. At the time of the new deal, an age when one could still argue that the Republic was moored to the Constitution, a Republican, a conservative would ask, are these proposed labor laws constitutional? Note, the author of this piece never even pays the Constitution a passing reference even though the age in question is indisputably a time when these issues were being thrashed out and the matter of their constitutionality was being litigated. Even though we won the court packing contest, constitutionalists lost the Constitution and the waywardness of the new deal prevails to this day.
The author of this piece ties all the motivations of the right to economic concerns, almost a purely Marxist analysis. If the Republican Party in California is motivated by greed, any decent person would move to uphold the rights of oppressed laborers. But if the question is whether the Democrat party is invading the Constitution in order to gain political power and pile up votes on election day, the dark motivations of the Republicans become benign and "humane" motivations of the Democrats become dark.
Today we live in a post-Constitutional world in America so the issue of whether Obama care would be held constitutional never came into the consideration of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Its constitutionality was not merely assumed, it was assumed to be irrelevant. It was assumed to be irrelevant because the left had won the argument over the constitutionality of the new deal and there has never been a meaningful constitutional restraint on the power of the federal government to regulate our lives ever since.
That is the way the left operates, when it is on the losing side of an argument it simply changes the predicates or changes the venue. The predicate should be, is this proposed law regulating labor constitutional but instead the question becomes whether this law regulating labor conditions puts to right Republican/capitalist oppression of defenseless workers? When Roosevelt was losing much of his new deal to constitutionalists on the Supreme Court he proposed to change the venue, that is, to change the court by packing it.
Today the left moves disputes it cannot win from the federal legislature to the executive branch. Thus we see extraconstitutional laws being made every day by unaccountable bureaucrats who work in corners of the federal government such as the EPA, or BLM, or IRS. If the left cannot find an obliging bureaucratic cubbyhole to have its way, it will go to international treaties and so we have TPP and UN contrivances to regulate the right to bear arms.
When a farmer in California fights to save his farm from bankruptcy he is not necessarily a bigot as has been insinuated in this article, he is a sturdy yeoman fighting for the survival of his family just as our early pioneers did. We change the definitions, we change the predicates, and if necessary, we change the venues in order for The Left to win every battle on a new set of ad hoc rules.
Those of us who are stubborn constitutionalists in an age which despises us, those of us who look to article 5 of the Constitution to restore human rights to an oppressed yeomanry all around the nation, know that we must not lose the battle over definitions or predicates or venues if we are to save the Republic.
