Compliments of YouTube
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
E-Verify...Obama IneligibleTo Work In The United States
The following courtesy of:Patriot Action Network
Posted by Michael Childs
Here is the story of how a mother and homemaker in Washington State stood up to challenge the identity fraud of Barack Obama. Learn how she paid a price for her courage to run the president through E-Verify.This should be Front page stuff………
This is very frightening big time. I will never have any respect for Obama at all. It is a shame about how corrupt our government has become.
America is done. Our leaders are crony scum. The military leaders are wimp-less hacks and unstudied. The citizens are arming up like no other country in history.
We know the press/media is complicit in this fraud’s illegal holding of the office of POTUS..so tell me. How does a person get this info out??
WHY cant they march right down with an arrest order and put his lying chump in jail??
People with the money and power to expose this fraud have tried and look where it has gotten us to. I AM willing to lay my life on the line to get this pervert out of office..but that's not going to be enough. All these congress critters talk tough but someone has put the tape over their mouths for a reason wouldn't you think? Its absolutely ludicrous that these people REFUSE to indict this criminal in our White House. Our values and the Rule of Law only apply to those trying to expose him? We need millions of us to march on the WHITE HOUSE and arrest him ourselves.
“Someone that has a lot to say about this subject these Days are taking their Lives in their Own Hands!!
Obama has the money and power backing him so all he has to do is what he is told. I believe he will remain in charge. Due to voter fraud placing Obama in office 2 times I am sure the Democrats will take control of Congress after the 2014 elections. Then Obama will appoint his Supreme Court Justices and that will be the last nail in America’s coffin. I do not think anything or anyone can stop the Obama machine. I also believe the only reason he is sending planes and tanks to the Middle East is to help wipe Israel off the map. The US will be next.
_______________________
Picture courtesy of Patriot Post
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Yale Univeristy...What's a diploma worth?
Many have referred to Barack Husein Obama as the most arrogant SOB to ever occupy the White House...and that may very well be true. But I would point out that the most arrogant statement to ever come out of the White House has to be the following:
Now for all you anti-conspiracy theory buffs maybe you ought to look at where this stuff started. It may not have started at Yale University but just look how long they've been pushing their agenda; Bush was indoctrinated in the 40's. His son, GW also attended the world class school of propaganda along with John Kerry and other notable we-run-the-world wannabees. On a side note... Have you ever wondered why George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton are best of buddies now that they're both out of office? And why does Laura Bush attend CGI (Clinton Global Inititive) meetings?
Let's get back to Yale. We know that many of the top schools in the country have been taken over by the communist left and without going over the entire list, lets just say that Yale is in the top tier. But did you know that Yale is also one of the top schools in the country that promotes sex and other stuff that goes against the traditional grain of American education. But every once in awhile we have a Yale graduate that rises above the dregs of academia and proves that there is still hope for mankind. One such graduate was Chief Justice Clarence Thomas who recognized the true value of his diploma: "he took a 15-cent sticker from a cigar and stuck it to his Yale diploma to symbolize its true worth."...he also stored the diploma in his basement! Wow! Good for him!
Well I may have taken a long time getting here but there is another distinguished Yale graduate that pulled himself up by the bootstraps and let the world know exactly what Yale is all about, and his name is Nathan Harden and he tells all right here...maybe not all, but you can find that in his book, Sex and God at Yale ~ Norman E. Hooben
The following courtesy of Hillsdale College
Nathan
Harden is editor of The College Fix, a higher education news website,
and blogs about higher education for National Review Online. A 2009 graduate of
Yale, he has written for numerous publications, including National Review,
The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, The New York Post,
and The Washington Times. He was a 2011 Robert Novak Fellow at the
Phillips Foundation, a 2010 Publius Fellow Correctness, and a Good Education
Gone Bad.
“I had always been taught,
and experience had fortified the teachings, that an active faith in God and a
rigid adherence to Christian principles are the most powerful influences toward
the good life. I also believed, with only a scanty knowledge of economics, that
free enterprise and limited government had served this country well and would
probably continue to do so in the future.”
