” are the Ninth and Tenth Amendments:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
and
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Basically, that seems to translate into “If it is not a power delegated to the Federal Government by the Constitution, then the Feds can’t do it, and they can’t stop the States and the People from doing it.”
Too bad this isn’t the cornerstone of Federal Jurisprudence.
Or far as that goes, if the cops made a color copy of it and put it in front of everyone they interrogated, informed the suspect that they had to look at it until they confessed, they would get confessions in record time. I would confess to things you did.
BTTT
Torch the Constitution?
Over my dead corpse...
And what a non-shock to learn that the bank teller window for the anti-Constitutional movement is manned by none other than George Soros.
The best constitution is one that grants absolute power to them.
that commie judge also consults European law during supreme court cases, and should be tried for treason.
In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
JUDGES being the operative idea.
...by legal means, of course.
?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Yes the laws of physics...... rope....tree or lamp post.
Are you willing to accept the truth???
Are you an “American” citizen or a “Statutory” citizen of the united states???
“The fourteenth amendment reads: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’
In The Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, it was held by this court that the first clause of the fourteenth article was primarily intended to confer citizenship on the negro race, and, secondly, to give definitions of citizenship of the United States and citizenship of the states; and it recognized the distinction between citizenship of a state and citizenship of the United States by those definitions; that the privileges and immunities of citizens of the states embrace generally those fundamental civil rights for the security and establishment of which organized society was instituted, and which remain, with certain exceptions, mentioned in the federal constitution, under the care of the state governments, while the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States are those which arise out of the nature and essential character of the national [143 U.S. 135, 161] government, the provisions of its constitution, or its laws and treaties made in pursuance thereof; and that it is the latter which are placed under the protection of congress by the second clause of the fourteenth amendment.
“In Gassies v. Ballon, 6 Pet. 761, 762, Mr. Chief Justice MARSHALL declared that ‘a citizen of the United States, residing in any state of the Union, is a citizen of that state;’ and the fourteenth amendment embodies that view.”
[Boyd v. State of Nebraska, 143 U.S 135 (1892)]
________________________________________
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649; 18 S.Ct. 456; 42 L.Ed. 890 (1898):
“The words ‘in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ in the first sentence of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution, must be presumed to have been understood and intended by the congress which proposed the amendment, and by the legislatures which adopted it, in the same sense in which the like words had been used by Chief Justice Marshall in the wellknown case of The Exchange, and as the equivalent of the words ‘within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States,’ and the converse of the words ‘out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States,’ as habitually used in the naturalization acts. This presumption is confirmed by the use of the word ‘jurisdiction,’ in the last clause of the same section of the fourteenth amendment, which forbids any state to ‘deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ It is impossible to construe the words ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ in the opening sentence, as less comprehensive than the words ‘within its jurisdiction,’ in the concluding sentence of the same section; or to hold that persons ‘within the jurisdiction’ of one of the states of the Union are not ‘subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.’”
“The fourteenth amendment came before the court in the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 73, at December term, 1872, — the cases having been brought up by writ of error in May, 1870 (10 Wall. 273); and it was held that the first clause was intended to define citizenship of the United States and citizenship of a state, which definitions recognized the distinction between the one and the other; that the privileges and immunities of citizens of the states embrace generally those fundamental civil rights for the security of which organized society was instituted, and which remain, with certain exceptions mentioned in the federal constitution, under the care of the state governments; while the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States are those which arise out of the nature and essential character of the national government, the provisions of its constitution, or its laws and treaties made in pursuance thereof; and that it is the latter which are placed under the protection of congress by the second clause. “
“And Mr. Justice Miller, delivering the opinion of the court, in analyzing the first clause, observed that “the phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign states, born within the United States.”
“The eminent judge did not have in mind the distinction between persons charged with diplomatic functions and those who were not”
“This section [in Elk v. Wilkins] contemplates two sources of citizenship, and two sources only, —birth and naturalization. The persons declared to be citizens are all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ The evident meaning of these last words is, not merely subject to some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance. And the words relate to the time of birth in the one case, as they do to the time of naturalization in the other. Persons not thus subject to the jurisdiction of the United States at the time of birth cannot become so afterwards, except by being naturalized, either individually, as by proceedings under the naturalization acts, or collectively, as by the force of a treaty by which foreign territory is acquired.”
“To be ‘completely subject’ to the political jurisdiction of the United States is to be in no respect or degree subject to the political jurisdiction of another government. [including state governments].”
“”Born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and “naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” mean born or naturalized under such circumstances as to be completely subject to the jurisdiction,—that is, as completely as citizens of the United States, who are, of course, not subject to any foreign poser, and can of right claim the exercise of the power of the United States on their behalf wherever they may be.”
“The power of naturalization, vested in congress by the constitution, is a power to confer citizenship, not a power to take it away. ‘A naturalized citizen,’ said Chief Justice Marshall, ‘becomes a member of the society, possessing all the rights of a native citizen, and standing, in the view of the constitution, on the footing of a native. The constitution does not authorize congress to enlarge or abridge those rights. The simple power of the national legislature is to prescribe a uniform rule of naturalization, and the exercise of this power exhausts it, so far as respects the individual.”
[United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649; 18 S.Ct. 456; 42 L.Ed. 890 (1898)]
This video should help as well...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6b4YrXayzE
Yes, the senate wouldn't convict, but it'd put her through legal hell for some time. And during that time it 'should' make her ineligible from taking part of all pending cases before SCOTUS.
If th first video wasn’t sufficient to convince, you then try this one...
If you need more proof [or anyone else], then just say so and I will dig up all of the proof you need later.
“He has demanded that websites be forced to include opposing views, because of “the growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what it is that they see.””
Dude, we can “filter” out anything at this point. TV commercials and annoying internet ads have trained us well.
“...looks like the dead mother in the movie Psycho....”
Did you ever notice that ALL the good comrades look just plain psycho in general?
They ALL look alike to me. Instantly interchangeable, completely replaceable, and totally contemptible.
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