Posted on 01/28/2013 5:25:12 AM PST by servo1969
Imagine you're getting ready to head to church one fine Sunday morning and on your television you hear a man say, "Let's give up on the Constitution."
Such actually happened when CBS News Sunday Morning aired a rather inflammatory commentary by a Georgetown University law professor teased by host Charles Osgood asking, "Is the U.S. Constitution truly worthy of the reverence in which most Americans hold it?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
(video)
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CHARLES OSGOOD, HOST: Is the U.S. Constitution truly worthy of the reverence in which most Americans hold it? A view on that from Lewis Michael Seidman, Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University.
LOUIS MICHAEL SEIDMAN, PROFESSOR OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY: I've got a simple idea: Let's give up on the Constitution. I know, it sounds radical, but it's really not. Constitutional disobedience is as American as apple pie.
For example, most of our greatest Presidents -- Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, and both Roosevelts -- had doubts about the Constitution, and many of them disobeyed it when it got in their way.
To be clear, I don't think we should give up on everything in the Constitution. The Constitution has many important and inspiring provisions, but we should obey these because they are important and inspiring, not because a bunch of people who are now long-dead favored them two centuries ago.
Unfortunately, the Constitution also contains some provisions that are not so inspiring. For example, one allows a presidential candidate who is rejected by a majority of the American people to assume office. Suppose that Barack Obama really wasn't a natural-born citizen. So what?
Constitutional obedience has a pernicious impact on our political culture. Take the recent debate about gun control. None of my friends can believe it, but I happen to be skeptical of most forms of gun control.
I understand, though, that's not everyone's view, and I'm eager to talk with people who disagree. But what happens when the issue gets Constitutional-ized? Then we turn the question over to lawyers, and lawyers do with it what lawyers do. So instead of talking about whether gun control makes sense in our country, we talk about what people thought of it two centuries ago.
Worse yet, talking about gun control in terms of constitutional obligation needlessly raises the temperature of political discussion. Instead of a question of policy, about which reasonable people can disagree, it becomes a test of one's commitment to our foundational document and, so, to America itself.
This is our country. We live in it, and we have a right to the kind of country we want. We would not allow the French or the United Nations to rule us, and neither should we allow people who died over two centuries ago and knew nothing of our country as it exists today.
If we are to take back our own country, we have to start making decisions for ourselves, and stop deferring to an ancient and outdated document.
OSGOOD: Opinion from Professor Lewis Michael Seidman.
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The folks at CBS News were so enamored with Seidman's opinion they posted a video of this nonsense at their website along with the transcript.
Worse than that, in the last two weeks, Bob Schieffer likened President Obama's gun control initiatives to America defeating the Nazis in World War II, CBS News's political director John Dickerson called on President Obama to destroy the Republican Party, and now this.
I recently asked if CBS News is making a conscious move to the far-left to become broadcast television's MSNBC.
What do you think?
Don’t forget that the vast majority of real estate even in us so called blue states would opt to follow red state America if given the choice.
I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Sep. 23, 1800
“Why? The USC neither speaks to nor implies anything about drugs.”
Precisely. the Constitution does not give the Feds any authority over intoxicants. The prohibitionists realized this and amended it. Drug warriors are as lazy as @#$%^ing liberals.
Boy, talk about having your underwear showing, making a statement like that. It just about says it all, doesn't it?
For as beautiful a document as the Declaration of Independence is, Jefferson had a weaselly side to him, particularly when he stabbed Washington in the back (figuratively speaking) in an effort to get back at Hamilton.
I happen to think Lincoln was a great president, though he has many detractors on this site. A man in a difficult situation.
Well, once Louis Michael Seidman gets into the 20th Century, well...Wilson and both Roosevelts? I would spit on all of them, though at least Teddy Roosevelt had some guts and gumption.
And what is it about these guys who have to have their middle name spelled out? Guys like John Stuart Service, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Harry Dexter White, etc.
I forgot Barack Hussein Obama. Oh, wait...he doesn't like that...at least during election cycles.
That’s the point actually. The government only has those powers enumerated by the constitution. (which is why they hate it so much)
Screw these whack jobs. Bet when Republicans control both houses and the presidency,they will examine every issue, and call them “unconstitutional”
They don’t like the second amendment, then they can start shooting at us. And they don’t need to wait too long, I am not getting any younger...
They just love that first amendment, though.That’s the one that allows lying media. That’s the one that keeps some of us from using the second to shut them up.
I concur.
They don’t think the first amendment applies to us, only to them.
The only bow-tie guy I trust is Christopher Kimball,
host of America’s Test Kitchen.
Of course, Professor Seidman of Georgetown is getting invited to all the right parties now that he’s “come out”.
One question: just WHAT is the Constitutional provision that
allows a Presidental candidate who did not get majority support to assume office of the Presidency. Is he talking about a VP who ran against the eventual President in the campaign, and failed to get the nomination, being able to step into the office if the President is killed, or otherwise incapable of fulfilling his term?
“When you compromise with evil,evil always wins”.
-—don’t forget that the narrative they’ve had going
for AT LEAST four years on the “global front” is a systematic
disregard for the designs of Radical Islam, and the corresponding rhetorical contortions that that requires.
It’s all of a piece. Evil seems to be winning all over the Middle East, and this Administration blithely continues to fund it WITH OUR MONEY. The remaking of America continues apace, and they have brought us already a long way down that road. All of a piece, remember, and the pieces are all being forced to “fit together”. It’s a comprehensive dismantling,
and bit by bit, they are providing us with “a new way of looking at things” that only very gradually will become “the only way of looking at things”. It’s a VERY big gamble on their part, and the path to get there will be a very rocky one for them.
The media is the number 1 enemy.””
Absolutely correct. Bears repeating.
I have been sounding the siren on this since the old media monopoly began squealing like a pig with the emergence of the new media of truth. Hussein and Moochie were promoted by the old media as their icons of fascism to control the freedom lovers behind the new media movement.
Lee Goodman of Stop Concealed Carry was one of the panelists at the Chicago-area anti-gun...
"The Illinois State Rifle Association had asked their people – who love their guns more than they care about other people’s lives – to go to the forum. They showed up and, on a pre-arranged signal, interrupted the moderator’s introductions by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. There’s nothing wrong with pledging allegiance, but this demonstration was designed to take control of the meeting and display their power. You may have seen something like it in movies like Cabaret and The Sound of Music, which chronicle how Nazis would intimidate patrons of beer halls and other public events by singing, saluting, scowling, taking names, and following up with beatings."Who Owns the Constitution? (according to Lee Goodman):
"Ultimately, it is not only impossible to know what the Constitution was originally supposed to mean, it is irrelevant. What we need to keep in mind is what the Constitution was supposed to do. It was written to be the framework for a nation that would be governed differently from the way many other nations at the time were governed. It was meant to establish a relationship between the government apparatus and the people.It was not meant to be the law."
I’m sure Professor Lewis Michael Seidman would rather die than admit to the concept of Natural Law, which holds the right to self-protection to be inviolate.
Chavez is probably Obama’s role model on this continent.
Incidentally, a lot of people don’t realize that Chavez ran on being black. VZ has a lot of people who have some African blood, and a large portion of the poorer classes were of heavily African descent. Like Obama, Chavez is barely black and if you looked at him without knowing that he called himself “El Negrito,” you’d simply think he was a dark-skinned European, perhaps Portuguese.
But he really pitched this. Of course, there as here, blacks are doing a lot worse under the government of a supposed “black” than they were before.
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