The body of the
book provided evidence that the academic agenda at Yale was openly antagonistic
to those two ideas—that Buckley had encountered a teaching and a culture that
were hostile to religious faith and that promoted collectivism over free market
individualism. Rather than functioning as an open forum for ideas, his book
argued, Yale was waging open war upon the faith and principles of its alumni
and parents.
Liberal bias at American colleges and universities is something we hear a lot about today. At the time, however, Buckley’s exposé was something new, and it stirred national controversy. The university counterattacked, and Yale trustee Frank Ashburn lambasted Buckley and his book in the pages of Saturday Review magazine.
Whether God & Man at Yale had any effect on Yale’s curriculum is debatable, but its impact on American political history is indisputable. It argued for a connection between the cause of religious faith on the one hand, and the cause of free market economics on the other. In a passage whose precise wording was later acknowledged to have been the work of Buckley’s mentor Willmoore Kendall—a conservative political scientist who was driven out of Yale a few years later—Buckley wrote:
"I consider this battle of educational theory important and worth time and thought even in the context of a world situation that seems to render totally irrelevant any fight except the power struggle against Communism. I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level."
This idea, later promoted as “fusionism” in Buckley’s influential magazine National Review, would become the germ of the Reagan coalition that united social conservatives and free market libertarians—a once-winning coalition that has been lately unraveling.
I graduated from Yale in 2009, fifty-nine years after Buckley. I had a chance to meet him a couple of years before his death, at a small gathering at the home of a professor. Little did I know at the time that I would write a book of my own that would serve, in some ways, as a continuation of his famous critique?
My book—which I entitled Sex and God at Yale—shows that Yale’s liberals are still actively working to refashion American politics and culture. But the devil is in the details, and it’s safe to say that there are things happening at Yale today that Buckley could scarcely have even imagined in 1951. While the Yale of Buckley’s book marginalized or undermined religious faith in the classroom, my book tells of a classmate who was given approval to create an art object out of what she claimed was blood and tissue from self-induced abortions. And while the Yale of Buckley’s book was promoting socialist ideas in its economics department, my book chronicles Yale’s recent employment of a professor who publicly praised terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
My, how times have changed!
There is clearly a radical sexual agenda at work at Yale today. Professors and administrators who came of age during the sexual revolution are busily indoctrinating students into a culture of promiscuity. In fact, Yale pioneered the hosting of a campus “Sex Week”—a festival of sleaze, porn, and debauchery, dressed up as sex education. I encountered this tawdry tradition as an undergrad, and my book documents the events of Sex Week, including the screening in classrooms of hard-core pornography and the giving of permission to sex toy manufacturers and porn production companies to market their products to students.
In one classroom, a porn star stripped down to bare breasts, attached pinching and binding devices to herself as a lesson in sadomasochism, and led a student around the room in handcuffs. On other occasions, female students competed in a porn star look-alike contest judged by a male porn producer, and a porn film showing a woman bound and beaten was screened in the context of “instruction” on how students might engage in relationships of their own.
And again, these things happened with the full knowledge and approval of Yale’s senior administrators.
As might be expected, many Yale students were offended by Sex Week, but university officials defended it in the name of “academic freedom”—a sign of how far this noble idea, originally meant to protect the pursuit of truth, has fallen. And the fact that Yale as an institution no longer understands the substantive meaning of academic freedom—which requires the ability to distinguish art from pornography, not to mention right from wrong—is a sign of its enslavement to the ideology of moral relativism, which denies any objective truth (except, of course, for the truth that there is no truth).
Under the dictates of moral relativism, no view is any more valid than any other view, and no book is any greater or more worth reading than any other book. Thus the old idea of a liberal education—that each student would study the greatest books, books organized into a canon based on objective criteria that identify them as valuable—has given way to a hodgepodge of new disciplines—African-American Studies, Latino Studies, Native American Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies—based on the assumption that there is no single way to describe the world that all serious and open-minded students can comprehend.
Indeed, Yale administrators have taken their allegiance to cultural relativism so far that they invited a sworn enemy of America to be a student, admitting Sayed Rahmatulla Hashemi—a former diplomat-at-large for the Taliban—in 2005. Talk about diversity!
