Posted on 02/24/2010 3:24:36 AM PST by Scanian
The day before last week end's Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, a group of prominent conservatives gathered a few miles away at the Virginia estate of our first president. Their Mount Vernon Statement swears fealty to a "constitutional conservatism" that "applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal" and "honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life." If only they meant it.
Constitutional conservatism certainly sounds better than "compassionate conservatism," which turned out to be code for big-government conservatism. And it is easy to hope that the thread of a properly limited federal government could bind the strands of a movement that has been unraveling since the end of the Cold War.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“I’m here to tell you that there is a concerted effort on the left to divide us to pass Obama’s agenda.”
Hmmm. . . you are making an interesting point. The nonsensical rantings of the nanny-staters on here could only have been written by a touchy-feely liberal.
“absent the federal Defense of Marriage Act, gay marriages in one state arguably have to be recognized in other states. In addition, drugs and pornography readily travel across state lines and incontestably implicate the commerce clause in that respect at least.”
Read up on the Commerce Clause. Its original intention was not to restrict commerce as it’s been used lately, it was intended to ENCOURAGE commerce.
The libs in Congress (Pelosi, Reid, etc.) believe that if you stretch the CC far enough it can be used to cover anything. There is nothing that is off limits, in their opinion.
“That is less than 1% of the population.”
It’s about 5 times higher percentage than most 1st-world nations.
In the black community, it’s about 20-25%, the vast majority for non-violent drug offenses. That criminal record makes it difficult for them to ever enter productive society, which is an enormous cost for our society.
Many years in the future this will be looked at as a tragedy of monumental proportions, but most people in this country think it’s no big deal.
The Constitution grants Congress the power “to regulate commerce.” That includes sometimes the power to ban things, such as tainted beef, medicines made of radioactive salts, drugs that are prone to abuse, and kiddie porn.
The Supreme Court has been wrong before and they are wrong on this.
You don’t think the Commerce Clause has been over-used?
It’s been turned into an excuse to allow the Federal gov’t to do all sorts of unconstitutional things.
It was meant to keep commerce moving smoothly, not to ban handguns within 100 feet of a school and other such bans which have nothing to do with commerce.
Those statistics are totally false. They are liberal propaganda. Check the FBI stats. Less than 10% of young, black men are in prison and the rate is much lower for older men and women.
The majority of those in prison, both black and white are in for violent or property crimes. In fact, white inmates are very slightly more likely to be in for non-violent crimes than black inmates, which disproves the myth that blacks are treated more harshly by the justice system. The stats show that there is no statistically significant difference, an that insignificant difference favors blacks, not whites.
The vast majority of those incarcerated for drugs are dealers, not users, and you can bet that the majority of dealers have committed violent crimes for which they were never caught or convicted. Also, many currently in for drug dealing have prior records of violent and/or property crimes.
Prison is generally a last resort in this country, following juvenile offender programs, pre-trial intervention programs, drug treatment programs, community service and probation. One generally has to work hard at being a criminal to go to prison. Even when prison sentences are given, they are generally way too short for the crime, and typically only a small portion of those inadequate sentences are ever served.
The vast majority of those in prison are hardened criminals, who have made a lifestyle of harming other people and stealing their property.
There are FAR more people walking the streets who belong in prison than the other way around.
“The majority of those in prison, both black and white are in for violent or property crimes. “
I was specifically talking about non-violent crimes. You added property crimes as well. Here’s the stats on non-violent offenders:
“According to data from the Department of Justice, 52.7% of state prison inmates, 73.7%
of jail inmates and 87.6% of federal inmates were imprisoned for offenses which involved
neither harm, nor the threat of harm, to a victim.”
- Gilliard and Beck, 1998. p. 11.; Harlow, Caroline Wold, Profile of Jail
Inmates, 1996, Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1998, p. 2.
“Those statistics are totally false. They are liberal propaganda. Check the FBI stats. Less than 10% of young, black men are in prison and the rate is much lower for older men and women.”
The stats are that approx. 25% of black males have been incarcerated, not that 25% are in prison.
“The vast majority of those incarcerated for drugs are dealers, not users, and you can bet that the majority of dealers have committed violent crimes for which they were never caught or convicted. Also, many currently in for drug dealing have prior records of violent and/or property crimes.”
Source, please.
I was going from memory on those numbers. Here are some more recent figures.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/p08.pdf
Looks like only about 3% of blacks are incarcerated. About 20% of inmates in state prison are there on drug convictions and about 50% are in for violent crimes.
The number of blacks incarcerated on drug convictions dropped significantly between 2000 and 2006, while the number of whites and Hispanics increased.
Table 7 has a summary of prisoners by offense and by race.
Also if 25% of black males have been incarcerated, it is because a somewhat larger percentage than that have committed serious offenses.
You should also keep in mind that those 1996-1998 stats would have reflected the fallout from the crack epidemic, which caused drug, violent and property crimes to skyrocket, especially among blacks. Yes, illegal drugs were causing many people who oridinarily would not have been criminals to commit horrible crimes. This led to a get tough policy on crime, (well relatively speaking) that even liberals like Bill Clinton supported.
It seems as though it worked, as crime rates have dropped and leveled off since then. This has been especially benefical to blacks, who have seen their both incarceration rates and victimization rates drop dramatically.
If a racist was in a position of great power and wanted to do the maximum damage to minorities, his best course of action would probably be to implement a get soft on minority crime policy. Such policies destroy minority communities and force hard working, law abiding minority Americans to live in terror. Perhaps the best way to help the law-abiding majority of minorities is to lock up the relatively small percentage of evil, violent offenders among them.
Bear in mind that the commerce clause protects free markets by overturning state and local laws that hinder commerce. From that perspective, even though the commerce clause aids federal power its serves economic freedom. On that and so many other issues, we must take the sour with the sweet.
While constitutionalists and conservatives are generally going in the same direction, don’t assume all constitutionalists have a desire for a nanny state.
From the article
By enlisting the federal government in their moral crusades, conservatives do not merely alienate potential allies who reject their premises about the appropriate use of force. They sanction the idea that the federal government can do whatever the Constitution does not explicitly forbid, as opposed to the Framers’ vision of a federal government that can do only what the Constitution explicitly allows.
Justice Clarence Thomas highlighted this problem in his dissent from the 2005 Supreme Court decision that upheld the federal government’s authority to arrest patients who possess marijuana for their own medical use. “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause,” he wrote, “then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”
I do not expect constitutional conservatives to be libertarians. But is it asking too much to expect them to be constitutionalists?
No, I nailed things exactly as they are.
LLS
I had an exchange with Dave Camp R-MI, who used the Common Clause to justify some Federal action. I asked him, using his logic, to tell me what is prohibited to the Federal Government. No answer yet, maybe he'll answer at the Obama HealthCare Revival Meeting and Kabuki Theater today. I won't be watching.
We are at the beginning of an era in which federal power will retreat due to financial and economic constraints. People tend to eat to excess when an abundance of food is available, but diet they must when the cupboard is bare.
And the roots have produced a tree of unlimited, totalitarian power. There’s no obligation to give such power respect or obedience. They are creating a revolutionary situation in this country, that if it continues, will lead to widespread violence against the Feds. Americans will not be slaves in chains. Are we there now? Nope.
Your worries have run ahead of the facts. Not only is the Bill of Rights in good health, but American government at all levels is now beginning a process of retrenchment that will last several decades at least and ensure lasting discredit for excessive spending and big government.
Okay.
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