The View From 1776

According to the latest Gallup poll, 52% of voters oppose the president’s intention to bypass the 60-vote super-majority traditionally employed in the Senate for passage of major measures, such as Obamacare.

Nonetheless, when Senator Lamar Alexander requested that President Obama respect the will of the majority , the president dismissed the request.  “You know, this issue of reconciliation has been brought up. Again I think the American people aren’t always all that interested in procedures inside the Senate. I do think they want a vote on how we’re going to move this forward,” he said.

Attempting to cram socialistic health care down our throats calls to mind the Soviet Communist Party elite claiming that, as the dictatorship of the proletariat, they were compelled to force compliance with their measures.  In that vein, the president has said that once the cram-down has been effected, people will discover that they really love Big Brother’s medicine.

At our elite Ivy League schools, grade inflation has been a scandal for a decade or so.  Nearly everybody gets at least a grade of B, and a substantial portion of every class graduates cum laude.  That might explain why constitutional law scholar and Harvard Law Review president Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address, completely misstated the law respecting corporate free speech.

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, doesn’t buy liberal-progressives’ self-portrait as superbly educated, intellectually brilliant, and therefore entitled to rule conservative and traditional dimwits. 

See Mr. Ignatius, Meet Mr. Bok:

Yale University historian Donald Kagan in an article he wrote for Commentary Magazine quotes former president of Harvard University Derek Bok and dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis, along with the late Allan Bloom, to opposite effect.

Mr. Bok:

Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.

For a sample of what passes for critical analysis in liberal-progressive circles, read Frank Rich and the State of Liberal Commentary, by Dennis Prager.

Shades of Bismarck’s kulturkampf and Hitler’s pogrom to impose Aryan purity. 

Germany has criminalized home schooling, demanding that parents place their children in state schools, where they will be suitably indoctrinated in the religion of socialism.

California is moving in the same direction.  In an appellate court decision last year (In re Rachel L.), California judges ordered the lower court first hearing the case to compel parents to cease home schooling and to enroll their children in public schools or certified private schools.

A superficial difference between Germany and California in this regard is that the latter is probably motivated in the main to preserve the monopoly of teachers’ unions.  The final effect is the same in both cases, however.  Teachers’ unions, supported by the Federal government, are dedicated to teaching the moral relativism of secular socialism.  In both Germany and California, we are dealing with state imposed politically-correct thought control.

In contrast to the California appellate court, an immigration court judge recently granted political asylum in the United States to a German family, who had been home schooling their children.  In Germany, home-schooling parents can be jailed and have their children taken from them, because socialist Germany wishes to eliminate vestiges of Judeo-Christian morality that interfere with the political state’s socialistic collectivism.

Our hate-crime legislation has criminalized not just actions, but private thoughts.  The way is open under the Democrat/Socialist Party for a future Federal police force, a sort of Gestapo to criminalize spiritual religion.  We need only a future crisis and a Rahm Emanuel who will not waste the opportunity presented.

Don’t dismiss that threat as impossible.  Before 1933, no one in the United States could have dreamed that a farmer would be imprisoned for raising food on his own land to feed his family, on the grounds that he was not authorized to do so by Federal bureaucrats. 

President Obama’s tutors Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, in their leadership days in the Weatherman underground, advocated wiping out the Constitution and our entire social and political structure at gun point.  Mr. Obama’s determination to nationalize the healthcare industry in the face of overwhelming public disapproval, and his rationalization that people will learn to like it, are eerily reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel 1984.  At the end, the main character, having been worked over by government agents, tearfully declares that he loves Big Brother.

During the height of the Cold War, sweet-on-the-Soviet-Union liberal-progressive-socialists pushed for unilateral disarmament.  They didn’t want to impede socialistic progressivism in the USSR, and they believed, as does the Obama administration today, that being nice and polite in our dealings with foreign enemies will lead them to reciprocate.

The Obama administration’s treatment of murderous terrorists as if they were people suspected of traffic violations is more of the same.

In the next terrorist attack, American victims will die, presumably happy in the knowledge that full legal rights will be granted to terrorists captured by our military forces (who, of course, must read them their Miranda rights in the midst of life-and-death combat).