Sitting for my final exam in International Relations, I found myself next to Hashemi, whose comrades were fighting and killing my fellow citizens in the mountains of Afghanistan at that very moment. The fact that the Taliban publicly executes homosexuals and infidels, and denies girls and women the right to go to school, gave no pause to the same Yale administrators who pride themselves on their commitment to gay rights, feminism, and academic freedom. In an interview, Hashemi boasted to the New York Times: “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead, I ended up at Yale.”
It’s hard to overlook the paradox:
By enrolling Hashemi in the name of diversity, Yale abandoned the principle of human rights—the very principle that allows diverse individuals, including those of different faiths, to coexist peacefully.
It was my aim in writing Sex and God at Yale to bring accountability to Yale’s leaders in hopes of reform. Yale has educated three of the last four presidents, and two of the last three justices appointed to the Supreme Court. What kind of leaders will it be supplying in ten years, given its current direction?
Unfortunately, what’s happening at Yale is indicative of what is occurring at colleges and universities across the country. Sex Week, for example, is being replicated at Harvard, Brown, Duke, Northwestern, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin. Nor would it suffice to demand an end to Sex Weeks on America’s college campuses. Those events are, after all, only symptoms of a deeper emptiness in modern academia. Our universities have lost touch with the purpose of liberal arts education, the pursuit of truth. In abandoning that mission—indeed, by denying its possibility—our institutions of higher learning are afflicted to the core.
The political freedom that makes a liberal arts education possible requires an ongoing and active defense of liberty. Try exercising academic freedom in a place like Tehran or Kabul! Here in the U.S., we take our liberty far too much for granted. To the extent that Yale and schools like it succeed in producing leaders who subscribe to the ideology of moral relativism—and who thus see no moral distinction between America and its enemies—we will likely be disabused of this false sense of security all too soon.
Something to think about...
“We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and future generations a new world order. A world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations; when we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance at this new world order…and order which a credible United Nations can use it’s peace keeping role to full fill the promise and vision of the UN’s founders.” ~ President George Herbert Walker Bush, January 16, 1991 - Yale University Class of 1948 [Who died and made him king? And who the hell is "we" ? ..."a credible United Nations" What a joke! It's the most corrupt organization ever devised by man! The UN founders were all communists!]That new world order stuff was further encouraged by another Yale graduate, Bill Clinton. I don't know how many speeches he made that included his so-call world view but the tyrannical idea has the backing of yet another Yale grad, Hillary Clinton.
Now for all you anti-conspiracy theory buffs maybe you ought to look at where this stuff started. It may not have started at Yale University but just look how long they've been pushing their agenda; Bush was indoctrinated in the 40's. His son, GW also attended the world class school of propaganda along with John Kerry and other notable we-run-the-world wannabees. On a side note... Have you ever wondered why George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton are best of buddies now that they're both out of office? And why does Laura Bush attend CGI (Clinton Global Inititive) meetings?
Well I may have taken a long time getting here but there is another distinguished Yale graduate that pulled himself up by the bootstraps and let the world know exactly what Yale is all about, and his name is Nathan Harden and he tells all right here...maybe not all, but you can find that in his book, Sex and God at Yale ~ Norman E. Hooben
The following courtesy of Hillsdale College
Man, Sex, God, and Yale
By Nathan Harden
The following is adapted
from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on September 20, 2012.
In 1951, William F.
Buckley, Jr., a graduate of Yale the year before, published his first book, God
& Man at Yale. In the preface, he described two ideas that he had
brought with him to Yale and that governed his view of the world:Liberal bias at American colleges and universities is something we hear a lot about today. At the time, however, Buckley’s exposé was something new, and it stirred national controversy. The university counterattacked, and Yale trustee Frank Ashburn lambasted Buckley and his book in the pages of Saturday Review magazine.
Whether God & Man at Yale had any effect on Yale’s curriculum is debatable, but its impact on American political history is indisputable. It argued for a connection between the cause of religious faith on the one hand, and the cause of free market economics on the other. In a passage whose precise wording was later acknowledged to have been the work of Buckley’s mentor Willmoore Kendall—a conservative political scientist who was driven out of Yale a few years later—Buckley wrote:
"I consider this battle of educational theory important and worth time and thought even in the context of a world situation that seems to render totally irrelevant any fight except the power struggle against Communism. I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level."
This idea, later promoted as “fusionism” in Buckley’s influential magazine National Review, would become the germ of the Reagan coalition that united social conservatives and free market libertarians—a once-winning coalition that has been lately unraveling.
I graduated from Yale in 2009, fifty-nine years after Buckley. I had a chance to meet him a couple of years before his death, at a small gathering at the home of a professor. Little did I know at the time that I would write a book of my own that would serve, in some ways, as a continuation of his famous critique?
My book—which I entitled Sex and God at Yale—shows that Yale’s liberals are still actively working to refashion American politics and culture. But the devil is in the details, and it’s safe to say that there are things happening at Yale today that Buckley could scarcely have even imagined in 1951. While the Yale of Buckley’s book marginalized or undermined religious faith in the classroom, my book tells of a classmate who was given approval to create an art object out of what she claimed was blood and tissue from self-induced abortions. And while the Yale of Buckley’s book was promoting socialist ideas in its economics department, my book chronicles Yale’s recent employment of a professor who publicly praised terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
My, how times have changed!
There is clearly a radical sexual agenda at work at Yale today. Professors and administrators who came of age during the sexual revolution are busily indoctrinating students into a culture of promiscuity. In fact, Yale pioneered the hosting of a campus “Sex Week”—a festival of sleaze, porn, and debauchery, dressed up as sex education. I encountered this tawdry tradition as an undergrad, and my book documents the events of Sex Week, including the screening in classrooms of hard-core pornography and the giving of permission to sex toy manufacturers and porn production companies to market their products to students.
In one classroom, a porn star stripped down to bare breasts, attached pinching and binding devices to herself as a lesson in sadomasochism, and led a student around the room in handcuffs. On other occasions, female students competed in a porn star look-alike contest judged by a male porn producer, and a porn film showing a woman bound and beaten was screened in the context of “instruction” on how students might engage in relationships of their own.
And again, these things happened with the full knowledge and approval of Yale’s senior administrators.
As might be expected, many Yale students were offended by Sex Week, but university officials defended it in the name of “academic freedom”—a sign of how far this noble idea, originally meant to protect the pursuit of truth, has fallen. And the fact that Yale as an institution no longer understands the substantive meaning of academic freedom—which requires the ability to distinguish art from pornography, not to mention right from wrong—is a sign of its enslavement to the ideology of moral relativism, which denies any objective truth (except, of course, for the truth that there is no truth).
Under the dictates of moral relativism, no view is any more valid than any other view, and no book is any greater or more worth reading than any other book. Thus the old idea of a liberal education—that each student would study the greatest books, books organized into a canon based on objective criteria that identify them as valuable—has given way to a hodgepodge of new disciplines—African-American Studies, Latino Studies, Native American Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies—based on the assumption that there is no single way to describe the world that all serious and open-minded students can comprehend.
Indeed, Yale administrators have taken their allegiance to cultural relativism so far that they invited a sworn enemy of America to be a student, admitting Sayed Rahmatulla Hashemi—a former diplomat-at-large for the Taliban—in 2005. Talk about diversity!
Sitting for my final exam in International Relations, I found myself next to Hashemi, whose comrades were fighting and killing my fellow citizens in the mountains of Afghanistan at that very moment. The fact that the Taliban publicly executes homosexuals and infidels, and denies girls and women the right to go to school, gave no pause to the same Yale administrators who pride themselves on their commitment to gay rights, feminism, and academic freedom. In an interview, Hashemi boasted to the New York Times: “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead, I ended up at Yale.”
It’s hard to overlook the paradox:
By enrolling Hashemi in the name of diversity, Yale abandoned the principle of human rights—the very principle that allows diverse individuals, including those of different faiths, to coexist peacefully.