The Obama administration’s switch from preventing terrorist attacks to granting foreign terrorists the same legal and procedural protections as those granted to our own citizens explains why large red flags of caution were ignored in the case of the Detroit airliner bombing attempt.  It is of a piece with Attorney General Holder’s policy to grant constitutional legal rights to Gitmo terrorists, while prosecuting intelligence community agents who attempted to prevent terrorism.

Wall Street Journal columnist L. Gordon Crovitz explains:

Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee heard an explanation of how U.S. intelligence agencies decide when to put suspected terrorists on a watch list or a no-fly list.

Timothy Healy, the head of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, explained the unit’s “reasonable suspicion” standard like this:
“Reasonable suspicion requires ‘articulable’ facts which, taken together with rational inferences, reasonably warrant a determination that an individual is known or suspected to be or has been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to, terrorism and terrorist activities, and is based on the totality of the circumstances. Mere guesses or inarticulate ‘hunches’ are not enough to constitute reasonable suspicion.”

If this sounds like legalistic language, it is. Indeed, a quick Web search was a reminder that this language is adapted from Terry v. Ohio, a landmark Supreme Court case in 1968 that determined when Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches allows the police to frisk civilians or conduct traffic stops. In other words, foreign terrorists have somehow now been granted Fourth Amendment reasonableness rights that courts intended to protect Americans being searched by the local police. Thus was Abdulmutallab allowed on the airplane with his explosives.

The difference between law-enforcement procedures and preventing terrorism could not be clearer. If a well-respected banker takes the initiative to come to a U.S. embassy in Nigeria to report that he thinks his son is a terrorist, we expect intelligence officers to make “hunches,” such as that this person should have his visa reviewed and be searched before getting on a plane. Information is our defense against terrorism, but evidence of terror plots is often incomplete, which is why intelligence requires combining facts with hunches.

The result of prohibiting hunches was that Abdulmutallab was waved through. Information about suspected terrorists flows into a central Terrorist Screening Database, which is then analyzed by the Terrorist Screening Center, where FBI agents apply the “reasonable suspicion” standard to assign people to various watch lists including “selectee” lists and the “no-fly” list. It’s at this point where an approach based on domestic law enforcement trump prevention, undermining the use of information.

This CYA excess of caution by intelligence community operatives is not a reflection of obtuseness in the intelligence community.  It is a product of the president’s liberal-progressive policies, the same ones that lead him to bow and scrape to foreign dictators and to blame conduct by the United States for the Islamic jihad.

A Washington Times editorial recaps the ways in which President Obama has created a climate of CYA caution in our intelligence services.  Since the president’s inauguration, the smart thing for intelligence agents has been to keep their heads down, do only and exactly what they are told to do, and avoid any initiatives to ferret out threats to our national security.  The president, acting through Attorney General Holder, has made it clear that CIA agents’ approved actions can later be deemed criminal conduct.

Obama’s actions followed the pattern established by liberal-progressive, Democrat/Socialist Senator Frank Church in the mid-1970s, with predictably the same results. 

The Church Committee did its best after President Nixon’s Watergate scandal to eviscerate our nation’s intelligence services.  Senator Church started from the typical liberal-progressive perspective that our foreign enemies would not be our enemies if we were nice and friendly, if we shared our wealth with them.  Their attitude was that the persons to be punished and whose careers were to be wrecked were CIA or FBI agents who had taken risks to uncover and to thwart lethal threats to the security of the United States.

As the 9/11 commission reported, destruction of the World Trade Towers and part of the Pentagon was a consequence of Senator Church’s neutering of our intelligence service capabilities.  If there is to be a repeat of 9/11, it will be the result of act two of the Church Committee under President Obama.

Judith Miller on the City Journal website describes the Obama administration’s initial reactions to the near-miss terrorist bombing attempt on an airliner bound for Detroit.

For the first three days after the incident, administration officials congratulated themselves, declaring that the system had worked as planned.  This ignored the fact that only the heroism of alert passengers and crew on the airliner averted disaster.  The Federal security system had failed in every single aspect.