It was my aim in writing Sex and God at Yale to bring accountability to Yale’s leaders in hopes of reform. Yale has educated three of the last four presidents, and two of the last three justices appointed to the Supreme Court. What kind of leaders will it be supplying in ten years, given its current direction?
Unfortunately, what’s happening at Yale is indicative of what is occurring at colleges and universities across the country. Sex Week, for example, is being replicated at Harvard, Brown, Duke, Northwestern, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin. Nor would it suffice to demand an end to Sex Weeks on America’s college campuses. Those events are, after all, only symptoms of a deeper emptiness in modern academia. Our universities have lost touch with the purpose of liberal arts education, the pursuit of truth. In abandoning that mission—indeed, by denying its possibility—our institutions of higher learning are afflicted to the core.
The political freedom that makes a liberal arts education possible requires an ongoing and active defense of liberty. Try exercising academic freedom in a place like Tehran or Kabul! Here in the U.S., we take our liberty far too much for granted. To the extent that Yale and schools like it succeed in producing leaders who subscribe to the ideology of moral relativism—and who thus see no moral distinction between America and its enemies—we will likely be disabused of this false sense of security all too soon.
OBITUARY
THIS IS SAD---- BUT THINK ABOUT IT AFTER YOU READ IT THEN READ IT AGAIN!
In 1887 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the
University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the
Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior: "A democracy is always
Temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent
Form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until
The time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous
Gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
Always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from
The public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally
Collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a
Dictatorship."
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the
Beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200
Years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage."
The Obituary follows:
"United States of America ", Born 1776, Died 2016
It doesn't hurt to read this several times.
Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law in
St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning
The last Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Obama: 19 Romney: 29
Square miles of land won by: Obama: 580,000 Romney: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Obama: 127 million Romney: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties
won by:
Obama: 13.2 Romney: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory
Romney won was mostly the land owned by the
taxpaying citizens of the country.
Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low
Income tenements and living off various forms of government
Welfare..."
Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the
"complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of
Democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population
Already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase..
If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million
Criminal invaders called illegals - and they vote - then we can say
Goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.
THIS IS SAD---- BUT THINK ABOUT IT AFTER YOU READ IT THEN READ IT AGAIN!
In 1887 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the
University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the
Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior: "A democracy is always
Temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent
Form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until
The time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous
Gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
Always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from
The public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally
Collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a
Dictatorship."
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the
Beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200
Years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage."
The Obituary follows:
"United States of America ", Born 1776, Died 2016
It doesn't hurt to read this several times.
Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law in
St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning
The last Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Obama: 19 Romney: 29
Square miles of land won by: Obama: 580,000 Romney: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Obama: 127 million Romney: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties
won by:
Obama: 13.2 Romney: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory
Romney won was mostly the land owned by the
taxpaying citizens of the country.
Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low
Income tenements and living off various forms of government
Welfare..."
Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the
"complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of
Democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population
Already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase..
If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million
Criminal invaders called illegals - and they vote - then we can say
Goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.
James Madison, call your office. Your Constitution is nowhere to be found.
Congress and Congress alone is granted the power ‘to borrow money on the credit of the United States.’ Yes, but who's paying attention?
For what its worth...
Obama does whatever he wants with or without Constitutional authority and nobody in the Congress holds him accountable. Sounds to me like we no longer have a Constitution... At what point shall we say that our country no longer exists? I say we have already passed that point; the American people just have not woke up yet. ~ Norman E. Hooben
Don't miss the video at the bottom of this page.
Source for the following: The American
Debt and the Constitution
Congress and Congress alone is granted the power ‘to borrow money on the credit of the United States.’ Can Congress delegate that power to the president and restrain its own ability to take the power back?
President Obama
often treats the Constitution as, at best, an annoyance.
When the
Senate’s power to advise and consent to nominations (Article II, Section 2) was
likely to derail appointments Obama wanted to make to the National Labor
Relations Board, he used his power (provided by the same section of the
Constitution) to make recess appointments to put his people on that board.
But the Senate
was not in recess according to its own rules and according to the Constitution,
which states (Article I, Section 5) that neither house may adjourn for more
than three days without the consent of the other. No such consent had been
sought or received.
If this naked
power grab is sustained (it’s currently before the D.C. Circuit Court of
Appeals), then the Senate’s power to advise and consent is essentially
nullified. The president could declare the Senate in recess if it took a lunch
break and appoint whomever he pleased to whatever office he pleased.
There are
certain parts of Obamacare that that law declares unrepealable, despite the
fact that it is an inescapable principle that what one Congress, president, or
Supreme Court has the power to do, a future Congress, president, or Supreme
Court can undo. Otherwise, they would effectively be amending the Constitution
without following the procedures for doing so, as laid out in Article V. They
would thus nullify the power of the states to prevent an amendment unless
three-fourths of them agree to it.
One of the
president’s demands for avoiding the fiscal cliff is that Congress give him the
power to raise the debt ceiling, subject only to a two-thirds vote in each
house to override him.
While it is
hard to imagine Congress willingly surrendering so basic a power to the
executive branch, I wonder under what authority it could do so. Congress and
Congress alone is granted the power “to borrow money on the credit of the United
States” (Article I, Section 8). Can Congress delegate that power to the
president and restrain its own ability to take the power back?
The prohibition
against delegating powers goes all the way back to John Locke’s Second
Treatise on Civil Government, published in 1690. “When the people have
said,” he wrote, “We will submit to rules, and be govern'd by Laws made by such
Men, and in such Forms, no Body else can say other Men shall make Laws for
them; nor can the people be bound by any Laws but such as are Enacted by those,
whom they have Chosen, and Authorised to make Laws for them.”
To be sure, the
Supreme Court has long distinguished between “important” legislation and mere
“details.” In 1890, the Tariff Act of that year empowered the president to
reinstitute tariffs that Congress eliminated if he thought the countries so
benefitted did not reciprocate properly. The Court ruled in Field v. Clark that
Congress was not delegating legislative power to set tariffs, but merely
empowering the president to act as an agent for Congress.
In 1989, the
Court ruled in Mistretta v. United States that in this ever increasingly
complicated and technological world, “Congress simply cannot do its job absent
an ability to delegate power under broad general directives…. Accordingly, this
Court has deemed it ‘constitutionally sufficient if Congress clearly delineates
the general policy, the public agency which is to apply it, and the boundaries
of this delegated authority.’” Thus, for instance, the Food and Drug
Administration is empowered to make highly technical rules regarding the
licensing of drugs.
But that
doctrine does not apply here, for raising the debt limit is a simple matter, a
mere matter of one number instead of another number. And the Constitution,
unequivocally, grants that power to Congress and to Congress alone.
The way this
proposal would work, as far as I can understand the convoluted, isn’t-politics-wonderful?
idea, is that when the debt ceiling is within $100 billion of being hit, the
president would ask for a higher debt ceiling. Congress could approve or
disapprove of that request by joint resolution, and, if it disapproved, the
president would veto the joint resolution and go ahead and raise the debt
ceiling unless his veto was overridden.
But how does
that square with the constitutional requirement that only Congress can borrow
money? Congress will have formally voted to disapprove the new borrowing, but
the president will have the power to borrow it anyway. If that isn’t delegating
the power to borrow money to the president, contrary to the explicit dictates
of the Constitution, what on earth would be?
James Madison,
call your office.
John Steele Gordon has written several
books on business and financial history, the latest of which is the revised
edition of Hamilton's Blessing: The
Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt.
FURTHER
READING: Gordon also writes “The Scariest Day of My Life,”
“Churchill and the Power of Words,”
and “George Orwell, Call Your Office.”
Norman J. Ornstein thinks “Obama Should Force Recess Appointment Fight.”
Michael Barone says “Obama's 1-Man Rule Thumbs Nose at
Founders.” Steve Conover discusses “How to Fix the Debt Ceiling (A Bigger
Threat Than the Fiscal Cliff).”
______________________________
If this doesn't wake you up, nothing willl!
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