As damning facts emerged, the Transportation Security Agency slapped together a memorandum of draconian new measures that appeared to inconvenience and delay passengers more than to deter potential terrorist bombers.

Miller reports what happened thereafter:

But the new restrictions on passenger activity on international flights prompted protests and ridicule, especially after they were leaked to two travel blogger-journalists—Chris Elliott and Steven Frischling—who published them on their websites. The agency began backtracking almost immediately: orders to pat down nearly all passengers, and to keep them seated with personal possessions off their laps at least an hour before a flight’s arrival, suddenly became “discretionary,” an anonymous TSA spokesman now said…

Last Tuesday, it launched an investigation into how Elliott and Frischling obtained Security Directive 1544-09-06, the temporary emergency regulations, which were due to expire on December 30 in any event. Rather than focus its energy and resources on discovering how the 23-year-old Abdulmutallab managed to board an American airliner wearing explosive-laden underwear—endangering nearly 300 other passengers flying from Nigeria or Amsterdam, where the plane stopped before heading for Detroit—the TSA sent three of its agents at night to the journalists’ homes. Elliot and Frischling described them as “polite” but intimidating: they were armed with subpoenas and threats of grave legal consequences if the reporters failed to divulge their source. Under pressure, Frischling handed over his computer, which was returned the next morning, its software corrupted. Elliott called his lawyer and refused to turn over his computer or e-mails. The TSA gave him another two weeks to comply with the subpoena.

Such night-time-knock-at-the-door tactics are reminiscent of Hitler’s systematic suppression of dissident voices within Germany in the 1930s.

Needless to say, the ACLU expressed no objection.  After all, it was founded during World War I to defend anarchists and socialists who endeavored to sabotage the United States’ participation in the war against socialist Germany.  It’s all for anything that undermines the original intent of the Bill of Rights.

Liberal-progressives have been thwarted by the world’s growing awareness (1) that the threat of man-made global warming is a fraudulent scam, and (2) that the economic costs of action demanded by secular religious fanatics are staggeringly high and far beyond any reasonable cost-benefit ratio.  In a desperate attempt to impose the one-world-government vision of a small band of “scientists,” liberal-progressives are now turning to judicial activism.

Judicial activism is an innovation developed by the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin in the 1920s, originally for a somewhat different purpose.  Working through the Harvard Law School, Baldwin promoted a radically new interpretation of the Bill of Rights.  The intent was to manipulate the Constitution to make it destroy itself. 

A constitution is intended to reflect the most fundamental values of a society, to embody that society’s moral principles.  The ACLU’s game plan was to change public perception of the Constitution as a protection of individuals’ rights against arbitrary government power and majority sentiment into a license for radical subversives to do anything they wished to undermine the Constitution. 

In every generation when concerned citizens denounced the liberal jihad, liberal-progressive-socialists have skillfully used propaganda to make objections look like efforts to stop the right of free speech.  Liberals called it Red-Baiting in the 1920s, Black-Listing in the 1940s, and McCarthyism in the 1950s.  In today’s global-warming hysteria, with consummate PR skill liberal-progressives label questions and objections as scientific ignorance, despite the evidence that the basis for their religious faith in man-made global warming is a body of manipulated, distorted, and cherry-picked data.

Public outrage in the 1920s was no more unwarranted than today’s growing outcry against global-warming hype.  In the 1920s, the public had been battered by waves of bombings and assassination attempts by anarcho-socialists after World War I.  Most notoriously, in 1920, liberal activists planted dynamite in a wagon outside the Wall Street headquarters of J. P. Morgan, timed to detonate shortly after noon, in order to kill the maximum possible number of people on the street for lunch hour.  With shrapnel tearing through the packed sidewalk crowds, 38 people were killed and some 300 wounded. 

Such atrocities, along with secular religious belief in man-made global warming, are what liberal-progressives proudly regard as their efforts to perfect humanity. 

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page describes the latest judicial activism travesty.

For an overview of other phases of judicial activism in the United States, see the list posted in Judicial Activism - Summary of Prior Postings.